What is love: a feeling or a sociocultural construct?
What is love - A question that seems to exist since the creation of the world and an unequivocal answer to which has not yet been found. Millions of pages are devoted to this fundamental problem: the concept of love is found both in art and in philosophical texts, religious treatises and scientific research. We asked experts in several areas - cultural studies, philosophical anthropology, religious studies and psychology - to tell when this concept first appeared, how and under the influence of which factors it changed, and what and why we mean by love now.
Love is the word by which we describe the complex emotion and the practice of correlating with this emotion. The main character in the “Ninety-nine” novel by writer James Heins translated into Russian is an advanced modern anthropologist who fearfully avoids using this word in relation to his own feelings: “The manifestation of bourgeois scheming is, of course, an attempt to reduce a complex ideology to a similar epithet.” Nevertheless, in everyday life, we not only reduce the diversity of feelings and their manifestations to a single word, but also periodically arrange peculiar "wars of naturalizations" - disputes about what true love is. Gary Chapman, a Baptist consultant on marriage and relationships, wrote his popular book on the variation of possible interpretations even within one time slice in the nineties. He identifies five possible understandings of love, more precisely, its practices (pleasant words, special pastime, gifts, touches and acts of service). But this is not enough, so Chapman complicates the picture by adding a distinction between love and love.
In fact, a special feeling in relation to another person, apparently, existed and exists in all societies, but the diversity of practices associated with it allows us to talk about different understandings of love. In antiquity, for example, the texts that have come down to us show several different views: the sexual sensuality of Ovid in The Science of Love, the love-friendship of Achilles and Patroclus in Homer's Iliad, the cosmic attraction to reproduction and immortality in Plato’s Pir ... True, In all cases we are talking about male sensuality, since the woman was not perceived as a full-fledged man and did not have the right to citizenship.
Close to modern romantic love is followed, following the philosopher Denis de Rougemont and sociologist Norbert Elias, to associate with courtly love glorified by troubadours in 12th century Christian Europe. The main feature in this case was the geographical or social distance between the loving or loving and the beloved or lover (the corresponding texts were also written by the women). The idea of the uniqueness of courtly love ignores the presence of similar poems in ancient Egypt, in China, from the 9th-6th centuries BC. Oe., in Japan, Heian period, in Islamic love poetry of medieval Andalusia. Nevertheless, the subtleties of the social context fill love with specific content.
Today’s performance, inherited from medieval courtly love (de Rougemont and Elias) or romantic love of the end of the 17th century (according to sociologist Anthony Giddens), still includes the concept of sexual loyalty and overcoming obstacles to happy lovers. This entails many problems - for example, love turns out to be hard to manifest and maintain in long-term relationships, since most sources (books, films, articles in magazines) are devoted to the experiences that accompany people before the start of permanent relationships and, in particular, cohabitation. Samples of the practice of love are set by the social context and the dominant ideas, and fruitful work in this direction would be to increase the diversity of ideas about how to relate to this feeling.
To give a definition of love, you must first agree that when we say the word "love", we all understand it more or less equally, even if we decided that we are talking about so-called romantic love, and not, for example, about love of truth or homeland. The problems begin already here, since we are not talking about a phenomenon, about which there is some acceptable consensus at the level “we all observe the same thing, let's now understand what it is and how it works”. No, we all observe different things, everyone calls his own love, and it is necessary, as they say, to agree on terms. Then the question "love is a sociocultural phenomenon, biological or some other?" turns inside out. Conventionally, one researcher can say: "Here we have a phenomenon, it is at the core of a sociocultural one, and let's agree to call it love." Another says: "Here we have a phenomenon, it is basically a biological one, and let's agree to call it love."
Let us assume that we have come to the conclusion that we are interested in the sociocultural component of romantic love. More recently, a very popular position among anthropologists (it’s about social and cultural anthropology) was that romantic love is a sociocultural construct, invented by Europeans somewhere in the Middle Ages, and spread relatively recently on a global scale. That is, all these ahs, sighs, the idealization of the beloved, and so forth were invented by the authors of medieval novels. It would seem that a rather vulnerable point of view, if you give examples of love stories from the literature of other cultures, but, first, we perceive this literature through the prism of our ideas, and secondly, as supporters of this position object, described in the Literary Monuments only concerns local elites, and the fact that anthropologists observe them locally has nothing to do with this. And in general, love can be declared redundant concept that duplicates others used to describe the relationship between individuals in society. But since love appeared, even if it was invented by European novelists (or, it is reasonable then to continue, the ancient Greeks), and contemporaries are worried, then you still have to deal with it.
Recently, at one of the festivals, the film “Sleepless in New York” was shown about how people are experiencing and living a break in love relationships. The main speaker in this film is anthropologist Helen Fisher, she deals with the phenomenon of love and comes to the conclusion that romantic love is an addiction, like a drug. In general, a lot of critical (and fair) words are said and written about romantic love, especially assuming a focus on a single object. But, if we assume that a person is a creature endowed not only with self-consciousness, but also with the ability to rebuild itself (philosophical anthropology in this sense allows a lot more freedom than social), including at the sociocultural level, it is possible to abandon the "bad" love and come up with a new one - better. That is, for example, to formulate the concept of harmonious relations and declare that henceforth such relations should be considered genuine love. In principle, they do it regularly, but, it seems, without much practical success. And in general, returning to the opinion of the purely European character of the concept of "love", it is worth noting that, no matter how the ideas of love change, whenever it seems that something new has appeared, you should open the Plato "Pir" dialogue and make sure - there has already been said about this.
The most ancient example of love in religion is the love of man and of God. Ishtar and Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, Selena and Endymion in Greece, Sigurd and Brunnhilde among the Scandinavians - these stories of different degrees of tragedy are known to many. Later, as paganism remained in the past, love in its romantic and even erotic aspect still continued to be used to describe the relationship of a person with a deity. Around the world, mystics, Christians, and Muslims used images and language to describe love to express their relationship with God.
In the practice of Hindu bhaktas, people who dedicated their lives to one single deity, most often Cherry in the guise of Krishna, this went even further: believers perceived themselves as actual partners of the deity in love games during his time on earth. Echoes of such notions can be found in Judaism, where all of Israel is perceived as the "bride of God", and in other traditions. Does this mean that the content of all religions is love? Of course not. But it is important to note that it is love that is so often found in many different religions as the most successful way to express the emotions that a mystic experiences in relation to the object of his worship. How is this manifested in practice? At first glance, not much: this kind of revelation was the lot of enlightened mystics, and not ordinary believers. But they became possible due to the most important change in our culture, which is associated with the spread of Christianity: a turn from external to internal, from actions and material reality to thoughts, feelings and intention.
Christianity has offered Western civilization the view that what is happening in the mind of man may be more important than what is happening around him. Purely psychological, ideal processes suddenly became capable of actually changing the material world. Similar ideas spread in other parts of the world, although for us, as for people of Western culture, the history of Christianity is clearer and more important. Such ideas allowed Sufis, bhakta and hermits to "meet" with God. Brunhilda could appear before Siegfried on the battlefield in the flesh, but Jesus, Allah, or Krishna can only appear before the human mind, which, however, does not diminish the importance of such a meeting. And it is precisely such a purely religious notion that the feelings have their own inner strength and value and is the main thing that religion has given love, as we know it. It is precisely to this that the idea that love, if it is “real” and “sincere,” goes, wins everything, justifies any sacrifices and is capable of violating any laws, stories about which we meet in chivalrous novels and in Hollywood films.
I know, probably, about twenty theories about "love." Perhaps more - a burning topic. In hindsight, these theories may explain why the relationship arose or why it did not work out. But to look for a partner, none of these theories helps. Why exactly here ran the spark? Why did it break out here, but not in ten other places? This is magic. The choice of an object in love always happens unconsciously. You can, of course, then self-confidently say: “I chose her because she was the most beautiful at the party,” but the truth is that she chooses that “I” that we almost or don’t know in ourselves. It solves, it provides the desired hormones, and, as a rule, you can rely on it. And the consciousness remains to somehow explain this choice: “likeable”, “he has a good job”, “loves animals” and so on.
Love works on two types of fuel: hormones and projections. Usually we have some kind of internal plot, in which the partner has an important role, and this plot is formed in childhood, and sometimes several generations before us. To believe that we are simply “looking for a person who looks like a father” is a ridiculous delusion. Sometimes for dad, sometimes for mom, sometimes for some part of mom, and sometimes for some split, unrecognized part of ourselves. Brothers and sisters, too, do not need to be discounted. When we meet the right person, which is great for our inner scene, the projections unwind instantly, like chemical reactions.
Someone from the medieval thinkers said that "love does not require the past." Unfortunately, these stories are not always about a happy family and a quiet old age hand in hand. Although at the level of consciousness pictures are almost always exactly like that. And at a deeper level, it can be about betrayal, betrayal or lonely motherhood, and about sacrifices and torment (when you have to suffer for someone, and as much as possible), and for some offense long ago, to pay for which also have a partner. Which, of course, is neither a dream nor a spirit. Very much in love is involved in regressions - it has long been noted that lovers behave and react like small children. Alas, if in childhood we were rejected, not heard, not noticed, if we were lonely and scary, it will manifest itself in love relationships. Required. But the good news is that all the "parental scenarios" and our inner plays are not a sentence. Two adults are able to rewrite almost any story in such a way that it includes joy, sexuality, and quiet old age hand in hand.
Photo: Shutterstock