Why are many thinkers and philosophers so skeptical about love?

Question

A grave mental disease.~ Plato

A mutual misunderstanding.~ Oscar Wilde

Desperate madness.~ John Ford

A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.~ Jonathan Swift

People would not fall in love if they had not heard love talked about.~ La Rochefoucauld

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God.
~Jorge Luis Borges

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.~ Oscar Wilde

If you stay in love for more than two years, you're on something.
~ Fran Lebowitz

Answer 1

Perhaps they think too much and feel too little. Then when they do experience the intense emotions connected with love, such as joy, bliss and perhaps pain of loss, it's too much for them to bear and they find it easier to be cynical.

Answer 2

Let me add one more: Love is a big illusion... LOL.

Well, they are not totally wrong. Perhaps they just didn't experience so-called love. Or they had previous bad experience with that stuff.

Another possibility: there are lots of misconception about love. When we mention love, it reminds us to warm feeling, or 'unidentified space electrical shock', or 'unexplained chemistry'. We also confuse hormonal effects in our brains with love. We also want to justify our selfishness by asking our loved ones "Do you love me?" or "If you loved me, you would do this and that".

Maybe the philosophers also got PhD (Permanent head Damage)... LOL.

Answer 3

Love can be a really complicated thing. It is something that in a lot of ways embodies many of our weakest qualities as human beings. Does true love exists, yes it is possible but it is very rare, in my opinion. What most people describe as love is just a social institution set up in order to satisfy selfish needs.

Answer 4

Because they can't get any and they're ticked off so they wanna try to ruin it for everyone else.

Then again, I have my own issues. Philisophical and intellectual rammifications can kiss off, I just wanna domintate the world and rule it with an iron fist of might, leading armed regiments through the nations, gorging our bellies on their cries for mercy as we encircle the globe, oppressing all until at last, I ALONE STAND AS THE ULTIMATE DARK LADY OF ALL THE KNOWN UNIVERSE! MUAHAHA!

Answer 5

each and every Christian might want to, if no longer recognize this guy, a minimum of believe this quote. after all, it completely reflects what their Bible teaches (James a million:27) I, in spite of the indisputable fact that, thoroughly believe this quote because it really is the right project to do. it really is surely one of my well-known Bertrand Russell prices: "a good international needs expertise, kindliness, and braveness; it does no longer choose a regretful hankering after the previous or a fettering of the loose intelligence by the words uttered some time previous by ignorant adult males."

Answer 6

Because it is based on an emotion. Philosophers are very scientific and rationalize everything, everything needs to be able to be explained and controlled. An emotion falls outside of science reasoning and should not be acted on.

Answer 7

LOL!!!!!! John Ford a thinker? Oscar Wilde was a bitter gay. Plato was only interested in young men. Where are the real thinkers? You really had to go trawling for these quotes, didn't you?

Answer 8

I suggest some of these minds named, famous or not in Postmodernist circles, are not very profound thinkers.

But if they are there are three aspects to what is nominated as "love" to which they are objecting. And the three have little to do with one another.

1. Love is a relationship of mutual admiration leading to a desire for intimate relations between two self-responsible minds--a partnership of respectful adults. Anything else is less and doesn't deserve the name. But that makes it something hard to earn, in need of scientific definition and difficult to maintain---the complains being about its being hard-to-earn, hard-to -understand and hard to maintain.

2. Love is frequently confused with mere impulses toward sex--which the mind cannot entirely control, only at last govern and direct by volition or refusal. The Greeks confused will with mind, ego or consciousness trained for success with noting emotions whose source they could not explain. Hating this helplessness, they spoke against "love" because they couldn't dictate over it, and felt like slaves toward it. But the fault doesn't lie in a potential reaction of emotional or erotic positive--lust in one's thoughts--it lies in what you eventually do about it, or not.

3. The emotional part of live requires that an adult learn how to think by the scientific method--defining the 5--6 prioritized functional workings that make anything what it is or what man-made things have to be--the "normative" level of anything. This means that in matters of personal love, one has to distrust initial reactions and check on them pretty carefully; and also that emotions are programmed by the successful mind in terms of what he/she knows to be understood in terms of what is known to be life-positive or life-negative, strong or weak, and immediate or long-term as well as personal or impersonal.
This is too much work for the lazy minded; they want to think with their glands and not govern themselves--being human is too much work for them, even with a lasting love as a reward.

All these things are the reason why "love" as I have defined it perfectly has been confused with lesser emotional compulsions , addictive behaviors and collectivized relationships. The US has never had a realistic philosophy; the manner in which lust, selflessness and dictator-slave relationships have been mistaken for an admiration of equals proves this point quite perfectly.

Ayn Rand called sexual love the one divinity granted to Man. It sounds as if she and I have gotten it right as thinkers, and the others--and Hollywood's schlock merchants--are either issuing a caution to the unwary or have gotten it all wrong.

Answer 9

Because, "Love Hurts"
Nazareth

or,
"Love Bites"
Def Leppard

Answer 10

Love is a fickle emotion subject to the whims of a fickle creature.