Why Why and More Why

Sat, August 16, 2008 at 10:58PM

Many a time I wonder if I am being too analytical of things around me; most certainly, I'd ask myself "WHY". But this WHY is too general. I just want to focus on the WHY of feelings -- feelings that dominate us, elude us, confront us, and perplex us. As I browse this morning's quotations (ohhh yes! can't you tell that I love reading quotes), I happened to land on an article that is relevant to my WHY question. Perhaps it is more directed to love, but nevertheless, isn't love an emotion? ~itsduhattityood

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Love's Complications
By: Peter Goldie

Peter Goldie is lecturer in philosophy at Kings College London and author of The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Clarendon) and On Personality (Routledge)

I come not to bury love, but to complicate it. There is something wrong with our concept of love . Romantic love (just “love” hereafter) isn't what many of us think it is when we ask ourselves “Do I love him?” or “Does she love me?” Many of us are making some kind of mistake. But what kind of mistake is it, and what is love if it isn't what many of us think it is?

The suggestion that I am making is that there is a mismatch between love and our concept of love. But what is the nature of that mismatch?

One possibility is that our concept of love is of something that simply doesn't exist. This kind of mismatch is certainly true of some of our concepts. For example, we have (or used to have) a concept of “witch”. The story of why some people have been called witches (and treated accordingly) is a story about our social history – about sociological influences (power relations, for example), and not about the way people, in fact, are. There are no witches (at least not of the broomstick-flying variety).

Similarly, according to this view of the mismatch, we have the concept of love because of our social history. But there is no such thing as love. And, one might add as a gloss to this view, our lives would go better if we didn't think there was such a thing.

To say, baldly, that there is no such thing as love seems (if you will forgive the understatement) to be something of an overstatement. But there is another version of this view that might have more appeal: it's not that there is no such thing as love; rather, the mismatch lies in this: the concept we have of love is hopelessly idealistic, hopelessly romantic .

The result of that concept is happiness, wherein happiness must be some simple kind of psychological state, namely “pleasure, and the absence of pain.”

Analogously with happiness, I think many of us do think that we have apparently compelling reasons for thinking that love must be one simple thing – one simple kind of psychological state. But these apparently compelling reasons are not the same as those concerning happiness. In respect of love, the reasons are, roughly, like this:

1 Love is an emotion;

2 Emotions necessarily involve feelings;

3 For every emotion there is a characteristic and unique kind of feeling;

4 So love must necessarily have a characteristic and unique kind of feeling;

5 Whether or not we are in love depends on whether or not we have that feeling.

6 Even if we cannot always tell, through introspection, whether or not we have that love-feeling, there is still a simple matter of fact about whether or not we are in love.

Each of 1 to 6 is wrong.

The mistake is to think that the single word picks out an emotion which is a single, simple psychological state, as if the questions “Do I love her?” or “Does he love me?” admit of simple yes or no answers. These are just bad questions if love is so conceived – just as bad as “Am I happy?” if happiness is conceived of as pleasure. Each of these questions ought in our minds to fragment into a myriad of questions. To have a concept of love as being a single simple psychological state, with a characteristic and unique kind of feeling, is to make a mistake, just as it is for happiness. Only once the complexity of love is appreciated can its depths be appreciated .