Biology and Philosophy of Love

Biology and Philosophy of Love

What does it mean to love another person? This question is one that virtually every person has asked himself at some point; virtually every school of thought that exists has attempted to provide an answer of some sort. In this paper I will explain my own attempt at answering that question, from the perspective of an amateur philosopher; then I shall delineate the answers that some biologists have given. We shall see that, while at first these two sets of answers might appear to be quite different, there are in fact some interesting and notable similarities.

I have heard many different accounts of what it is to love someone - to care truly for that person's best interest, to be willing to sacrifice one's own life for that person's well-being, and so on, the list is infinite. To be sure, these accounts all have a measure of validity; there are many different forms of love. However, there is one aspect that all of them have in common, which is the same point at which I think they fail to capture what it really is to love someone: they are too altruistic. Humans, it seems to me, are essentially self-centered creatures; and I do not intend that statement to have the extreme negative connotations that usually accompany the term "self-centered". I mean it in the most literal sense: humans are centered around the self. Much as we may try, the self is un-transcend-able. At this point in scientific and spiritual progress, we cannot ever truly experience anything through another person's frame of reference - all that we can know for certain is that which we think and feel. Thus, it makes no sense to speak of love as a sort of "leaving the self".

How, then, are we to think about it? I offer this alternative: so as to avoid the mistake of treating love as a form of altruism, we should think of loving another person as the act of loving oneself through another person - in other words, we love the people that make us feel best about ourselves, that bring out the best in ourselves. It is important to note that by no means does this definition entail that we do not genuinely care about the people we supposedly love. We can see this as follows: by this definition, it is essential that