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Defining Love
"Love is not a feeling. It's an ability." -- Peter Hedges
When asked to define "love" in one word, many adjectives come to mind -- wonderful, unconditional, mysterious, and powerful. Love is considered one of the greatest emotions known to human kind and ranges from familial love to romantic devotion to the benign love that exists between good friends (Rosenburg, 2009). Love can be a sentiment or an action; a noun (love is a many splendored thing) or a verb (love like you've never been hurt). Love creates families, motivates acts of kindness, and inspires people to creativity. We view it as a protective force, such as a mother's love for a child. However, it can also move into more dangerous territory. Thousands perish in wars fought for love of God and country. Truly, there are myriad lens through which to examine this complex concept.
Webster's dictionary generally defines love as "the intense emotion that we feel when we are drawn to a person or object we believe has value, worth, or goodness" (Merriam-Webster, 2012). This description allows us to merge our intellectual understanding of love and our shared emotional experience of it as well. Perhaps the best descriptor for love is "complicated." It is an emotion that can mean many different things to different people. Thus, it is helpful to approach defining this multi-faceted concept by noting historical categorizations of love and explaining what love is "not" to get closer to a concrete understanding of what it is.
Historical Definitions
Most cultures and world religions describe love as an affectionate or passionate devotion (Mills, 2011). Plato and Aristotle posited that love is the desire and longing of the...
For instance, in Descartes' The Passions of the Soul, his "moral concerns lead him to describe the passion of love as altruistic and involving self-sacrifice [but] his general account of passions, however, suggests that all passions (including love) spring from and promote self-interest," leading to a seeming contradiction and debate that ultimately only serves to reinforce outdated notions of love (Frierson 314). This kind of debate around love has
Quran The objective of this study is to consider how the language, arrangement and general compositional strategies of the text in the Quran result in a particular understanding of Allah's love of man and man's love of Allah. For the reader of the Quran who has never encountered the writings love may not be at first obvious to the reader. However, when better understanding the context of the Quran and the
The only thing that is missing is the freedom to make that choice, the freedom to do it without pain or sacrifice. But freedom always comes with a price, especially for women. In the process of gaining her choice, Ada loses a finger, loses her piano, and almost loses her life. We have to also look at history in the film. The Piano seems historically correct because women didn't have
Play material Defining Play To define what it means to 'play,' I first turned to the dictionary. Immediately, when I looked at the entry for "play" given by freedictonary.com, I was confronted with a seemingly limitless list of different definitions of the word "play." To play can mean to act in "jest or sport," or "to occupy oneself in amusement, sport, or other recreation." The noun "play" can also mean a
Servant Leaders Conceptualizing and emotional healing and two very important parts of servant leadership (Northouse, 2016). Each allows the servant leader to embrace the situation and be part of it through an intuitive process that promotes growths and unity. Conceptualizing for example allows the servant leader to realize and understand the mission or spirit of the organization for which he is operating. He has a deep comprehension of this mission and
Love Modern America lacks a true love ethic. Writers like M. Scott Peck and Bell Hooks argue that our confusion about love stems from an inability to see love as an action rather than a noun, and the confusion of romance and sex with love. Instead, they argue that true love is based on choice and the desire to nurture the self or another spiritually. Hooks specifically argues that much of our
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