Are love and hate polar opposites, or closely related? How so?

Answer 1

I try not to indulge in hate, love does not seem to be so easy to avoid and is all too easy to immerse oneself in (in a good way). I feel that both are a part of the human condition but in my experience one cannot truly hate without first having truly loved. If you like, hate is the inverse of the emotion love. I feel they are both intensely strong emotions for which the language is often misused or underestimated.

Fantastic question...

Answer 2

I think they are closely related, but not polar opposites. Love is complete concern for anothers well being and happiness, hate is complete concern for anothers destruction. complete disdain would be another thing, peraps a third point in the polarity.

Answer 3

Closely related. You have to know one to understand the other. Both emotions are directly wired to the same part of the brain that elicits either feeling and both have a hair trigger which, with emotional maturity and resulting self control, become appropriate emotions. Too much of either can destroy an otherwise balanced life.
My philosophy: " Love me, or leave me and let me be lonely, you won't believe me but I love you only, I'd rather be lonely than happy with somebody else. I want no one unless that someone is you, you, you. I intend to be independently blue, blue, blue. Oh I want your love but I don't want the borrow, to have it today and to give back tomorrow, for my love is your love and no love for nobody else."

Answer 4

On the most basic levels, children first interact with their worlds on the basis of I like this and I don't like that. Love and hate are just chronically complicating extensions of the "like/don't like" evaluations. They translate to value, and de-value or don't value, respectively. Is it possible to value something and to not value it? Only if that thing is composed of smaller elements which receive different levels of "like/don't like."

Love and hate are fundamentally and intrinsically polar opposites, and when they coexist in any thing, the end is dissonance and ultimately self-destruction.

Answer 5

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Anyone who's gotten over a love affair will tell you that.

Hate is love mixed with unresolved anger. IT is love under threat. When people are angry, when they hold a grudge, when they "hate" it is a fear response -- something they value is being threatened. IT is easy to have feeling of affection for someone and still hate what they do, hate who they are, etc.

Answer 6

surely i think of extra so as that love and joylessly are heavily appropriate, yet specific I do see the way it works, additionally love and unhappiness are related. All thoughts look related in some way. you could love somebody yet hate them for now not loving you back i assume yet as I pronounced which would be jealousy.

Answer 7

"Geek" stole my answer, I'm tellin'.

And s/he got it from one of my sources, "The Road Less Traveled".

Love and hate are both passionate responses to a given stimuli. Not opposite at all, the same factors are at play.

Peace.

Answer 8

love and hate are the two sides of the same coin....
it is a fact but can be known only when u will fall in love...
because if u lve you are bound to hate....
sorry i cant explain it here this is a personal experience thing

Answer 9

According to an article I read (see citation below), Sartre said that all people are faced with the paradox that we are "condemned to be free." We realize that we are free to become whatever, but once we become whatever we wanted to be, we are something, and stuck there as an object (as viewed by the Other). We aim not to be this object, though, because we still want to be free.
So, this leads to the idea that we try to escape being seen an object by the "Other," which is whoever looks at us and sees us as an object. We try this in several ways (there are 4 ways/stages), and each of them ends up failing.
The first way is love. Through love, Sartre said that we hope to be "the lens through which the Other must look in order to see any meaning in the world" (quote from the article I read) and thus be seen as a "special object" which the Other is reliant on (so you get some control over the way the Other looks at you, stopping _them_ from defining you). This can fail, though.
Then one ends up in the second stage, which Sartre called masochism. In this stage, one tries to get the other to look at him or her as a certain sort of object (subservient), in a similar way to the first stage (since getting the other to look at oneself in a certain way is still a way of getting some power, the power over how they look at you). However, it is through the way one chooses to beome subservient that one defines oneself, and thus we don't quite have control over the other's look because we have defined something that can be looked at.
So, then one ends up in stage 3 (because we gave up on just trying to be a predefined object so that the Other doesn't get to define us), desire. This stage is simpler than stage 2; it's when one tries to "capture the Other's subjectivity through first 'trapping' it in the body and then possessing it through possession of the body" (from the article, again). Sartre said basically that one caresses another to make them "nothing but a body through the 'caress,'" but this only works while one is oneself just acting, not being a subject or an object ("incarnate," as well). When one stops caressing the other and actually wants the other, one is once again a subject. Then, the other must be an object and cannot be be this captured subject anymore. So, this is supposedly the reason why desire always fails, and one goes on to stage four.
Stage four is sadism. In this case, one attempts to make the other's subjectivity one's own by controlling it (making it "incarnate" once again) via pain. The article says "we incarnate the Other's subjectivity by making him/her identify with his/her body through the pain we inflict." This last stage fails, too, though, because either a) the Other looks at one unpleasantly or in some other way and then the sadist ends up with an identity given by the Other, so ends up as a subject once again (which is what what one attempted to avoid) or b) the stage went as intended, but if the "victim's body becomes meaningless flesh the sadist is at a loss to know what to do with his/her victim; any meaningful action demands that the victim is more than a meaningless flesh and the incarnation [which was the way the Other's subjectivity was attempted to captured] dissolves once more, the subjectivity of the victim [and the objectification of oneself] seemingly inescapable."
So then one faces the last stage Sartre idenfied, which is hatred. Supposedly through it one tries to "symbolically rid the world of all others through ridding it of one specific Other," to get freedom from the Other's look forever. But this is a problem, too, because the "death of the Other simply fixes us once more in the identity, which constituted us in his/her eyes, and this, now, can never be changed" so we are objects in the eyes of the other's subjectivity forever.
So, since this has also failed, we end up stuck in a cycle (which is what this whole thing is), between trying to avoid being labelled by the Other by providing a label and trying to get the Other's subjectivity out so we can "capture" it (a trifle abstract, but this was about as clear as I could make the whole argument). The article author notes that we can't be in more than one of the stages at any one moment, but the "failure of each is guaranteed and propels us into another part of the cycle" (and it seems these aren't linear stages, like 1 -> 2, but it can also be like 1->4 or 3->2). Another consideration is that although a stage like "sadism" may seem odd, the author suggests that this is similar to things like flirting and teasing, not just more extreme things.
So this, according to Sartre (and somewhat explained by the author of the article cited below, which is where the quotes in the above come from; the rest is my interpretation of her article), is the relation between love and hate, and everything in between (and around it) and how this relationship is said to work.

Edit: wow, that's a long answer; sorry, but I don't think I could have made it any shorter without cutting out ideas and explanations that attempt to make it clearer.