Love's Bond - Robert Nozick

Love is unique in its striking ability to be a driving force in dictating interpersonal relationships. It patterns behavior and orients individuals towards their distinct, unique attractions. According to Velleman, love penetrates deeper than one’s qualities; it extends to one’s rational will, or the essence of a person. To him, though love appears to have particularity, it is also a moral emotion. Kolodny subscribes to the relationship theory, asserting that an ongoing, interpersonal, and historical relationship with a relative is a part of the reason for love. In Kolodny’s view, the existence of the true self is irrelevant, as is the morality of love. Both Velleman and Kolodny disprove the quality theory; however, their perceptions of love and its morality differ. I believe that Kolodny is correct in his view that morality is irrelevant to love and that there must be factual reasons for love. Although it is enticing to believe that one is attracted to the essence of another, the essence is not motivation enough for love. The relationship theory takes into account the motivation needed to love a particular person from a historical, interpersonal, and ongoing perspective.

When one looks at romantic love, one would conclude that it is a social dyad that brings about certain responsibilities between two people in a relationship such as honesty, protection, openness and expressions of love. (William, 2008: 76). Contrasting with

Love is exclusive between the loved and lover because humans tend to prioritize love above all else in the world as it leads to fulfillment. For the beginning of my paper, I intend to compare two useful arguments from Aristophanes and Socrates that transpired in Plato’s The Symposium as their ideas apply to the exclusivity of love. Additionally, my paper will contain my reflection on love through examining the importance of love to human flourishing, perfect and imperfect loves, what and who love is properly for, the relationship between love and beauty, and the relationship between love and desire in order to further comprehend the encompassing relationship between love and exclusivity.

Ever since the beginning of time, love has played an enormous role among humans. Everyone feels a need to love and to be loved. Some attempt to fill this yearning with activities and possessions that will not satisfy – with activities in which they should not participate and possessions they should not own. In Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker encounters an emotion some would call love but fits better under the designation of lust for a woman. In contrast, the speaker of Robert Herrick’s poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” urges virgins to marry, to make a lasting commitment in which love plays a

The human idea of love is quite possibly the most misunderstood in today’s society. Love can be between a man and woman, mother/father and their kids, or even really good friends. However, these relationships of love go through many interactions and stages to start and progress. Many psychological events must occur and be worked through in order to be successful. All relationships must endure the five perspectives of human behavior. These perspectives are biological, learning, social and cultural, cognitive, and psychodynamic influences.

There exists no power as inexplicable as that of love. Love cannot be described in a traditional fashion; it is something that must be experienced in order for one to truly grasp its full enormity. It is the one emotion that can lead human beings to perform acts they are not usually capable of and to make sacrifices with no thought of the outcome or repercussions. Though love is full of unanswered questions and indescribable emotions, one of the most mystifying aspects of love is its timeless nature. Love is the one emotion, unlike superficial sentiments such as lust or jealousy, which can survive for years, or even generations. In the novel The Gargoyle, the author, Andrew Davidson, explores the idea of eternal love between two people,

In the modern world, there is a difficult word that people are facing and having a hard time to identify it, which is the word “love.” Nonetheless, there is a triangular theory that carried out by Robert Sternberg which helps people to understand love. The three angles are used to represent three dimensions (intimacy, passion, and commitment), and each point represent the extreme of each dimension. This essay mainly discusses about Robert Sternberg and how to improve the current relationship.

The original study “The nature of love” was focused on gaining more understanding of human development (Hock, 2013). It involved a series of experiments done by Harry Harlow in 1958, in which he

Love exists in the short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro and in the short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver. in Munro’s short story the plot is that of a mentally ill wife, Fiona, who falls in love with another patient while her husband still tries to hang on to their old love. Her husband eventually wants to have an affair with the wife of the man his wife is having an affair with. Their love changed because of their circumstances due to ill health. Carver’s story discusses the different definitions of love due to the type and quality of relationships; everyone has a different definition. Love also exists all over the world within different environments and cultures. The concept of love depends upon the environment in which it inhabits. Love is dependent on the life of the people in love and it also depends on their current environment. Nature and nurture are also huge factors into the development and process of love. What nature and nurture mean is whether it is due to how the person lives and acts along with their personality compared to whether it’s all in their genetics beforehand. Love is more on the nurture side instead of the nature side of human experience.

Love can be whatever one makes it out to be. From basic science to a complex philosophical or mystical idea. A person’s own unique experiences with love make it a concept that is so widely perceived and interpreted. Throughout her piece, Selections from Love 2.0 Barbara Fredrickson tries to broaden her audience’s understanding to a new idea of love. Overall, she claims that love is a biological need. The claim that longevity and quality of life might have lots to do with not only ‘clean air and nutritious food’ but also ‘your supply of love’ are accurate to a certain extent. A constant supply of love is needed for a better quality of life but it is not necessarily needed to live a long life. If the claim is taken to be true, then a weak supply of love would result in a person just existing and not living life to their fullest or connecting to other human beings; therefore, they would be incomplete without it.

Love is perhaps one of the most contested issues in the world. No one has a precise definition of what love really should look or feel like. Most people have resorted to use their own experiences in love to effectively derive its true meaning. Through these experiences, philosophers have argued that the definition of love varies greatly depending on whether it was given by a man or a woman. This is however not the case. As proven by the narratives of Beauvoir and Sartre, the definitions of love derived from the experiences of both men and women are quite similar. Consequentially, Beauvoir’s account of the woman in love sheds important light on Sartre’s conflicting thought about love. By first highlighting the concepts of love as stated by Beauvoir, this text seeks to establish how Beauvoir’s account of love lays a vital foundation for Sartre’s.

Sharon Olds’ poem “Sex Without Love” wonders at the ability for two people to have sex and not involve emotions or pretenses of love. The poem argues that it is better to have sex without love under the premise that love is a false savior for people, and everyone is all alone anyhow. In other words, the claim is that personal interactions do not serve a purpose other than being a distraction, and they will inevitably end. However, the notion that attachment and love are false hopes for people and each person is all alone does not account for the inevitability of human interactions and the underlying importance of relationships. While the poem does not give its definition of being alone, complete isolation is virtually impossible and leads

In M. Scott Peck’s work, The Road Less Traveled, he says “Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words” (81). He also seeks to define love as “The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's personal growth” (81). For Peck, he recognizes that the nature of love is so mysterious that a true satisfactory definition of love has yet to be created and suspects his own definition to be inadequate. He also recognizes that love is categorically vast in that it is divided into eros, philia, agape, and others.

Our innate tendencies affect out behavior patterns in the life cycle. From love, sex, and marriage and the change from societies to past and future times. The discoveries of why we have mating traits and how they are used in many meanings such as a smile or the way a person speaks with their body. The forces of culture and environment take part in human involvement in the world. While men and women start to change roles and rights are broaden in a marriage. Along comes divorce in which happens so often in societies because of many reasons. What we have inherited is from out ancestors and it repeats itself in every life cycle. The expedition of the book Anatomy of Love goes through the past to future on love, sex, marriage, and divorce and how it relates to modern societies.

The second Good of Loves Bond as stated by Nozick is that one becomes an expert at meeting their beloved’s needs; this concept is a subset of the “US” and “WE” compound. When the lover becomes an expert at meeting the needs of the beloved, he/she gives the lover the capacity to care about the beloved and vice versa, which in turn lengthens one’s life. This ability to generate compassion and care allows for the strengthening of the “WE” complex. According to Nozick, this allows the lover to love the beloved as a whole; the lovers characteristics become about of the “WE” and “US” complex, thus, increasing happiness, comfort and thereby, life expectancy.