Is love Rational?

Question

Is it rational to love sombody (love as in passionate physical and sexual attraction, not like the love of ones mother or friend). In Rational Philosophy is it seen as irrational to love somebody and expecially if they already have a partner. I am a follower of Stoic Philosophy and from what I have gethered it is wrong to love sombody who loves somebody else. True?

Is it rational to love sombody (love as in passionate physical and romantic attraction, not like the love of ones mother or friend and indeed not lust). In Rational Philosophy is it seen as irrational to love somebody and expecially if they already have a partner. I am a follower of Stoic Philosophy and from what I have gethered it is wrong to love sombody who loves somebody else. True?

Answer 1

Your question"it is wrong to love sombody who loves somebody else. True?" If you love this person in the truest sense of the words then it can't be wrong for you because it comes from within & you have no choice!
Now that being said the physical challenge of that love is where you can go wrong! You & your love will have to determine how far that part of your love will proceed*

Answer 2

Love to me is simply a total heart connection/attraction to somebody. But, in my experience "love" can exist on many levels and how it is expressed is the confusing part. Or should I say love is about connections to these various levels.

There is the relationship where you meet someone and you are very attracted to them. When you make love it is a wonderful and mindblowing experience. But perhaps you
don't talk much, so the social attraction or connection isn't there.

Another type of relationship is where you talk, talk, talk. So your social connexion is strongly felt, but perhaps the physical loving isn't so good.

Then there is also the special relationship (and I'm keeping this very simple) where your social connexion is wonderful and the physical side is amazing - so there is a both a strongly felt social and physical attraction. This is what we usually look for and is, perhaps, the ideal.

But these connections/attractions can also include the emotional level, the spiritual level, karmic level etc. I am trying to keep it simple. These connections/attractions are also nothing to do with the rational thinking mind. It concerns just your feelings, instincts, aura, hormones - call it what you will. And involves nothing else.

Therefore, love is most definitely not rational and posing the question "Is it seen as irrational to love somebody and especially if they already have a partner?" is yes - purely for the simple reason that you can't help falling in love with someone if all these connexions/attractions are apparent.

In answer to the second part of the question, if the one you love already has a partner this means they are also committed to each other. And the person you love might not have the same feelings for you. Or that person might love you...

And just because someone has a partner, how do you know whether it's a happy loving relationship ?

This is not about right and wrong but more about right choice and wrong choice. Unfortunately, you just don't know unless you try and find this out.....

And that's why the outcome can either be heaven or hell....


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Answer 3

Hello,

(ANS) in my opinion love is completely and utterly irrational, in our culture what we term (call) love is full of confusions. When we talk about love, what are we actually talking about?

**answer, love is a feeling, or state, or a condition but its based upon a basic mistaken idea or premise in my opinion. Love is nothing more special than just another fundamental human need (a "need" as opposed to a "want", if that makes sense?).

**Love is technically just a projection, or illusion, or delusion. We projected our own internal feelings onto another person. The object of our so called love (the person we love) becomes our mirror, we see our own feelings reflected back to us. We in turn are also a mirror for our partner (wife, girl friend, boy friend or lover). This is whats termed "being in love", this is when both people can be mirrors for each other, its also when both people get their mutual needs met.

**Romantic love tends to be the most delusional of all the forms of love.

**Projections can and do flip from positive feelings to negative feelings, and so this explains why two people fall out of love. The positive projections have worn off or flipped over into negative projections i.e. negative feelings about the person. Hence couples separate, split or divorce etc.

Ivan

Answer 4

i imagine it truly is rational because it may nicely be defined by using clinical and mathematical discourse. at the same time, i imagine that love has some volume of irrationality because some human beings save on with others round at the same time as it truly is unnecessary and they don't have any actual reason except that they are in love. yet is that love? are you able to educate that someone is in love? Or are they clingy? i wager i'm middle of the line, you may nicely be a rational individual in a thoroughly irrational courting or vice versa, yet all of it comes right down to no matter when you're "in love". And is there such component as love? do we educate it? we are able to educate air and gravity and all way of invisible issues, yet do we educate and emotional condition? one which would not a lot result our brains because it does our senses and our rationality? You tell me. i imagine it truly is a at present not achieveable question to respond to without making use of your opinion. As on your remark about the decline in philosophical talk, I agree. we favor more desirable new concepts, new takes on the old, more desirable protection of our concepts instead the straightforward reality of them.

Answer 5

love is an intensely subjective subject for most people. in this light, i can only speak to my own experience of it. that being said..
i believe love has nothing to do with rationality, expecially in the sense you have described it as physical and sexual attraction. there are types of love which deal with mutual respect and admiration which do involve the mind and the rationality, but the physical sensation of "love" i do not believe to be part of this. If you wish to strictly adhere to Stoic teaching, there is no emotion which can be derived from reason or can even be present in a "Sage" (person who has evoked everything but reason from his being). to each his own, but i dont believe this to be entirely true. i do see it as having a clear basis in reality. however, i dont think it has entirely hit the point. There are many elements of the human emotional spectrum which just plain dont stand up to reason. But to say that there is no element of the emotional spectrum which can stand with reason seems like a premature conclusion to me. I believe there is love beyond the physical sense which cannot be quantified by or torn down by reason. It is in this superphysical love which we find the roots of compassion and charity as well as in which we find true compainionship and friendship. It has deep roots in respect and dispair for suffering of yourself and others, but goes beyond the sum of the two.

this of course is just my personal stand point, which i cannot back by rational arguments, mostly because i dont believe understanding of it can be obtained by reason alone. While i do believe reason to hold a very important place in the understanding of the world, it cannot do so on its own without just a little help from compassion.

very nice question though, you get a star :)

Answer 6

Love is the most misused word that exists.

No wonder it confuses us.


A long time ago I thought that love was something that you reserved for some special set of people that you had judged worthy of it.

After a while I got to thinking about what Jesus had said about turning the other cheek and loving our neighbor I put the two together and realized that he had made no exceptions in these statements. It became obvious to me that he intended that we exclude no one from the love that we are supposed to be giving. I started thinking about my idea of love and suddenly realized that I had not been loving anyone at all. I had simply been judging everyone and every thing.

Judging someone worthy of love is not love, it is only judgment. I actually started to cry when I realized this. I saw just how much of my life I had wasted being judgmental, thinking of myself as a Christian, when I was actually doing just the opposite of what Jesus had asked us to do.

I thought about the verse judge not lest ye be judged, and I understood it for the first time.

I realized that I have a lot of catching up to do. So many opportunities were wasted. I now try to apply the love that I have for the world in a universal way like Jesus asks us to do.

If I start to feel afraid and think that I see someone that I should not love because of something I have thought or heard I try to catch my mistake as soon as possible. I tell myself that I have forgot the truth and have fallen for the same old trick that had cost me so many opportunities to be loving in the past. The horror of this realization is often all that is necessary to bring me back to my senses and make me drop the judgmental nonsense I was thinking.

I still have a lot to learn about love, but at least I’m making progress.

Love and blessings

Your brother
don

Answer 7

For me Love is madness that is all I have to say and I love every minute of it hehehehe

I can still have a love for another even if they love someone but I will not love them the same way exp..say I liked or loved someone for a very long time and within that year of meeting he fell in love with another without my knowledge because of course I have no control of making him love me back but say he did go with another of course I would be completely sad and devastated over this I will always have a love for him but that same intense love for him will leave me because he has found another and it is out of my hands ............

If you are rational in your loving you will move on hehehe I will move on and love another worthy of my love and and in return the love is given back to me the way it should be the person I loved has no more chances hes done finished you know why because I love myself more then he that is life :))) and that is if you want to call it rational love for me hehe and my well being :))))

Answer 8

No.

Love is a hormonal response, it does not follow rules or sense or rational thinking. Of course, some will argue that you are talking about lust not love. As for being wrong, well, one might say it is often dangerous....

Answer 9

Love is the act of considering the self interest of another as though it were your own.

It is what allows us to form couples, groups and nations.

It is a profoundly rational thing, though not everyone treats it rationally.

It's not 'wrong' to love someone who doesn't love you, it just isn't smart.

Answer 10

Love is indeed irrational. Love requires putting the interests of another higher than your own interests, which is irrational. This is different, though, than desire.

If one desires someone who is in love with someone else, can that one really be putting the other's interests ahead of his or her own? To interfere with the hapiness of two other people to satisfy your own desire is irrational also, but it is not, contrary to popular belief, love.