A short philosophical guide to the fallacies of love

Abstract

Love, as the most intense and pervasive of human feelings, cannot deny in it the existence of love beliefs, that is, beliefs about one’s own love and that of the others’ love, thereby rendering the imagination of a loveless world impossible. This book, the authors clarify, originates in a series of discussions surrounding the illusions in love in their own lives and that of their friends. These conversations are given a theoretical form in this book as an epistemology of love. The authors thereby introduce this epistemology of love as a reflection on the groundedness of love beliefs, focusing mainly on the kind of love that is not grounded. The illustration of this takes the form of sketches of fictional characters derived from authors’ own friends, fables, myths, and everyday stereotypical situations to a large extent. The first chapter begins by introducing the book’s premise based on eros, which is romantic love characterized by passion and desire for a lover, distinguished from philia, love characteristic of affection for one’s friends or family. It distinguishes romantic love from ‘conjugal love,’ or marriage, a more stable form of attachment. This romantic love is a dispositional state, an attitudinal property that the lover comes to possess for their beloved. It is typically encompasses three features; the physical reactions caused on interaction between lover and their beloved, the desire for prolonged intimate and sexual contact, and the thought and act of doing ‘strange’ things for the sake of the beloved, that one would not do otherwise. Thus the common properties of love originating from this disposition state are, firstly, love being passionate, is not an active choice one makes willfully. Second, is it not a characteristic feeling. Third, like any passionate feeling, love varies in its intensity and strength and is not a stable characteristic emotion that lasts in the same state throughout. Fourth, love is non-symmetric, one does not love with the guarantee of being loved in return or with the same intensity. Hence, the inevitable possibility of a broken heart. The second chapter focuses on the psychological mechanism of rationalization or the act of providing reasonable motivation to form unjustified love beliefs. The reasonable motivations themselves are not reasonable because the lover does not recognize the underlying causes of their actions. It talks about fallacies that elucidate the effects of the rationalization of love