"It is all in the day's work; everything I do, I do con amore; and so too I love con amore."
-Soren Kierkegaard (Johannes Climacus), "Either/Or"
There is a commonly known expression: "If you love someone, set them free." It seems these words are actually closely related, and this relation goes back a long ways.
The etymology of the word "friend" can be traced to Proto-Indo-European, where we find the present participle form of the root, "*pri-". "*pri-" means "to love," and the present participle form, "*pri-ont-" could roughly be translated to "loving." We also find that "*pri-" is closely related with the Old Church Slavonic "prijatelji," which means "friend," as well as Welsh "rhydd," which means "free."
Love loves, and does nothing more. All love accepts that which it loves, letting the beloved freely be that which is loved. Why do I say this? Because the moment we decide that the beloved must be changed, it follows that by changing, it must be changed into something else—something entirely different. Therefore, the desire to change the beloved is something other than the initial love, even if a bit of love remains.
All friendship has love at its roots. Why do I say this? Because when we call somebody our true friend, we accept them for who they are and allow ourselves to abide with them, that is, to stay by their side. While it is theorized that the kinship between the words "free" and "friend" has its factual historical basis in the association between free men (as opposed to the association between a master and slave), I find that there is an even richer way of looking at the relationship between these words. To love someone, we let them be, that is to say, we let them be free. When we love our friends, we let them be who they are. If we seek to change a perceived quality in a friend, it is because the quality that has appeared is something that we cannot abide with, and thus cannot love. It is in this way that I find "love" and "freedom" are still related in today's usage.
What are the things that we love about somebody? We may find that we love their way of saying and doing things. We may find that we love their courage or their compassion. We may love their sadness or anger. We may even love just about everything about them. That which we are able to love about someone depends on how we see them, and if we see someone behave a way in a situation, or see someone display a certain quality, we then are capable of loving this behavior, or loving this quality. In other words, if we believe someone is a certain way or has a certain quality, we can then dispose ourselves towards that quality in one way or another. We could approve of said quality, or disapprove of it. We might scorn it or desire it. We might hate it, or we might love it. This entry simply focuses on how we love. Those things that we love about somebody are those things that we stay with, and, so it seems, those things stay with us.
Some may find this to be an oversimplification. For I say "love," and perhaps different meanings come to mind for different readers. But when you look at it more closely, love is actually quite easy to understand. The tricky part is that we never seem to be feeling just one thing purely. Oftentimes with love of any degree, whether it be a kindly friend's love, a concerned family's love, or a passionate love of romantic attraction, etc., there are other feelings that happen at the same time, for instance, striving, needing, lamenting, anger, or hate. All of these kinds of experiences have led people to say things like "love is really sadness," "if you love something, you need it," and "love is really akin to hate." Many people think that love is happy, love is sad, love is angry, love is needy, on and on and on. Many people think that love needs, love laments, love fights. But really, these are overcomplications that lead people to think love is so hard to define. They overcomplicate because they add more to love than what love itself is. The truth is, love loves.
Now I would like to move from exploring the more general sense of love to a more specific sense. I would like to explore the sense of love that we often call "romantic love," which the ancient Greeks called "eros," a name which was also used for the god, Eros, who we commonly refer to by the Latin name, Cupid. Before diving in, I want to make note of the way that the Greeks' use of love is tied up with a sense of desiring or wanting. In the Platonic dialogue, Symposium, Socrates and his friends discuss the nature of eros, and before getting into it, he establishes a couple things: one is that "everyone who desires, desires that which he has not already, and which is future and not present," and the other is that "when you say, 'I desire that which I have and nothing else,' is not your meaning that you want to have what you have now in the future?" Making note of these remarks, we can see how if love is tied with desire, then this desire either seeks to be with that which it has not, or seeks to stay with that which it has. This seems to fit just perfectly with my earlier characterization of love as wanting to abide or stay. For abiding is a disposition towards the future. Now I will remind the reader that I do not think that love necessarily connotes desire, for we do not lose the sense of "loving" if we take away the sense of "desiring." However I think it is important to deal with the sense of "desiring" as it is commonly connected with love. It is by assuming there to be a correlation between love and desire that people often mistake love for lust, or assume that love involves lust. Really, lust is just a form of desire that can accompany love, especially eros. I think we can conclude from this digression that if love sets its gaze towards the future, it can easily bring about a strong desire, but this desire, which looks towards the future, is not the same thing as love, which in the present simply loves.
Now to resume the exploration of romantic love. The old Proto-Indo-European term "*leubh-", which means "to care, desire, love," is closely related with Latin "lubet" which means "pleases," and, (my favorite version), Lithuanian "liaupse," which means "song of praise." Closer to our English language term, we have Old English "lufu," which means "love, affection, friendliness," which is closely related to the Old High German and Old German words for "joy" and "praise." In all of these we see a common thread. That sense of joy, praise, care, and, as some, such as Indians and Greeks, use it, desiring.
To return to the Greeks, they considered eros to be love of the beautiful. "For the beloved is truly beautiful, and delicate, and perfect, and blessed" (Symposium). It does seem to always be the case that when we love someone in a romantic way, we find them beautiful. To reconnect with my earlier conviction that love abides, we might make this distinction: In loving a beloved friend, there are many different things about them that we may find ourselves loving; while in loving someone in the romantic sense (aka eros), the quality which we find standing out is beauty. So when the beloved is seen in a romantic way, their beauty is what is most loved, and the beauty is what stays with the lover. (I don't just mean beauty in the way we might say a waterfall is "beautiful." Here, and fitting the context, I mean it in the sense of "attractiveness," "seductiveness," and in the oldest sense, "revered." This is what I think the Greeks had in mind when talking about "beauty" regarding eros.)
The Lithuanians seem to get closest to the activity of love with their phrase, "liaupse." If there were any action that would be a perfect parallel for love, would it not be music? A song exists as an expression in itself, not sung for any means, but simply to be sung. Love is the same way: it has no end, yet is an end in itself. Joy is one of our words in the English language which has not departed far from its Proto-Indo-European origins. "*gau-" means "to rejoice," and it is very closely related to the Ancient Greek word, "gaio." This sense remains in the Old Germanic words that are closest to Old English and its daughter language, the English we speak today. When we love something, we praise it, we rejoice in it, and the joy needs not achieve any purpose, but is simply rejoicing. So it is that when beauty becomes the object of love, we find in many of those cases the all-too-familiar lover's poem or song.
The core revelation that Socrates arrives at in his effort to understand the nature of love is the idea that the highest form of love loves beauty in itself, "beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting" (Symposium). We take note that Socrates would often postulate things in terms of "eternal Forms." He would often say that all things in the material world derive their qualities from immaterial, objective, eternal "Forms." What he is talking about in Symposium is the "Form of Beauty," a Form that every beautiful person, animal, and object partakes in, just as every instance of justice would take its quality from the "Form of Justice," and so it goes with any Form. I am not inclined to believe in the existence of Platonic Forms, and it seems to me that the knowledge of such Forms may be impossible. In other words, I don't believe there are such things as beautiful people. One of my favorite parables from the Chuang Tzu goes as follows:
Men claim that Mao-ch'iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows how to fix the standard of beauty for the world?
It seems clear to me that no one creature understands what true beauty is. But then, no one man or woman knows this either. Could it be that beauty truly lies in the eye of the beholder?
We need not deal with the confusions of asserting objective, ethereal Platonic Forms, to understand what I find to be the kernel of truth in what Socrates says: When we love something in the romantic way, it is not that we love a thing that is beautiful, but, rather, we love the beauty in that thing. When the lover feels eros, the beloved is seen as beautiful by the lover. Bearing in mind the semiotic angle that this exploration takes, it seems no small stretch to take these words of Socrates in a semiotic sense: "beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities" (Symposium). When he says this, Socrates seems to imply that we are seeing into the "eternal reality" of the "Form of Beauty." However, if we understand, via semiotics, the way in which a mind is always affecting and creating its reality by the way it defines things, we might say there is yet some truth in his words, and here's how I would express it: Regardless of whether there is an eternal "Form of Beauty" or not, it seems that whenever we love in this way, we bring forth beauty. There is no eye that can behold beauty but the eye of the mind.
Now, to take a final turn in this exploration, let us examine the role love can play for us in life. Love is a feeling that makes itself known. If there is a life worth living, it is a life loved. Whatever we love, we are willing to stay with it, and if we let love prevail, this acceptance warms the heart. Nietzsche wanted to be a lover of fate. In section 276 of The Gay Science he says:
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
Amor fati is Latin for "love of fate." Even our fate we can learn to love. Can we see life and fate as beautiful? Can we bring forth the beauty in life? To have such a love that we are inspired to make music out of it, to sing a song of praise, ah, now that seems like a powerful view to take on life, (a view we take with the mind's eye). To truly love life would be to let it be, to let it be free. Being a friend to a beloved friend, we need not change them, but simply be their friend. Being a lover of a beloved lover, we need not change them, but simply love them. To love life is to set it free, which means not trying to change it, but to live it. Those who wish to be lovers of life with me, can you sincerely say these words? "I do what I love and I love what I do. I am what I love and I love what I am." If you can say these words, if you can love your life—set it free! The music will surely follow.