Max Scheler focuses on human feelings and considers love to be the essence of human nature. Scheler’s argument opens up a broad horizon of possible interpretations regarding the meaning of being human. Contemporary philosophical anthropology takes its point of departure from two opposing conceptions: that attributed to Scheler and that of Plessner. With Scheler and Plessner the anthropological discourse takes into account the challenges emerging from the sciences as well as from the humanities. Scheler focuses on human feelings and considers the love to be the essence of the nature of man. Scheler defines the logic of love as different from the logic of pure reason. Today we can see a new significant interest in emotions, so much so that we openly speak about Emotional Turn and, under the pressure of the migration flows involving Europe, about the consequent increasing interest in themes concerning intercultural and interreligious dialogue. This process has in turn increased the interest for empathy questions and alterity’s phenomenology.
@ Martin Klvana
have a look at this link please
Scheler's Phenomenology of Love
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1203179?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Love is a derivative of libido, Sigmund Freud noted. This also applies to love in the social sense, which awakens compassion and helpful behaviour.
I think it's interesting to discuss whether social love (compassion, empathy, prosocial behaviour) has something to do with lust or libido - or should be seen independently of the sex drive.
I am going to understand ‘love’ as the attitude which, at any given moment, can lead the subject to decisions which are contrary to their own goals, even to the most sensible and honorable ones. Note that the person who stops and looks at someone who is suffering and helps him (whether a close relative or a stranger) does not only waste, for example, time (with the subsequent harm to his professional effectiveness), but also misses opportunities which would be beneficial for his future. Love understood in that demanding sense is –in my belief– “the essence of Human Being”.
But I certainly grasp here a challenge derived from two points. The first point is that nowadays, after leaving behind all the unmotivated assumptions accepted by behaviourism, we already recognise cognitive abilities in animals. Furthermore, the current focus on hominids and Neanderthals opens a new door for us which was undreamt of for previous philosophers and scholars. As a consequence of all of the above, the astonishing greatness of evolution prevails and, thus, the idea of the human soul being foreign to evolution becomes more and more undesirable. Note that the idea of a spiritual component which had not arisen from evolution would ultimately describe it –evolution as a whole– as a failure, taking away from it all greatness. This consequence, needless to say, would be deplorable especially for judeo-christian theology. In short, in my opinion, it is nowadays necessary to explain how the most spiritual particularities of human beings could be originated in evolution. But that task –and here is the second point– seems to be especially difficult in the case of the ability to love in that sense, since this ability has nothing to do with an adaptive advantage but quite the opposite. Certainly, “a moral sense of fairness enhances one’s chances of doing well in the competition to be chosen as a partner in cooperative ventures” [Baumard, André & Sperber, 2013]. Likewise, the fear of the ‘big eye of the group’ and the consequent omission of mischiefs, or, in a more sophisticated way, the active, Machiavellian building-reputation, are adaptively advantageous resources. However, love in that sense is not. And it would not be useful to invoke the (controversial) concept of (natural or cultural) ‘group selection’, since the helped individual may not belong to the group of the helper. (More in general, see [Odenbough, 2017] about the allegedly altruist ‘group selection’.) All in all, the challenge that I referred to is a difficult one.
However, we can now glimpse some hope. The studies on ‘Theory of the Mind’ (or the grasping of the ‘foreign’ mind) have differentiated two stages. The initial stage, which consists of the ability of perspective-taking (that is, predicting what he, the subject, would see, or feel, or even believe, if he, the subject, were in the other individual's circumstances), is common to humans and, at least, apes, and I suspect that it sustains what is called [Tomasello, 2012] ‘spontaneous altruism’. The advanced stage, which, in my view, would start when the subject gets to grasp mental contents that cannot be his, the subject's, under any circumstances (for example, any content which involves the desire to communicate interpersonally with him, with the subject), is a uniquely human ability, which would have originated due to the growing need for cooperation and communication in hominids, and whose origin is, therefore, completely adaptive. If we focus on this last stage, and we keep in mind that ‘foreign’ needs are a type of mental content that we can grasp, we could start to ask ourselves: Would this advanced stage of Theory-of-Mind have something to do with the ability to love as I am understanding it here?
Romance is the addition of VALUE to anything beyond objective reality.
So when a mother LOVES her children she has a romantic relationship with them where she holds them as infinitely more valuable than others hold them
We can have romantic relationships with inanimate objects. If our mother gives us a gift of a small inexpensive cup right before her death, we may cherish that cup forever. To others it will seem like a cheap piece of ceramic but to us it may be priceless.
Love is like a SOCIAL GLUE. If we love something we are attached to it. We have a romantic relationship with it and we hold it as disproportionately valuable.
The essence of love seems to be as an emotional mechanism used by nature to ensure we TAKE CARE of something. If we love our dog, cat or home we CARE FOR IT.
The internal feeling is love, the external manifestation is care.
If someone seems to care greatly for their car we say "Boy, she really loves that car!"
Love is often linked to NEED. The more we NEED something, the easier we find it to love it.
So, parents and children love each other. We LOVE our country. We identify religion with goodness and so to say WE LOVE GOD is to say WE LOVE GOODNESS.
Stephen Martin Fritz , it is impossible to love something while being attached to it.
Martin Klvana I don't understand what you mean. How do you love something WITHOUT being attached to it?
Stephen Martin Fritz , by love i mean that kind of (god-like) love which has ignorance, not hatred, as its contrary. Where there is clinging, there is craving; where there is craving, there is ignorance; and where there is ignorance . . .
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