An Inductive Definition of Love as a Function of Being
Jiaqi Liu
Abstract
This paper intends to make a case for defining love via inductive methods rather than the traditional axiomatic methods often seen in more traditional philosophical practices. The basis for inductivity will be observations made from a set of common interpretations and intuitions gathered from a study conducted on 20 CSU East Bay students. These observations will demonstrate that: 1. Love is relational 2. Love is ontological and 3. Love is authentic (Eigenlichkeit). The composition of these three observations leads to the conclusion that love can be defined as a shared extension of authentic being. Regarding the relational component, the shared criterion of love has implications to self-relation similar to the Augustinian perspective on love (Tornau, 2020). This “sharing of love” also indicates that love requires mutual consent. The ontological consideration of love will draw from the Berkeleyan and Cartesian views on being and apply it to the context of coexistence. Finally, the authenticity of love will lean on the Heidegerrian Eigentlichkeit to explore how authenticity validates the existence of lovers.
Introduction
Any foray into defining love is usually met rather quickly by an impasse either due its multitudinous nature or by its circularity of definitions. The latter of which is trivially problematic in addressing the core issue of defining love in the sense that, beyond criticizing it as circular, there is little else that it can give. When examining the former, however, it seems that the sheer quantity in variation of definition can be distilled to yield additional insights on how one might define love. A 2013 study asked 59 women to sort a list of words in the order of how they would best define love (Watts & Stenner, 2014). The study identified six most common definitions as “attraction”, “passion and romance”, “unconditional love”, “sex and fun”,
“friendship and spirituality”, “a permanent commitment” and “separate people, separate lives”. Intuitively it is quite evident that none of these are individually sufficient in defining love. Even taking all multitude of definitions as a conglomerate whole may not sufficiently provide a satisfactory answer to what love is. Then it must be asked, what is? The goal of this paper is to answer the question by first arguing that love must be defined inductively by illustrating some shortcomings of a deductive approach and how inductivity is effective at accounting for said shortcomings. We will introduce a study on 20 CSU East Bay students conducted as an attempt at examining individual experiences of love inductively. The observation from the aforementioned study will serve as a foundation in demonstrating that the definition of love can be derived as a shared extension of authentic being. I will discuss how the criterion of “shared” can be applied not only to other agents but also to abstract concepts and the self. How sharing intrinsically entails that it is done with consent. How examining the being criterion with a relational component offers a new perspective of Berkeleyan and Cartesian ontology. How the use of authenticity is consistent with its conception in Heideggerian works.
An Argument for Inductivity
To argue for an inductive definition of love there must be a case for inductivity. Thus, a sufficiently convincing argument must be made that an inductive approach to define love is more fruitful than a deductive approach. As such, I will illustrate the reasons why deductivity is unconducive to a satisfactory definition of love, then demonstrate that inductivity is free from the issues presented by the axiomatic approach. There are three reasons why deductivity is ill-suited for defining love. The immediately apparent reason being that attempts trying to arrive at an axiomatic definition of love often ends in a circular tautology that lands too close to where it started for the conclusion to offer anything meaningfully significant. Such as how love is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “…strong or constant affection…” but affection is defined as “a feeling of liking…” which is functionally similar enough to “love” that it becomes too circular to be useful (Merriam-Webster, 2016). The second reason is that deductive approaches often encounter a dilemma where it becomes so rigid in a particular axiomatic perspective that it loses its flexibility in general applications yet attempts at reducing its rigidity risks undermining the axioms on which it is founded upon. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, an axiomatic approach necessitates that the definition precedes experience. This invalidates our phenomenology of love and undermines our existence in the sense that when there is a conflict between the deductive definition and our experiences, the axiom dictates that it is our experience that is false rather than the definition. On the contrary, an inductive approach urges us to examine love as an experience rather than an axiom. It validates our existence in the sense that the definition is always a conclusion of our experiences rather than a premise. It circumnavigates the issue of logical circularity altogether and instead allows room for a holistic approach unencumbered by granularity. An inductive view of love as an a posteriori accumulation of individual cases allows for the definition to be continually appended to as our collective understanding and experience of love progresses.
Methods of Inductivity
The question “How do you define love?” was given to 20 California State University – East Bay students between the ages 20 and 35 and each were allowed to answer with short freeform text entries between 2 – 4 sentences. The goal was not to quantify the set of answers generated by the questions but rather finding potential common qualitative properties which can be used to facilitate the inductivity criteria previously stated. Each participant was briefed on the purpose of the topic and the purpose of the study. Each participant was informed that the presentation of their answers will be anonymous, and finally each of the participants signed a waiver agreeing to release their answers anonymously in this study. A post-processing categorization of the collected answers done to examine the qualitative properties, with specific emphasis on finding similarities in semantics and syntax structure across participant responses,
Observations
Analysis of participant responses on the question “How do you define love” observed three significant trends: 1) love is relational 2) love is existential 3) love is authentic. A cursory quantitative inquiry revealed that 100% of responses indicated that love is relational. 72% of responses indicated that that love is related to the state of being. 39% of responses indicated that love is authentic. Additionally, 50% of responses indicated at least two of the three noted trends while 39% of responses indicated all three. It should be noted that not an insignificant number of responses indicated that love is valuing someone more than oneself.
The participants were unanimous in their treatment of the definition of love as something that is relational. Perhaps not very surprisingly, every participant’s attitude towards the relational aspect of love is implicitly stated. No participants explicitly stated that “love is relational” or variations of. By far the most common expression of the relational criterion is through the use of implied semantics of plural pronouns (they, them, us) as well as the distinction between a self pronoun (I, me, myself) and an other (he, she, they) pronoun. Such as in the case of participant number 6, where they defined love as “…. It’s being comfortable with who they are and being comfortable to be yourself with them. …”. Or in the case of participant number 9, “When you want the other person to be the best version of themselves…”. The second most common form of semantic marker that reveal the relational criterion of love is through the use of key verbs and adverbs that imply more than one agent. Such as the case of participant number 15 where love is defined as “…you spend time together…”, participant number 11 where it is described “…, is coming closer together to the point of melding…” and participant number 8 where it is described as “…Love is something best experienced together. You find it in each other, not separately.” It is clear that the criterion of love being relational is innate to a degree where it is unnecessary to state it explicitly.
The second most common factor across the participants is the importance of the state of existence to love. Nearly three quarters of the participants answered that love is “to be” in such a way that it either refers to the existence of the self with the syntax structure such as “being myself”, the existence of a partner with the syntax structure such as “being with them” or a state of mutual existence with the syntax structure such as “being together”. Combining this with the previous category of “shared” then love is at the very least a relational ontology amongst two or more individuals. Already this seems to form an intuitive foundation of how love is described colloquially, where it is the shared union, or coexistence of two or more individuals. Coexistence here does not mean the simple sharing of spacial-temporal elements but rather the sharing of existence. Participant 7 described it as “not even wanting to go sleep because then you might be without them for a minute.”. Participant 9 expressed that love is when “…you can’t imagine not being there for them.”. Participant 10 described it as “…we both can be our true selves around each other.”. Notice that in all three instances, the participant used the verb be in the context of sharing a common existence.
Of the participants who responded that love is a state of being, 53% of whom specified that it is a state of mutual authenticity willingly presented by oneself and accepted by the other. While the responses for this category do not share common syntax forms, common semantics can be derived from keywords such as “true self”, “purest form”, and “essence”. There seems to be an expectation where the state of coexistence is only achieved when each individual in that shared ontology accepts the authentic presentation of the other as well as authentically accepted by the other. The exact use of authenticity will be explored in a later section but for the sake of clarity I will briefly describe it as it is used in the Heideggerian Eigentlichkeit (Heidegger, 1927). Eigentlichkeit roughly translates to “owning oneself” or “being one’s own” in the sense that witnessing the true self facilitates being the true self. As participant 2 so simply put, love is “when you look at someone and they just get you.”. The phrase “they just get you” can be easily interpreted as the expectation that the other is able to witness one’s authenticity. This is also seen in the response of participant 10 where love is described as “…we both can be our true selves around each other.”. In addition to the self-relation of authenticity, there is also an observable sentiment of relational authenticity. It is not enough for one’s authenticity to be self-validated, but it is also necessary that one’s authenticity is witnessed by the other. This inter-relational component is reiterated in the response of participant 12 where love is “…being drawn to someone’s very essence.”. Again, the relational aspect of authenticity is seen where there is a desire to witness and accept the authentic self of the other.
Philosophical Interpretation of Data
The criteria of “shared” necessitates that love must be relational. This implies that there is at least one acting agent and at least one receiving agent. It may seem rather incidental to state that love is relational since how can my love for another not be relational? It is here that we must consider forms of love not for another but love for the self and for non-agent objects such as love of an abstract subject. Describing love as an experience directly implies the existence of at the very least an agent that is experiencing; however, in the case where one expresses love for an abstract object such as how philosophy is the “love of thinking” it is not immediately clear where such relation may lie. The requirement for multiple agents does not preclude oneself to be both the acting and the receiving agent, which allows the conception of self-love as an extension. Once again St. Augustine comes to the rescue with the notion that love is relational to the self in that it is the direction of our will (Tornau, 2020). This relation to the self is also implied in his conception of sinful love when love of god is replaced by love of the self. An interesting side note is that this relational aspect of love mirrors the relational necessity of consent as seen in Larry Alexander’s Ontology of Consent.
Another aspect of the shared criterion that must be contemplated is the notion of consent. I will make the case that there is a semantic difference between giving, taking, and sharing. That difference being the direction of the movement of consent. By consent, I mean that all agents involved in a particular context must will the direct and informed entailments of said context.
Consent must be direct and informed since indirect entailments not made aware to the consenting agents can create situations where the agent consents to the context but not the entailments. Take the case where an individual is given a contract stating that all five-wheeled objects will be taken from them, it is perfectly imaginable that the individual may fail to consider that their automobile in fact fits the criteria since they had neglected that the steering wheel technically renders the automobile a five-wheeled object. The individual did in fact consent to giving up their fivewheeled objects but did not consent to the indirect entailment of giving up their vehicle due to the fact that they were not properly informed. Returning to the topic of implied consent in a shared relation, all three actions of giving, taking, and sharing implies the existence of two agents: the imparting agent from whom something is removed and the receiving agent to whom something is bestowed. In the case of giving, there is consent on the part of the imparting agent but not necessarily so for the receiving agent. The reverse is true for taking where there is consent on the part of the receiving agent but not the imparting agent. Mutual consent is certainly possible for both giving and taking but it is not a direct entailment. However, when something is shared, consent is always implied on both the part of the imparting agent and the receiving agent. Furthermore, sharing not only entails mutual consent but also allows for the possibility of both agents sharing with each other where the imparting agent is also the receiving agent and vice versa. When applied to the context of love, love that is given without consent is usually seen in the form of unrequited love. This is ethically problematic since the imposition of unwanted love impedes the agency of the receiver. This is equally true for love that is taken without consent though there is a question of whether that is possible in the first place.
Let us consider the second observation where there is a consensus on the ontological nature of love where love seems to be related to states of being on some level. This is somewhat reminiscent of Berkeley’s work on ontology that esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) where existence of an object is mind-dependent of an agent who is perceiving (Downing, 2004). When applied in the context of love, this can be reimagined as esse est amari (to be is to be loved) where existence of an agent is mind-dependent of an agent who is loving. It is important to note here that this ontology of love is rendered beyond a simple existence in the Berkeley sense by the relational component. There is a cascade of supervenience where existence precedes perception, perception precedes relation and relation precedes love. In this sense, the relational ontology is not only a property of love, but a necessary criterion of love. This is not to say that we do not exist if we are not loved, but rather that our being is validated and confirmed when our existence itself is acknowledged, accepted, and loved by another. It can be induced that love, as described by the participants, has the property where it is the state of one’s being intertwined with another’s state of being in an ontological symbiosis. In it, each member of that shared condition of love is able to metaphysically extend the dimensions of their being through their love of the other. Thus, the existence of those bound by the thread of love, in a sense, relinquishes themselves from the overwhelming loneliness of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) and evolves into a relational coexistence in the form ofamo ergo sum (We love therefore we are) (Stone, 1993).
The third and final observation where a significant number of responses expressed that love is the ability to be authentically oneself and the desire to accept the authentic other as they are. It would be difficult and imprudent to continue without first delineating what exactly is meant by authentic. As briefly mentioned before. Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit as authenticity is a self-relational ownership of one’s existence. Thus, in the bilateral relational ontology of love, authenticity is not simply directly self-relational but also a shared inter-relational ownership of the mutual being. With the addition of authenticity, all the necessary parts to the definition falls into place. Along with the shared component and the ontological component, love can be interpreted as a shared extension of being. It is a state where each individual’s existence is extended through the existence of the other in a way that the participating members are able to witness each other as they are. While social norms demonstrate that it is usually between two individuals in the case of romantic love, there does not seem to be any immediate counter arguments to why it cannot also apply to love amongst multiple individuals as is seen in familial or friendship love.
Conclusion
To reiterate, there is a compelling case to be made for examining love from an inductive perspective that avoids the issues present in using an axiomatic approach. This take on love moves in a non-traditional direction where love is not seen as an internal state but as an empirical, external, experience. In order to do so, a case-by-case definition of love was drawn from a sample of 20 CSU East Bay students. Their responses were generalized inductively into three observations of the shared criteria, the being criteria, and the authenticity criteria. This inductively derived definition of love as a shared extension of authentic being is composed of lived experiences that does not impose any a priori judgements on our being, but instead validates it. Though the arguments are beyond the scope of this paper, I would like to impart with the assertion that this definition of love sets up an important premise in establishing that love is intrinsically ethical such that not only is esse est amari (To be is to love), but also amari est ethica (to love is to be ethical).
References
Alexander, L. (2014). The ontology of consent. Analytic Philosophy, 14-137.
Downing, L. (2004). George Berkeley.
Heidegger, Martin, 1962 [1927], Being and Time, J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (trans.), New York: Harper & Row.
Merriam-Webster. (2016) Love. In The Merriam-Webster Dictionary New Edition Stone, J. (1993). Cogito ergo sum. The journal of philosophy, 90(9), 462-468.
Tornau, C. (2020). St. Augustine, Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2020 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#Bib
Watts, S., & Stenner, P. (2014). Definitions of love in a sample of British women: An empirical study using Q methodology. British Journal of Social Psychology, 53(3), 557-572.
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Reflections 