Love - By Eliza Veretilo

Love

Love...

So many human acts, crazy acts, unjust, just, random, even evil acts, are justified under the banner of love. What amazes me is how powerful it is, as a justification. Its power to heal and turn everything into something good and how it takes over all other human emotions. What keeps a mother forgiving an ungrateful child? Love. What keeps a working man in a 9 to 5 jobs he hates? Survival, yes, but also and even more importantly, love to his family. Ultimately, love is an affection which causes joy and attachment. We need it, we crave it. It is goodness and we are inclined to feel it for everyone. The problem? Our society has turned this powerful, almost universal human love that everyone needs, into a selfish kind of love, the only accepted ‘love’ is love between couples.

Let me explain myself better, I’m not saying that having one partner is being selfish, it’s not, you can only love one heart at the time, they claim. What I mean is that humanity is more inclined to love each other, to share with each other, but it is more convenient to our economy for people to group in pairs and spend all their love tokens on each other. This is not exactly something we are naturally inclined to do. Our ancestors lived in communities where they shared; they shared time, resources and attention. Altruism is saintly, not as a coincidence, but because it’s loving. Our current focus on the couple as the centre of ‘life’ actually has some damaging consequences on us. For example, people who don’t have a partner feel less adequate and people who have one feel forced to stay in that relationship even though maybe their real interest is elsewhere. Neither of this people has something wrong with them and I’m sure, everyone has the same amount of ‘love’ to give. They are just doing what is ‘acceptable’.

I would like to point out the example of teachers; teachers educate and look after children that are not theirs, for the most part of the kid’s awake day. The children form an attachment, without asking question about ‘blood relations’ and so do the teachers, they begin to care. Could there be anything more natural than the human inclination to educate and look after the young? But no, love nowadays is equated with sex. The human you have sex with is the human you must love. And thus love turns into a cheesy, caricaturized, caramelised version of it. A pre-packed set of dresses, chocolate boxes, flowers and lube. Love is more than that. Love is caring, love is appreciating, not impressing, love is open, not jealous, love is universal, not only lustful. Love is life giver, not an accessory. Love is what prompts people to do things for others, not a certain partner you need to show off, to prove your value, like all the other items you need to literally hang on yourself nowadays to be somebody.

If love was the pink and red bubble portrayed mainly on television, if love was a quest that women needed to wear make-up to embark on and men needed to fill their wallets to join, love would not be that blanket under which some of the biggest craziest acts in history have been sheltered under. Love, raw, real human love to ourselves, to others, to nature, to animals, to knowledge, to art, to music, to sport, to hope, to life cannot be compared to the petty image of lust that romcoms sell us on a daily basis. Could we claim and re-brand the word love? Could we escape the set of ‘must-haves’ that are expected of each individual in Western society (must have a partner, must have an office job, must have a fiat, corsa, whatever, must have this month’s it colour, most have office party... you know the rest). Could we take the cheese out of the most powerful of human emotions and reclaim it as a basis for action? For growth instead of drama? Could we? Could we rid ourselves from the illusion and destroy the false idol that has been built instead of love? There is a little love heart sitting next to me on my desk, its reads ‘my hero’. I still want to claim, yes, we can reclaim love.

By Eliza Veretilo

Spinoza on emotions, self-preservation and our being

Emotions: pesky little things aren’t they? Some bring joy; others anguish, with a whole host of different feelings betwixt the two. Think of the first time you fell in love, or got a present you really wanted, or passed an exam or driving test. Now, think of a saddening event. Thence, think of how you felt before and after. A whole host of emotions plague us, day in day out: to be torn in all directions is the natural human condition.

For a certain Mr Baruch de Spinoza, who believed that we are all defined through a non-religious God who ultimately controls all things in the universe, emotions are beautiful, logical things. This is because God is defined by logic: he is self-causing and his essence is this self-causation – he must thus continue to produce things to continue to exist. Logical, no? If we are thus created by a logical God, and so is everything else – every imaginable thing: plants, cars, muscles, thoughts, pens and paper, musings and eyebrow raises – emotions, too, are logical. ‘Emotions can be treated and explained through logic, as if they were geometry’, to paraphrase the good man. 

Power of acting; definition of emotions

How though, do we get to this idea? What, first of all, is an emotion? Spinoza tells us in the following statement to define it as the modes of a body by which the body’s ability to act is increased or decreased, the perceptions of these and the resultant reaction. 

Let us take the following example to understand Spinoza’s idea better: I am punched in the face. I see it coming, I feel it – my face feels it and my mind registers it simultaneously. I now stumble back: I cannot act, or be, as well as I could before the punch. I feel anger – my power of acting, of moving, of doing anything, may be better than before, but still not as good as before I was punched. Emotions cannot be controlled by us, says Spinoza – they are logically defined.

Spinoza gives us two base emotions, upon which all others are constructed: joy and sadness. It is through emotions that we can see how the environment is working for us. Emotions are the link between our inner state and the outer world. We can only find our ‘power of acting’ indirectly through the emotions – it can never be grasped directly.

We constantly desire to maintain a joyous, happy state – as everyone, of course, likes to be happy. We thus attempt to repel things that will have the ability to make our power of acting decrease – be it a sad event in our lives, an argument with somebody or a punch in the face; we always strive for the happier ones, as these give us a bit more ‘oomph’ and confidence.

Conatus

The notion of the ‘power of acting’, Spinoza takes yet a step further. Spinoza notes that we all have a certain drive within us: a desire and striving to stay alive. As we are all ultimately created by God, and he, as noted above, must necessarily create to keep existing, he leaves a little imprint of his power in all things, including humans: the desire to survive, the power of self-preservation at whatever cost. This power, he coins as the term ‘Conatus’.

The Conatus is in all things: it can be as obvious as someone running at us with a knife and us fleeing, or as abstract as an electron figuratively turning away from a proton or neutron. Self-preservation is what makes us, us. We do not want to be destroyed, hence we run – this is at our very being.

As the mind and body are simultaneously aware of each other through perceptions of the outside world (as one hits the body, the mind registers it and vice versa) and as the body cannot come into contact with something that would destroy it, neither then, can the mind. This means that the mind cannot think of anything that would destroy it: it cannot comprehend or even have a vague notion of death. To have a vague notion of death, would equate to its feeling of death through the body and it cannot do this, for if it had felt that, it would, by definition, be dead and thus unthinking. As a result, for Spinoza – the mind can only feel incredible highs and the depths of sadness, but nothing beyond that: death is not an option.

A few questions...

This also means that suicide is not an option – how is this explained? Spinoza would say that we can be killed, but only through an external cause, from an outside object. The mind would have no idea that we would die if someone stabs us: it would only sense threat. Can suicide ever exist in a Spinozian world?

Spinoza goes on to elaborate on every conceivable emotion in over 40 pages, all based upon the base emotions of happiness and sadness. Is it right to say that these are the basic emotions that we all feel?

Spinoza says that our basic desire for self-preservation makes us who we are. Is there not more to us than this?

Joe Sturdy