Now time to spend my time on more interesting things.
However, in the interest of presenting a more formal piece of writing, I've submitted below a philosophical paper pertaining to definition of Love, which I wrote for an ethics class. Though not meant to explicitly be funny, I couldn't help but throw my two cents of satire and allusions. (I think it's fair to say I'm the only person who made a Family Guy reference in their presentation of a philosophical paper in the history of the world) That being said, if you have any interest, simply click below.
Awkwardly Yours,
The Teej
Always Love
I’d like to
start with a riddle. What has no condition
and has one condition? I’ll get to the
answer later. Humans have been plagued
with curiosity and driven to solve the many mysteries that surround our
creation and continued existence. It’s
likely through this process that we developed the everlasting fear of the
statement “I don’t know.” In a
countermeasure to this terror, many of us have chosen to throw the word “god”
at the problem in attempts to sleep better at night. I’m here to state that there are aspects of
this world that we don’t have a definite answer to. Unfortunately, this essay sheds light on one
of those ambiguities.
Love, as
the Everly brothers put it, is strange.
We’re all bound to its luster, yet the question as to what it really
means to love a person is still left in ambiguity. What is love?
From a first glance it’s often described as emotion, but there appears
to be more to it than that. Love is a
conscious thought. We process love; it
isn’t instantaneous and it’s not a reaction.
Love is that feeling that you receive when you simply contemplate that
to that which you love; peaceful, alluring, and incompatible to anything else
in this world. Love provides us with
hope, another entity to which we require.
To go about loving someone goes beyond that which is physical.
There’s a definite misconception of linking
love to lust. Lust is purely a physical,
biologically written code within ourselves that’s naturally directly correlated
with procreation. Where we’ve taken that
emotion and sought opposing meanings to it, through a Darwinian perspective,
lust is nothing more. However, in
contrast, one might consider the concept of love to be anti-Darwinian; think
about it. We’ve all done stupid things
in the moment for love; perhaps even putting our lives at risk. Darwin, however, in agreement with Hume’s
ideas, emphasizes our need to collaborate in order to survive. This notion of love is actually part of our
evolution for it allows us to be “aware of the emotions of the loved one than
we would otherwise be, and makes us quicker to make helpful responses,” as
Annette Baier explains in Unsafe Loves. (359) It would only seem logical that the social
nature of humanity was backed with this process of love to ease communication
and working together.
Though the
benefits of love are great, it would be naïve to continue without mention the
dangers of love. Love is powerful, but
with a price which at times becomes hard to bear. Our actions are ours alone; one is not
capable to neither determine nor control that which are others. We may love. However there is no guarantee to be loved in
return. The consequences of such an
outcome can be devastating. The effort
and dedication to love come at an expense.
Love requires forming some sort of dependency
on another, to love fully means extensive self-exposure and the link of
fates. This not only means that we’re
forced to disregard Jonathan Harrison’s story of Ludwig, but often times we
overlook the danger of becoming so intertwined, and someone like Kant, might
view this linking as a form of venerability.
Kant reminds us that the depth and breadth of self-disclosure within a
loving relationship is great, and in the wrong hands, can easily be turned
against us, crippling us physically, emotionally, and socially. It brings into question whether a level of
self-restraint or how much of a level should be established to prevent such an
occurrence; and is it ever wise to fully self-disclose oneself? Kant stated that the only way to protect
ourselves from such hardships “We must so conduct ourselves towards a friend
that there is no harm done if he should turn into an enemy.”
Where perhaps this might protect us from the
vast venerability previously described, is it necessarily, nay, healthy, to
place such a void from the rest of humanity?
Can we honestly and wholeheartedly love another while we reserve a level
of distrust to every other individual? I
certainly wouldn’t think so and neither does David Hume, who took an opposite
stating, “Don’t treat strangers in ways you will regret should they become your
friends.” (Unsafe Loves, 358) Where self-disclosure is a gradual process,
creating such barriers merely provokes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When distrust such as Kant describes becomes
the social norm, it’s reflected in the progression of society. Never again will airport security be at a
level as it was in the 90’s, due to a level of distrust. Where perhaps an example such as a change
airport security seems to be the product of logic, change only occurred due to
the introduction of a new level of distrust.
Hate,
jealousy, and grief, all byproducts of the loss of love. Due to the finite, mortal limitations that
our bodies have a tendency to own, it’s inevitable for one to question whether
the endeavour of love should even be bothered with. Presuming that life and time continues post
the death of the self, eventually the bond of love would logically cease with
said death. Love, therefore, cannot
exist without the presence of loss at some particular moment in time. These feelings of hate, jealousy, and grief that
then rise from the loss are powerful and quite harmful to the psyche. Depression, despair, and the chance of
suicide are all probable, however not limited, to follow.
Though
these reactions are considered unsightly, I would still argue for and advocate
the pursuit of love. William Lawhead
characterizes the poetic nature of love when he wrote, “We can and do love
flowers that fade; and the knowledge that they will fade may even enhance their
preciousness.” (The Philosophical Journey, 649)
The pessimistic viewpoint that human love is “doomed to failure” by
individuals such as Plato, Descartes, and Augustine, fails to acknowledge that love’s
constraint to time only amplifies the value to love another. Furthermore, though love yields loss, love
never dies. Though we may die, though we
may go separate ways, love never blows up and gets killed. Love, of the present and past, remains an
experience had within our minds, outside of the possibilities of dementia.
Whether you
believe in an afterlife or not, one thing is certain, something, either
authentic or an elaborate hoax, is currently in the process which is commonly
defined and referred to as your life. To
deny or delay its existence merely appears foolish and wasteful. You are here, and banking on your continuance
through an afterlife, which can never be objectively proven, makes as much
sense as jumping off a building expecting Spiderman to save you under the
presumption that “everybody gets one.”
Count Leo Tolstoy ran into a similar problem at the age of 50, which led
him on a quest for the meaning of life. Without
meaning the course of a human life seems futile. Tolstoy concluded in My Confession “faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life,
whereby the individual does not destroy himself but lives.” (The Philosophical
Journey, Lawhead, 642) Though this
notion of faith to which Tolstoy makes reference to was a belief in theism, a
secular tie to this world rings just as true.
Faith in the form of love, towards another individual is all the purpose
you could possibly require.
Love
is a tricky force to reckon with, for it holds more power than we can
comprehend. It causes us to do strange
things. Love can make us feel
invincible; though it can just as easily cause a sensation of despair. When given the choice, however, like Nada
Surf vocalized, “Always love, hate will get you every time.” What has no condition and has one
condition? If you haven’t guessed
already, it’s love.
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