Please don't let me be misunderstood...

The first obvious question to ask is: What kind of love are we talking about? And it is a good one; we use the word ‘love’ in such a plethora of different situations that it sometimes seems like we are deliberately trying to entangle ourselves in confusing and often contradictory meanings. The mind instantly jumps to ‘Romantic’ or ‘Erotic’ love, but we also talk of loving one’s friends, distinguished still from familial love. These three are the most clear-cut distinctions (no one would suggest the feeling of love I have for my brother is, or ever has been, at all similar to the one I have for my first girlfriend) but there are various other forms as well, such as unrequited love, ‘true’ love, the love of things or the love of self. All have quite differing practical meanings: they feel very different, they typically last different lengths of time and our behaviour in relation to those feelings bears little or no resemblance to another. So why do we use the same word? Well, of course it could just be a quirk of language – suggesting that our language has not had enough time or inclination to develop distinct words for these distinct phenomena. Far more likely, though, is that these different meanings have arisen out of a common ground; that most or all of the feelings that we call ‘love’ are caused by or feed into the same psychological drives. These different types of love may even in some way each represent a different facet of a whole or ‘true’ love.

So, for the moment I would like to talk about all the experiences that we group together as love because I think an exploration of what all of these experiences have in common would be a sound starting point. I expect that we will find that most of the practical differences between different forms of love are in fact simply different ways of expressing the psychological drives that they all share. Just as the way I behave when I’m in ‘romantic’ love can be very different to the way you behave when you’re in ‘romantic’ love – we might concede that we’re both feeling the same feeling, or at least the same type of love but due to our individual differences in consciousness and experience we are both expressing that love in a slightly different way – just not so different as for the behaviour to be unrecognisable.

So for now at least, when we ask ‘what is love?’ what we mean to ask is ‘what is it that all of the feelings we call love have in common? Is there something about consciousness that could be the cause for these feelings?’ By asking this question instead, which is at once more general and more directed question, we can stop ourselves falling into common traps such as overplaying the twin follies of biological imperatives (which make a bit of a mockery of free will, not to mention insult a number of disabled people and asexuals) and soul-mates (an idea which ends good relationships, depresses the lonely and also challenges free will and the ever-changing nature of consciousness).

My answer to the question ‘What is love?’ is deceptively simple. Please have the patience to read through my initial attempt at an explanation and I think that you will probably agree that it succeeds in some way covering all our different types of love.

Love is understanding – understanding another consciousness and having your consciousness understood by another.

‘But Edd,’ you may object, ‘on the contrary! Mystery is the basis for love; once understanding is achieved, love is gone’. This is a good point and we will return to it later in more detail, as it will open some doors for us when thinking about the breakdown of love. For now I will say this; mystery is little more than the feeling you get when you desire more understanding of a thing. In that way mystery is the motivation for understanding. Perhaps why mysterious people are often the sexiest but not always the best people to be in a relationship with as they are hard to 'get to know'? The other thing I will say to this objection is that you are thinking only of ‘erotic’ love in this instance. Does a son stop loving his mother once he understands what she wants of him and of her own life, once he grows up and she reveals herself to him as being a human being, once her parental mystery has gone? Not at all, if anything the love is enhanced. Do I stop enjoying my friends’ company when we reach a stage where I understand them well enough to predict what we will do together of a Saturday? No, I find that unspoken closeness comforting. Mystery then, may yet play a part in our understanding of love but it is too type-specific to be of any use yet. It is also so intimately linked to understanding that I don’t think it stands as an objection to the general proposition that ‘Love is understanding’.

Let’s go into a little more detail about understanding. Specifically, understanding another consciousness. Think of a consciousness in the world, maybe yours, but for now better to think of any old consciousness. As it encounters objects, things, phenomena, it gathers more data about those objects through the only means a consciousness can obtain such data, that is to say through it’s senses. After enough encounters with an object the consciousness may even understand most or even all there is to understand about that object. Objects in the world have an essentially finite number of discrete facts that we can know about them, at least for a functional understanding – our understanding of them is pretty much static – yes, the object itself may change but experience will eventually teach us that objects change only through the exertion of external forces. This consciousness, that is going around, understanding objects around it, may at some point come to realise that it itself is different from all the tables and chairs that it’s starting to understand – it (or you) can change itself and things around it, seemingly from no external forces – you can move by yourself. Once a consciousness becomes self aware - aware of this distinction between itself and the knowable world it is understandable that the consciousness would assume that these unintentional (inanimate) objects are there for-it (i.e. that it is better than the world because of consciousness’ privileged relation to the world).

The encounter with another consciousness complicates things. Hegel discusses this meeting and recognition of another consciousness in his discussion of the master/slave relationship. I will not go into too much detail over what Hegel discussed here but it is important because the meeting of two consciousness’ as opposed to the meeting of a consciousness with an object and the life affirmation that comes as a result of recognising a consciousness and being recognised as a consciousness is the basic drive of love. Love really being a deeper exploration of that recognition.

When I encounter a consciousness and see that it is such, all I can really know and understand about it is that it is an other; another thing that can act in a way that no amount of observation and experience can help me to fully predict. This other consciousness then, can not be viewed as being for-me. It is for-itself. When that other consciousness interacts with me in a way that respects that I am for-myself and I reciprocate that respect, we are both affirmed as consciousnesses. If we start communicating we can learn more about our own consciousness than we could ever have learned by introspection alone – just as I can learn a lot more about physical objects if I am able to play with many different objects instead of just one. The learning is at most half of the feeling though. We spend most of our time with our own conscious minds and we’re naturally quite pleased with how much they can do but we must also be aware that we must not seem as complex as we know we are – this is why we tend to relish the opportunity to reveal ourselves to other consciousness’ – this may be through a number of mediums conversation, play, talent or job performance, etc. The joy of discovering another consciousness at it’s best is reciprocal respect and learning – the more we learn about the other the more we are able to reflect on ourselves and the more we are able to reveal ourselves to the other. The recognition is intricately related to self-consciousness and therefore the feeling of affirmation is intricately linked to self-worth.

This process of learning about another consciousness, while being learned about is what I believe love primarily consists of. Remember though, because consciousness is constantly growing and changing as it learns and because it is learning all the time it would require two consciousness to be learning from one another every minute of all their lives to come close to ‘understanding’ each other in the same way that I can spend a day studying a table and by the end, pretty much understand all I would ever need to know about it’s construction, history, materials and how it will react to many different objects. Understanding of a consciousness is a constant endeavour in the way that understanding of a thing simply is not.

The reciprocal intimacy between two consciousness’ can create to a good understanding of the conscious processes of the other (i.e. understanding of how they think), leading to a sense of ‘oneness’ that is a crucial part of the experience to all three of our main types of love.

‘I know you so well that I know what will cheer you up in this circumstance’

‘Our thought processes are so synchronous that what makes you unhappy also makes me unhappy’

‘I put my child’s/friends’/lover’s wellbeing above my own’

OK, so that’s a start. Love as understanding of a consciousness and being understood as a consciousness leading to life-affirmation for both parties and a sense of separate consciousnesses moving closer to some shared thoughts seems like a good start. It seems like an explanation that covers Friendship, romance and family to different degrees. Of course, we have only just scratched the surface – we have not yet thought about what makes two (or more) people want to increase their mutual understandings over any other people. We haven’t begun to think about what why people stop making an effort to understand and share themselves. We haven’t really touched on what role sex plays. What becomes of ‘true love’ under this definition? Of course, we can not always be talking about what features do all types of love share and never outline their differences but I have gone on for quite long enough for now. We will move onto such topics in the coming weeks.