What is love?

Philosophers, poets, psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists - everyone seems to have their own idea about what love is.

This is unsurprising in one way - love functions as one of those umbrella concepts, a guiding ethical and personal ideal - and so it captures a wide range of hopes and aspirations.

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But it makes it hard to talk about love in a meaningful way, when we mean so many different things with just this one word. 

Famously, the ancient Greeks had three different concepts of love.

Love can mean desire for something or someone, the attraction that you feel for aesthetic reasons. The Greeks called this eros.

Love can mean solidarity with someone - the motivation to support, encourage and promote another person. The Greeks called this philia.

Love can mean giving, an unconditional and sacrificial bestowing value on someone that they don’t have inherently but that arises from the giver. The Greeks called this agape.

And, of course, l…

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Most of us would not think of ourselves as cruel - I certainly don’t see myself that way. Generally, we feel a sting of compassion, and a desire to help, when faced with suffering. The boy in this photo - in a flower market in India - elicited this response for me when I saw him, and when I look at this photo I feel it again.

But reading Nietzsche - and trying to absorb his striking and often counter-intuitive descriptions of human life and interaction - has made me wonder.

Of course, I am not cruel in an obvious sense. I don’t delight in causing people harm or hurting animals.

But if you were to really strip back the layers of my motivations - get behind the easy interpretations, the ones the fit neatly with what I think is good and right and ethical - you might begin to wonder too. Are there subtler, more refined forms of cruelty lurking in my soul?

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Probably.

The obvious candidate for this refined cruelty is, at least according to Nietzsche, compassio…

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Compassion is something you hear a lot about - compassion for others and, more recently, self-compassion. I am treating it here as an emotion - as something we feel about other people.

There is an awful lot of moralising about compassion. It has become one of the touchstones of customary morality. Its twin is love. It goes like this: when faced with someone who is in difficulty or experiencing suffering, or when faced with someone who has hurt or harmed you, or, or when facing these things yourself, the best ethical response is to show love and compassion.

Today we’re thinking about compassion, love will come around in about two weeks.

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Here are two problems with this approach. The first is that when I talk to people about this topic it becomes clear that almost no-one agrees on a definition of what compassion is. The word denotes ‘feeling with’ - con + passion. But is this enough? Is it empathy? Is it taking someone else’s perspective? Is it validating …

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I can find a few examples in my life of relationships where respect has become contempt.

Each of us, I suspect, has a mechanism in our value system that triggers this feeling of contempt. I also suspect that this causes a conflict for many people - are we allowed to feel this way? Shouldn’t we respect everyone equally?

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As with respect, I think contempt implies an order of rank. If you feel contempt for someone, it usually has to do with them falling short of a standard, whether their actions or in their character. It is not easy to feel contempt for someone without also looking down on them.

I have noticed a trend where compassion is proposed as a remedy for contempt. A person may fall short of your expectations for many reasons - including their personal histories of trauma, mental health problems and difficult personal circumstances. If you take these into account and feel compassion for them, then you will see the error in your co…

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I can’t recall ever being overcome with respect but I have certainly been overcome with love, or with disgust. So you might think it doesn’t belong among our strong emotions - our passions. 

I think it does: respect (and its opposite, contempt) is something we feel and it can powerfully affect how we relate to others.

Respect seems to operate in two ways. First, a baseline level of respect that isn’t specific to the individual. For example, I respect everyone’s right to be themselves without interference from me (or from anyone). Philosophically speaking, I think about this as every living thing exercising the will to power.

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But then there’s also a more individualised type of respect. Respect that isn’t about universal rights or group membership. Respect that is about an individual and their characteristics.

The tricky aspect of this is that this kind of respect usually involves ranking others on a scale. We respect individuals who are ‘above’ us, or at …

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My son recently caught a mouse, its furry little body stuck in the plastic jaws of a trap. I had the job of disposal. When I emptied the trap into the bin, I got the angle wrong and its furry little body slid onto my hand. I felt that skin-crawling feeling: disgust.

The physicality of disgust is important. Many of the things that arouse disgust seem to have a sound evolutionary basis: rotting food, infected wounds, bodily waste, household pests like cockroaches, insects, vermin - we tend to have a strong aversive reaction to these, and for good reason.

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Moral disgust is a bit like this. We are disgusted by things that we see as a kind of corruption, a state of decrepitude that carries with it the threat of transmission, of cross-infection. We are often disgusted by (im)moral positions that threaten us or that we think threaten our social order.

I find these visceral responses to (im)moral actions intriguing. We feel it before we think it. We s…

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Reflection

We desire many things. Classic examples are wealth, fame, sex and power. Often desiring these - or at least, desiring them too much - is seen as a bad thing. It is either immoral or, at the very least, harmful, to fixate on these desires.

But there are also more permissible desires. The desire to love and to be loved. To see others flourish and to play a part in that. The desire for deep connection, for purpose, for meaning. All of these are often considered favourably. It is fine to desire these things - as much as you want.

I find it hard to understand why we discriminate in this way. I prefer to think about desire in itself and separately from the things desired. It seems to me t…

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Shame is a powerful emotion. In thinking about shame this week, I have come across two different approaches to it. The first, championed by Brene Brown, is that shame is unavoidably negative. The second, something I came across at a research seminar, is that it has both positive and negative possibilities.

Both of these put shame in a psychological and moral context. The question is whether or not shame is psychologically damaging, and whether it can promote pro-social behaviours.

It is clear that shame can be psychologically damaging. This is when it is about your character, or personality. To feel ashamed of yourself as a person - particularly with regard to fixed characteristics - is unlikely to be helpful.

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It is also clear that shame can promote certain types of behaviour. To be ashamed of something that you have done in the past, like, for example, getting angry at someone you love, can help you to avoid doing that thing in the future. So may…

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Here are two things about me - one I’m good at and another where I’m just average.

I play guitar reasonably well - perhaps better than most. I am not great but I am more adept than most. 

I am a long distance runner. As a result I am quite fit but I am not quick. I will almost always finish in the middle of the pack, at any distance.

As far as you know, these are reasonably accurate and straightforward self-evaluations.

But what if I am actually a terrible guitar player, but I say (and/or think) that I am pretty good? Typically, we would think of this as a negative type of pride: to overvalue yourself in front of others or to think that you are better than you are. Either way, we don’t tend to have a lot of empathy for people who are proud without cause.

On the other hand, what if I was a great runner, but only claimed to be average? We tend to respond to this as positive forms of humility: the “average” runner who completes a marathon in …

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This is the first time in my series on the passions that deals with our dark emotions. I often call these our ‘aversive’ emotions because they are internal experiences that we typically try to avoid.

One of the features of these posts will be this: I try to find two different versions of these emotions - the version that helps and the one that harms.

So on to despair. I should probably warn you that I talk about depression and suicide below, so look away now if you need to.

There is a history of mental illness in my family. My father struggled with depression and bipolar disorder, and attempted suicide on several occasions. My half-brother suffered from psychosis and eventually succeeded in ending his own life. I have seen other family members and friends struggle similarly.

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I hope it goes without saying that this is the harmful kind of despair. I don’t see any redeeming features in this, and if you experience this then please find people who can help and su…

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Joy is not easy to define - it has something to with happiness, satisfaction, contentment, a sense of wellbeing, combined with awe and wonder.

There have been a few truly joyful moments in my life. Here’s three examples. When I was a teenager, I was in a local Anglican church youth group that was more or less overtaken by a cult-like organisation that colonised four or five churches across Sydney and I was one of those swept away by it. One of the features of this experience was the music, and the joy that singing together engendered.

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Here’s another example. When I was in my twenties, I was an ardent fisherman. Every weekend I would clamber over rocky headlands in the pre-dawn dark. The goal was to have my bait in the water by sunrise. Watching the sun come up with the sound of crashing waves beneath me anticipating the day’s catch – through this I experienced joy.

Last example: when I read, I read philosophy. I don’t tend to read books intended for th…

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Strong emotions - essential to being human, but also (seemingly) problematic. Some of them we crave (like love or joy), some of them we avoid (like hatred or despair).

Trouble is, whether you’re thinking of the ‘good’ ones (like love) or the ‘bad’ ones (like hate), we all have them. In fact, I think we all have all of them at some time or another, even if we can’t admit to it.]

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There is a long and venerable tradition in philosophy of thinking about the emotions (or, more archaically, the passions). Generally speaking, the view of many philosophies (and religions) is that we should avoid being too swept up in strong emotions, whether good or bad.

For many ancient Greek philosophers, for example, our goal, especially when it comes our inner lives, should be moderation. Equanimity - internal serenity and peaceableness - this, to them, was desirable. The turbulence of any strong feeling - love or hatred, joy or despair - is to be avoided. You find similar reasoning in Christianity and Buddhi…

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