The Philosophy of Love

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 If I were to recommend only one work of philosophy to read it would be Plato’s dialogue:  “The Symposium”  The subject is love, which is odd, since very few philosophers have tackled that subject since Plato did 2400 years ago. Plato’s take on love is that love is a bridge from the desire for a lover to desire for “The Good” with a capital G - in other words,  love is a form of transcendence. 


In Plato’s time a Symposium was when a group of people got together to drink wine and give speeches on a given topic.  Symposiums still happen, but the difference today is that the drinking happens in the evening after, and not during the speeches.

 


A similar approach, minus the drinking, occurs in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Deuteronomy.  The name of this book: “Deuteronomy”, is the real give away.  It means “second law” because it is the second time that the ten commandments are recorded.  The key is that this time there is a prayer that does not occur in the first reading of the commandments.  It’s called the Shema, and it goes:  “Hear O’ Israel:  The Lord is one.  You shall love the lord with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your might….” This is known by Christians as “The Great Commandment”  According to Jesus, the Shema together with the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself, basically sum up the entire message of the Holy book. The Christian commandment to “love one another” and the ubiquity of pictures of Madonna and child, are, therefore, no coincidence. 


 A little context here: Deuteronomy was written and then popularized around the time of the Babylonian destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the forced exodus of the Jews to Babylon.  After that happened, Jews were no longer able to make Temple sacrifices.  The Shema solves this problem by making sacrifice an internal act of love between each individual Jew and God, something that can happen every day and in any location. It is my belief that the prophet Jeremiah’s promotion of that one little prayer of love is what made the continued survival of Judaism outside of the Holy land possible, just as a mother’s love helps to make the prolonged survival of her offspring possible.




What is love? It is something that has powerful biological roots in the rise of mammals. Mothers giving birth and loving and caring for their children is a mammalian thing.  Love comes from motherly love.  The hormones that facilitate motherly love are triggered by physical touch, and, since touch is often reciprocal, males can also feel love because they inherit the same hormones. 

 

Why is love so special for humans? At some point in our evolution we lost a lot of body hair which, since having less fur facilitates skin-to-skin contact, may have led to pair-bonding in humans. Pair-bonding, the sexual relations and prolonged mutual attraction between two adults, is actually rare in other mammals.  Most mammals  that live in groups live under polygyny, which is where one male monopolizes all the females and drives all the other adult males away.  There, love exists only between mother and offspring.  


We humans associate love as an emotion that lasts over a prolonged period of time, unlike most other emotions. The reason may be that human infants and children are helpless for a very long time, much longer than any other animal. They need to be cared for, for years, and it helps a lot if motherly and fatherly love lasts at least that long, so that the new generation gets a healthy start on their life’s journey. It helps the offspring if their parents stay together for a long time, and for their bonds to their parents to last as well, because grandparents can make a difference in their grandchildren’s survival and thriving.


The transcendence thing comes from the ecstatic nature of loving.  When, as adults, we fall in love with another, we can find ourselves consumed with our lover’s existence.  We forget our own needs and devote ourselves to our lover’s needs instead.  This experience can be so powerful that it presents itself as a life-changing revelation, one that forms the basis of much poetry, literature, and religious thought.  Hence the  “Symposium” and  “The Great Commandment”. And then there is Christianity’s fascination with the image of the Madonna which brings us back again to where it all began - a mother’s love for her child.

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