Love defined in one sentence?


Revamp

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Hello,

This is my first post to this forum. I attempting to define love in one sentence and would appreciate any feedback.

Love is an emotional response to the rational scrutiny of a person who epitomizes one’s most sacred values.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

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Wel

Hello,

This is my first post to this forum. I attempting to define love in one sentence and would appreciate any feedback.

Love is an emotional response to the rational scrutiny of a person who epitomizes one’s most sacred values.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

Hi Chris, :smile:

Welcome to OL.

I use a broader definition of love which can be applied to all human relationships. So this is it in one sentence:

Love is doing what's morally right.

Greg

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I attempting to define love in one sentence and would appreciate any feedback.

Love is an emotional response to the rational scrutiny of a person who epitomizes one’s most sacred values.

Welcome, Chris. Consider adding a photo and a bit of biography on your member page. It's free, easy, and fun. It helps to introduce you and helps us understand your interests and cognitive style. We are almost all one hundred years old and suspicious of newcomers with no face.

On your tentative definition, you might try some substitutions to highlight and clarify the logical ramparts and the extent of the definition's rational fit. Replace 'love' with affection, true love, love at first sight, romantic feelings, mother-love, love-of-country, the love of a child for its parent, and so on.

Or, you can insert an introductory qualifier, like "Ideally," or "in a perfect Randian World," and so on. You can even replace other words in the phrase with cognates.

"In an ideal, rational universe, human 'romantic love' is simply a result of intense logical inspection of candidates for affective relationship, the result of which is a more-or-less strong feeling-state in the brain/body if the candidate fills out the love-candidate questionnaire effectively, and if the candidate score reaches the minimum threshold for embodying holy worth."

Or, best of all, you can consult the Urban Dictionary, and give up before you kill yourself.

LOVE: nature's way of tricking people into reproducing.

-- don't, whatever you do, consult literature or poetry. It will make you sweaty and uncomfortable. For example, this irrational and inelegant sophistry from the dead old playwright Sophocles:

One word

Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:

That word is love.

Here is Ginette Reno elaborating on the rationalist approach to love, in a musical setting. A bit wordy, thick with conditional phrases and logical entailments, but it's in French, so you won't notice.

Edited by william.scherk
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Are we back to love is a feeling vs love is action, Greg? Ya know I won that one.

--Brant

I've never heard a feeling defined as opposed to described

You can win, Brant.. and I'll still stand by my view that love can mean acting contrary to feelings when it's right to do so.

Greg

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RV,

Welcome to OL.

I suggest you set aside the attempt to place love under rational control.

A dog loves you. Is that dog engaged in an "emotional response to rational scrutiny" etc., etc., etc.?

:)

One can align love with reason, and when it works, it's wonderful, but it doesn't always work out that way. Love mostly comes from the lower part of the mind, and only a little comes from the upper. In other words, love is not either-or with respect to reason.

Here is my attempt at a one sentence description:

Love is wanting and caring so much about a thing or person that it helps define him or her, that is, it becomes part of his or her sense of identity.

That even holds true for the dog.

:)

MIchael

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Are we back to love is a feeling vs love is action, Greg? Ya know I won that one.

--Brant

I've never heard a feeling defined as opposed to described

You can win, Brant.. and I'll still stand by my view that love can mean acting contrary to feelings when it's right to do so.

Greg

I agree. But that's not a definition.

--Brant

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Are we back to love is a feeling vs love is action, Greg? Ya know I won that one.

--Brant

I've never heard a feeling defined as opposed to described

You can win, Brant.. and I'll still stand by my view that love can mean acting contrary to feelings when it's right to do so.

Greg

I agree. But that's not a definition.

--Brant

That's true.

It's not a definition... it's a way of life... and a way to life.

Greg

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Now--back to the thread topic. I submit REVAMP isn't actually looking for a definition but the palaver of sorts he's been getting so far. A true definition, accepted as such, ends the discussion. Now, I wonder if this gentleman knows where he is for we don't know anything about him. Maybe he's the Johnny Appleseed of love (discussions).

--Brant

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Why and why here?

--Brant

Hello Brant,
I should have provided more detail about myself and my post. Though, not posting to this forum before or any other for that matter, I have enjoyed reading through the OL topics over the last few years.
My questioned stemmed from a conversation at work in a reference to romantic relationships. Our conversation was brief and, I wanted to describe love in objective terms. That was the sentence I came up with.
Thank you for your reply,
Chris
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Welcome. Chris, to discussion on OL. It is assured by comparing numbers of reads on my major contributions here with numbers of posters here that you are not alone in being a long-time reader of OL while never posting. There are evidently a hundred or two such regular readers who never post here.

In perfecting your definition and the conception you are out to isolate, William and Brant have introduced some good vistas and resources. I’ll mention also (as you’ve probably already checked) the collection of Rand’s remarks on love, the particular sorts of it she was out to distinguish and esteem, at the Ayn Rand Lexicon here. I think her first entry shown there is off the target. The talk of payment and exchange in this phenomenon was out of order and an artifice imposed by a particular (and mistaken) egoistic idea of and ideal for human beings. But the other entries there are on to great truth and value, even if here and there flawed. There is an Aristotelian influence in the conception Rand was after, also in the Branden frames mentioned by Brant, and I think there is some important rightness in Aristotle’s theory.

In pursuing a theoretical definition, it is good to have in back of mind, the various meanings of the term in use today. Here are some of those meanings, in roughly reverse order of specialization, from my American Heritage Dictionary:

8. A zero score in tennis.

7. With capital L (in the Christian Science sect): God.

6. In theology: (a) God’s benevolence and mercy towards man. (b) Man’s devotion to or adoration of God. (c ) The benevolence, kindness, or brotherhood that man should rightfully feel towards others.

5. With capital L (in classical mythology): Eros and Cupid, the god of love.

4. A strong fondness or enthusiasm for something: a love of the woods.

3. A beloved person. Often used as a term of endearment.

2. An intense sexual desire for another person.

1. An intense affectionate concern for another person.

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  • 4 months later...

Hello,

This is my first post to this forum. I attempting to define love in one sentence and would appreciate any feedback.

Love is an emotional response to the rational scrutiny of a person who epitomizes one’s most sacred values.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

In one sentence: Love is the sacrifice we willing make for another. [Laissez Faire Law, p.150]

-- or as Miss Rand said, love is the exception-making.

Near or distant, those whom we love cannot be owned by our admiration or passionate sexual desire. Approximately all we can do is to love, without bargaining. To me, this is a vital clue. Money is fungible. If you give Israel $10 billion for a housing project, in reality you are giving them $10 billion for weapons, because they were spared a budget line-item called "housing." But love is not fungible or exchangeable. My loving you gives you no love of your own. It must be generated in your own heart, by yourself, and for yourself. If you discover a value in the world, something or someone worthy of love, the recipient of your love will never be anyone other than you. Paraphrasing Ayn Rand, I swear by my love and my hunger for it, that I will never love for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to love for mine. It is a legitimate permutation of Galt’s oath. We live badly without love, and die for want of spiritual food. But there can be no love transfusion, no bequest of passion or happiness -- regardless of our futile whim that a vacant soul might be filled by a neighbor’s joy. As Jim Morrison once shouted: You cannot petition the Lord with prayer. Love is a do-it-yourself improvement project that requires a lifetime of learning and practice. [op cit., pp.90-91]

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  • 1 month later...

In one sentence: Love is the sacrifice we willing make for another. [Laissez Faire Law, p.150]

-- or as Miss Rand said, love is the exception-making.

I disagree. To quote Rand, real love is this

- To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

- One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of [what or whom] one loves.

Of course "love" in a much more general traditional sense or rather "a feeling of love" is due to appreciation as well, but is not necessarily accompanied by apreciation of rational qualities. In this more much more general sense, one can be said to "love" a drug or a poison.

Real "love" can be a source of "exception-making", but never as a sacrifice, only as the best available choice in order to keep or protect what one loves.

- Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness

Kindly, Thomas

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-- or as Miss Rand said, love is the exception-making.

What is the exact quote? I think you bollixed this up.

--Brant

and reference (thanks)

Agreed, I do not remember anything even close...

This ain't one sentence...from The Lexicon...

I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term—as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of “the heart,” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy—of a subconscious philosophical sum—and, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then—and only then—it is the greatest reward of man’s life.

A...

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Sigh.

“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved.”

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Sigh.

“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved.”

Clearly I have to re-read The Fountainhead.

Thanks.

A...

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“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved.”

Ah ha! You said "the" and she didn't! Gotcha!

--Brant

(I'm a real bad man)

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