Loving needs reason

In considering the idea of love, I developed various arguments that defended the idea of love as requiring reason. That is, a person has to have a reason for loving someone else. By this, I am not pointing out that people's existence is the reason. Though indeed that is true, I am primarily concerned with the role of the human free will and its dependence on reason. The arguments themselves are not flawless, but they are food-for-thought and you would do well to consider them.

The various arguments about this subject are fairly unorganized in thought, and are presented here in chronological order of their creation:

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6:47 PM, March 23, 2010
Some people (it is reasonable to assume many) think that you must love people as an end and not a means to an end. That is to say, you must love a person just as a person and not for anything that you will receive out of them. Certainly this is true if what you are receiving is a material gain, for in such cases, you do not truly love the person; you desire what they give you. However, the reasoning cannot be taken much further than this. Ask the question, "What is it that I love about the person?" You cannot love a person just for a person's sake, just as you cannot love a rock for a rock's sake. Are you to love them because they are a person? Can you love a rock because it is a rock? When you open the door for someone, are you doing it because they are a person, or out of habit, or for another reason? Another reason might be that you are trying to please God. Why would you try to please God? - Because He would give you joy in return. What is it then that makes you love other people?
If I told myself one day that I was going to love all the people around me every minute, I know that I would fail miserably. Why would I fail? It is not that the task is too difficult as much as it is daunting. Nor would I fail because I did not make some commitment in my head that says I will love people. Over the course of the day, my focus shifts, my vision changes, and I am no longer looking at people as objects to love, but rather, I am trying to please myself. It turns out that we are always trying to gain pleasure. There are various means by which we gain it, none of which include simply loving a person for a person's sake. In fact, we gain pleasure from caring for people because God gives us joy when we do so. Our mind senses this boost and encourages us to return to such tasks. If we were not lead by this desire for pleasure, there would be no reason for us to do anything. However, God made us this way, not so that the world could be flooded by selfish people, but because He wanted to be the ultimate source of joy.
"Falling in love" is quite different from loving a person. This sort of "love" belongs to a type of love that finds pleasure (usually aesthetically) from another person. The person has attributes or characteristics from which you can obtain pleasure. That does not mean that you "fall in love" with that person. The "love" that you seem to "fall" into is this love that you not only gain pleasure from other people's attributes but also that your feelings are more tangled up in your relationship with them. That means that interactions with them (such as simply seeing them, or thinking of their smile, regardless of whether actual or psychological) are stimuli for the mind that give you pleasure.
There are two important things that must be distinguished between. The first is the emotional, and the second is the sensual. Let the former (that is, emotional), pertain to the soul. Emotional feelings are the inner feelings that you have inside your soul, regardless of your current state. Sensual feelings, on the other hand, refers to what the brain senses and encourages the soul to command it to seek. Sensual feelings arise pertaining to things such as pain and sex. In response to pain, your brain generally takes the initiative and commands your appendages to retract or move in such a direction and speed that would decrease the intensity of, if not obliterate, the signal originating from the nerves. The same is true with sex. If you know yourself well enough, you can easily tell when your body desires sex even though nothing else pertaining to sex or sex stimuli has come to mind. Emotional feelings are independent of sensual feelings. For example, a man might be suffering for a cause he cares for and feel emotionally happy about it even though sensually he may be being persecuted, injured with techniques beyond his wildest dreams. The opposite can be true: the man might be suffering emotionally because he is doing something that happens to be giving him sensual pleasure. The most ironic idea about this system is that both affect the decision of the individual because the sensual pleasure may lead to emotional pleasure. However, it is only the idea of the potential emotional pleasure that a person thinks they will find in something that drives them towards seeking it.





9:30 PM, March 28, 2010
It is quite possible that, being made in the image of God, we as humans are given some of God's own selfless love from the beginning and can thereby love people without actually having a reason to love them. Loving people, at least to a small degree, would be a part of our nature. If we believe in God, He gives us enough more of His selfless love to share. However, we have to desire that love or He will not give it to us. However, how can we desire such love? It must be by some pleasure we get from loving already. In such a case, it would be our selfless love, given to us by God, that causes us to do something, and in return, our souls are given pleasure that they desire to perpetually renew as time goes on. One way our souls can do this is by continuing to love in that simple manner that we started loving. The other way is by asking God to grant us more love.
Is this really the way it works?





10:50 PM, March 30, 2010
You can practically make happiness spawn anywhere, in a manner of speaking. That is, you can decide to think of something as a source of pleasure. Now, although it will not necessarily be a source of sensual pleasure, it will, however, be a source of emotional pleasure. Emotional pleasure is slightly harder to pursue because of the body naturally desires sensual pleasure. It is the free will of the soul that decides whether a man will try to gain emotional pleasure or sensual pleasure or both. Nevertheless, the emotional pleasure does not always if ever cause the body to provide itself with an instantaneous boost of pleasure that acts as motivation for someone to pursue the source of the pleasure, whether it be an action or thing to acquire, etc. Of course, if your soul is a slave to sin, it becomes quite difficult to imagine emotional pleasure in good deeds.



9:48 AM, April 12, 2010
When you are relaxed and in your "comfort zone" (hypothetically, the place on earth you are happy most of the time), it is quite obvious that, when asked to go to immediately go to the funeral of friend, of which no one is attending, you will no doubt be quite reluctant. You may not mention your reluctance, since that would cause people to judge you and you certainly do not like that. However, at the moment, you are in your comfort zone and could think of hundreds of reasons why not to go to the funeral. You could say, "There's no point. My friend is dead. I cannot resurrect him." On top of that, you would add other excuses such as, "His own family is not even going to be there" or "I do not know anyone going to the funeral, so what good would my presence do? I would not be a comforter to anyone." Regardless of your list of excuses, should you not mention them for fear of being reproached, you would no opt for remaining in your comfort zone. On the other hand, should it be that you had just finished a battle in which your friend had died, be he courageous or a coward, you would (after learning of your friend's death), if you are of noble character, go immediately to the body of your friend and mourn for him. Following that, you would make funeral arrangements.
The question that I wish to pose is this: Do these two examples lead to different conclusions about why we do things? When ethics and morals demand something of us, their demands are usually not accompanied by instructions ("Here's how to do") but only by commands ("Do"). This allots a person freedom to go about fulfilling such moral commands by whatever means is necessary. The question arises, however, do morals ask us to be concerned with motives? A person who "selflessly" devotes their life to others is highly esteemed and said to be virtuous or moral, but what is their motivating reason for "selflessly" giving away their life? Surely one does not automatically give one's own life away? Given that the freewill acts like a scale which is tipped one way or another by randomness and the various things in life, such as sinful desire and God's grace, man only does what will give him pleasure. Or is there something else? Do morals demand truly selflessly giving one's life away? That is, is a person not permitted by morals to receive pleasure after he does a good deed?
Perhaps the terms need to be more well defined. Good deeds are called that because generally they are voluntary actions that are intended to benefit people though such actions are not commanded by law. Morals encompass both "good deeds" and the laws that each person has in his or her heart and mind. On far end of the positive (desirable) end of the spectrum, there is "selfless" giving, that is, giving (e.g. caring for the sick, feeding the poor, and spending time for good causes) but without expecting a return.
How can, or is it even possible for, a human to selflessly give? Our morals may or may not require this "selfless" giving, but we feel inclined to do the deeds it is associated with, such as feeding the poor and caring for the sick. The acts themselves do not necessarily have to be acts that are completely selfless giving; you can have a reason for being charitable. However, what makes us inclined to do such acts in the first place? Surely with a sinful nature, man is (at least initially) inclined to only do evil and think selfishly. Yet something happens in a man that allows him to make such free acts of charity. Furthermore, those acts are often accompanied by a joy that survives the moment and dwells in the memory of a man, where it might be extracted at some random occasion and please the man for another moment before being returned to the shelf. This joy is somehow obtained by honest charitable works (that is, deeds that did not require an evil thing be done first) and remains undiscovered lest we cease ignoring the small voice in the back of our heads that encourage us do a charitable act. Note that the charitable act is not the same as the selfless act, for in the charitable act, we receive a burst (short or long, great or small) of joy that remains ingrained in our minds so long as the memories of the good acts we had done remain. Selfless acts, by their very name, remove the motivation for completing them. It would require someone's freewill to act contrary to the nature it was intended, or at least it would require that the human be controlled or enticed into such actions by a higher power.
When Jesus visited the tomb of his friend Lazarus, He had to first leave (what might be called) His "comfort zone". When He came, He wept, and the people said, "See how He (Jesus) loved him (Lazarus)." In this actual scenario, Jesus, who is God and does not need to obtain pleasure from anyone, weeps for Lazarus as though He has lost something of great importance. Indeed, Lazarus had died, and the Son of God was showing to the people God's love for every single individual. God does not will that even one of His created persons should be lost. Jesus is not only God, but also fully man. The human freewill of Jesus was submissive to the divine freewill of Jesus, the Son of God. To be fully human, the freewill of Jesus' human side must have had motivation. Indeed, there was great motivation promised to the human freewill of Jesus by the divine freewill of Jesus that He Himself would be taken up into heaven and worshiped as King and God. This brings up an important point: the difference between why Jesus went to the tomb and why any other man would go. Jesus goes out of command of His own divine freewill, not because the loss of Lazarus would decrease the pleasure that He would receive from him (for indeed, to gain pleasure from another human and mourn their loss because of the loss of your own pleasure is purely human). But when God enters into the heart of a man, does not He shape the man such that the man can love others as God loves others? When man goes to a funeral, if he is of noble heart (one influenced by the grace of God), then it is quite likely that he goes out of love for the man and not purely because of the loss of potential pleasure for himself.
Within relationships, there may exist a spiritual bond between the two people involved in a relationship such that, though they may gain no pleasure from each other and even never see, speak to, or hear of each other again, they still feel obligated to preserve that relationship. When one of the two of them breaks that relationship by deciding not to be friends with the other person, they feel a bitter flavor in their decision, depending on how well developed the relationship was as well as the kind of relationship it was. What this possibly indicates, if it exists, is that God wants them to preserve their relationship, and He has made the spiritual or physical mind such that, within the bond of friendship, some pleasure is intertwined and some is transmitted along it.





11:49 PM, October 27, 2010
Loving needs reason. It is impossible for a person not to love for a reason. Furthermore, the free will must consent to the reason to bring forth love. Various individuals may state that they are capable of loving without a reason, but this is not so. Consider what is going on in their subconscious mind. If a person loves another person, they feel a sense of happiness from it. It is this happiness or expectation of something they desire that gives them reason to do such an action. The reasoning is the same whether they begin to love in order to test and see whether they will receive what they so desire (evidenced by a sense of pleasure, which is what they hope for) or they love already expecting that what they do will result in something they desire, perhaps a sense of pleasure. If a person does not have to have a reason for loving, then people would naturally love, but we can see from reality that this is certainly not the case.

Considering the requirement of reason, loving is an act of the will. It is not as though one is driven solely by God or natural instinct towards such. Otherwise, there would be no reasonable explanation as to why people do not love. If loving required no choice, people would naturally choose to love. The counter-argument would be best described in an analogy of a ball rolling down a hill: the ball continues to roll down the hill unless stopped by an external force. In the same way, people would be naturally loving unless there were a reason not to be. On the contrary, this is irrational in light of the definition of love (considering love perseveres through struggles and difficulties and reasons not to remain faithful or loyal, so why would naturally-loving people invent reasons not to love?). Furthermore, the definition of love is external to human beings. If it is only relative to human beings, we can define it however we want and define it in such a way as to encompass the actions of all humans. However, if we define it extrinsic to humans and exclusive of some human activity, then it is no longer an innate quality but is, with respect to its physical manifestation in human beings, a category of actions. Hence, nothing binds us to automatic obedience to the rules that define this category.