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The Philosophical Corner is a monthly column dedicated to the exposure and discussion of philosophy.
I once believed true love to be a delusion based on erratic emotion, conjured by the evolutionary mechanisms of hormones and neurotransmitters; a phenomenon that brings two beings together, yet swiftly leaves when reality sets.
Recently though, I asked myself, “Can true love last forever?” And yes, I now believe it can.
Love is not a simple emotion, but rather a logical, thought-out decision to care, to support and to stand by someone through anything. Love means being there for someone in both the worst times and the best times. Love means being understanding and forgiving. Love is a choice to prioritize another over oneself and value their happiness tantamount to one’s own. When done right, true love is the pinnacle of selflessness and will last forever.
The issue resides in whether human nature can handle such a task, and I think not.
Human nature — coined the “man in the state of nature” by Jean-Jaques Rousseau in his 1755 book “The Discourse of Inequality” — reveals that our evolutionary instincts cannot bear such selflessness, for our fundamental purpose resides in self-preservation. Whether that preservation is attributed to oneself or one’s offspring is negligible because the laws of natural selection view the advancement and protection of one’s bloodline and gene pool as equally paramount to oneself.
What cannot be deemed negligible is the love of romance, for there will always be another to reproduce with. In fact, the laws of natural selection directly oppose the monogamous institutions we have placed upon ourselves; to develop one’s gene pool is far more efficient with multiple partners.
Though true love may end in a logical conclusion, the emotions that lead to even thinking of such an analysis must be illogical.
Anyone can relate to the childish crushes humans gravitate toward as children, perhaps so far as to imagine a marriage and future children. And when one sees this person with another, they may feel pain equivalent to the hope of all the fantasies they’ve played in their mind being dashed because it seems as though the potential of that figurative future is now gone — the irrationality of self-punishment.
Yet the true pinnacle of true love is selflessness.
Published and popularized by French writer Stendhal in his 1822 book “Sur L’Amour,” “vain love” is considered a feeling humans develop for another person not because of who they are or their hopes and dreams, but because of what their affection says about us.
That is to say, a girl who has been rejected throughout her young life, perhaps by a father figure, will venture for romance to simply affirm that she can be loved.
Psychologist Jaques Lacan redefines “vain love” in his 1999 book “On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge” by writing that the primary goal in one’s quest for love is to be desired.
All this is to say that love is a supposedly selfless feeling, yet perhaps completely selfish to the point it expounds itself in the imagination of a vulnerable being — a feeling that contradicts the fundamental evolutionary standard.
When dissecting the love of romance under the frames of logic, there is no logic to be found. Yet, love never proclaimed itself to be logical. The true beauty lies within this absurdity.
The childish crushes, the contradictory monogamy and the vanity are what define humanity. They are what differentiate us from the natural world, what allow us to paint the Sistine Chapel and compose a symphony and what allow us to step away from the harshness of reality and dream of what could be.
If true love was attainable, there would be no heartbreak to feel so profoundly and no mystery to enliven us. It is because of the potential of having love that we get up to brave the unpredictability of life, in hopes of stumbling into “the one”.
Without a doubt, love is illogical, but who proclaimed humanity to be logical?
Humans’ entire rationale is solely dependent upon cause and effect. Through continuous cause and effect contingent upon experience, we can only make logical claims based on probability, and therefore are never sure. One cannot be 100% certain the sun will rise tomorrow, only confident that it will because ever since humans can remember, they have woken up to the sun.
Our logic relies on faith that the future will comply with the past, and if not, we adapt to our best effort. Therefore, we cannot characterize the illogicality of love as its downfall, for we are illogical beings as well. All we have is our emotions and experiences, so there should be no reason to detest love. Even in its imperfections, the power that love can bring to a person is unmatched.
Written after the Holocaust, Viktor Frankhal’s “A Man’s Search for Meaning” chronicles the reality of the physical and mental torture Frankhal went through in a concentration camp, as well as the power it took for him to rise above it.
“My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing — which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved,” Frankhal wrote. “It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out; but at that moment it ceased to matter.”
