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> My partner cKaye and I are both part of Python and we've been considering these questions a lot lately. It is great to have a partner that contemplates these

by sridca 11y ago

> My partner cKaye and I are both part of Python and we've been considering these questions a lot lately. It is great to have a partner that contemplates these matters! > In short: I don't think it's reasonable to treat love as though it were an emotion. Love is most certainly a feeling. Just for the sake of clarity, here is the dictionary definition: [quote] 1 an intense feeling of deep affection: babies fill parents with intense feelings of love | their love for their country. • a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone: it was love at first sight | they were both in love with her | we were slowly falling in love. • (Love)a personified figure of love, often represented as Cupid. • a great interest and pleasure in something: his love for football | we share a love of music. • affectionate greetings conveyed to someone on one's behalf. • a formula for ending an affectionate letter: take care, lots of love, Judy. [/quote] The key words in that definition are "feeling", "attachment", "affectionate". > Love is an act. Practice it. Do it. Do it well and with joy. But don't treat it like it's the same thing as happiness; it isn't. If love is a feeling, what is the nature of this act that you practice well with joy? If love, or the act, is not happiness - why feel/practice it in the first place? What about joie de vivre ("a cheerful enjoyment of life; an exultation of spirit.")?

BasDirks 11y ago
Looking up love in the dictionary is useless. You're stuck in language.
- sridca 11y ago
  > Looking up love in the dictionary is useless. Establishing the agreed-upon definition for words used in communication is a sensible thing. Otherwise everybody is free to interpret things however they want (such as my correspondent, jMyles, treating love as an "act") leading to communication being rendered ineffective. > You're stuck in language. No (language is merely a tool; it is not possible to be "stuck" on it unless you have an emotional hold). However it would seem that as you find establishing the agreed-upon definition to be useless it may well be the case that you are stuck in less useful one-liner responses (especially going by your comment history).
  - BasDirks 11y ago
    You don't understand. You're actually stuck. You can't see it because you're stuck. If you find yourself grabbing a dictionary because you need to establish with your "correspondent" that you're talking about the same thing when you say "love", you have a problem.
    - jMyles 11y ago
      I seem to remember a discussion about this exact phenomenon... Right! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgXlHWF3_Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgXlHWF3_Go
    - sridca 11y ago
      > You don't understand. You're actually stuck. You can't see it because you're stuck. As it is not possible to be "stuck" on language (which is but a tool) unless one has an emotional hold, and as you are not privy to my every thought/feeling day in and day out (other than what I convey via explicit communication), the word of the day after reading your nonsensical pithy assertions is: fatuous. Here it is, fully defined, for the sake of clarity: fatuous |ˈfaCHo͞oəs| adjective silly and pointless: a fatuous comment. > If you find yourself grabbing a dictionary because you need to establish with your "correspondent" that you're talking about the same thing when you say "love", you have a problem. Quite the contrary; the very fact that you have vested interest in maintaining nebulous communication (via redefining words to suite one's fancy, such as my correspondent above treating such a deeper feeling of love to be an act, thereby invalidating the sensible investigations around it) indicates to me that all the problem is being projected from the other side. One of the many benefits of paying sincere attention to one's feelings is that it makes it very easy to sift through what is one's own feeling versus what is being projected by others. You will have a hard time performing your modus-operandi with me.
      - jMyles 11y ago
        I think that your comments are mean and inconsiderate. I agree that appealing to the authority of Webster on the question, "what is love?" is capricious and demeaning. To reconstruct my point, I meant that, for example, when you say, "I love you," make 'love' a verb in the present tense in your mind. Love willingness and with abandon. Notice, by the by, that the way that we use the word "love" in casual conversation is often as a verb, not a noun. You never say, "I happiness you" <=- that syntax doesn't make sense for a feeling. And love isn't one. I submit that the impetus to misconstrue a beautiful act as an emotion is mostly a commercial one.

by sridca 11y ago

BasDirks 11y ago

Looking up love in the dictionary is useless. You're stuck in language.

sridca 11y ago
> Looking up love in the dictionary is useless. Establishing the agreed-upon definition for words used in communication is a sensible thing. Otherwise everybody is free to interpret things however they want (such as my correspondent, jMyles, treating love as an "act") leading to communication being rendered ineffective. > You're stuck in language. No (language is merely a tool; it is not possible to be "stuck" on it unless you have an emotional hold). However it would seem that as you find establishing the agreed-upon definition to be useless it may well be the case that you are stuck in less useful one-liner responses (especially going by your comment history).
- BasDirks 11y ago
  You don't understand. You're actually stuck. You can't see it because you're stuck. If you find yourself grabbing a dictionary because you need to establish with your "correspondent" that you're talking about the same thing when you say "love", you have a problem.
  - jMyles 11y ago
    I seem to remember a discussion about this exact phenomenon... Right! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgXlHWF3_Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgXlHWF3_Go
  - sridca 11y ago
    > You don't understand. You're actually stuck. You can't see it because you're stuck. As it is not possible to be "stuck" on language (which is but a tool) unless one has an emotional hold, and as you are not privy to my every thought/feeling day in and day out (other than what I convey via explicit communication), the word of the day after reading your nonsensical pithy assertions is: fatuous. Here it is, fully defined, for the sake of clarity: fatuous |ˈfaCHo͞oəs| adjective silly and pointless: a fatuous comment. > If you find yourself grabbing a dictionary because you need to establish with your "correspondent" that you're talking about the same thing when you say "love", you have a problem. Quite the contrary; the very fact that you have vested interest in maintaining nebulous communication (via redefining words to suite one's fancy, such as my correspondent above treating such a deeper feeling of love to be an act, thereby invalidating the sensible investigations around it) indicates to me that all the problem is being projected from the other side. One of the many benefits of paying sincere attention to one's feelings is that it makes it very easy to sift through what is one's own feeling versus what is being projected by others. You will have a hard time performing your modus-operandi with me.
    - jMyles 11y ago
      I think that your comments are mean and inconsiderate. I agree that appealing to the authority of Webster on the question, "what is love?" is capricious and demeaning. To reconstruct my point, I meant that, for example, when you say, "I love you," make 'love' a verb in the present tense in your mind. Love willingness and with abandon. Notice, by the by, that the way that we use the word "love" in casual conversation is often as a verb, not a noun. You never say, "I happiness you" <=- that syntax doesn't make sense for a feeling. And love isn't one. I submit that the impetus to misconstrue a beautiful act as an emotion is mostly a commercial one.