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Love has a circular definition? I find that interesting. It implies (to me) that more love grows from love. Maybe the experiment successfully lays the down a fo

• garretraziel 12y ago
  I don't think that it's circular definition. Definition talks about the one you love, in other words: love(x, y) = x has the active concern for the life and the growth of y "Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love" only says that "if x has no active concern about y, love is zero".
  • mbrock 12y ago
    This definition of love as a binary relation is interesting. Fromm, in a way, goes beyond it. From The Art of Loving: If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. This is the same fallacy which I have already mentioned above. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."
• EC1 12y ago
  Love is fractal!