It strikes me as incredible that the human race has so many fascinating contributions to our overall knowledge base that we understand much of chemistry, physics, biology and so many other disciplines, yet we have so little understanding of our very selves. I can only blame our lack of applicable technology and the youth of the discipline of psychology for this problem, so if you’re going to complain about psychology not being a science, let it be known that it is your failings in your particular field that make psychology a supposed pseudo-science.
Alternatively, you could simply agree that the only plausible reason for calling psychology a pseudo-science is because we don’t understand the fundamentals yet. Astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics all of these were pseudo-sciences during their inception (no I haven’t seen that movie yet). However debating the status of psychology as a science isn’t why I’m writing this, I just got a little side-tracked since I don’t really have a specific focus for this article other than discussing how little we know of our human selves.
As an example, let us take something that the majority of us search for all our lives, something that many of us would postulate is the primary reason to continue on in this world: love. I want you to consider this concept carefully and then ask yourself this question and I mean really ask yourself,
“What is Love?”
Now, there is an evolutionary view that we are driven by our most basic instincts such as procreation and that our prime directive, so to speak, is to pass on our genes. This school of thought has received a lot of study and has persuasive evidence in its favour, particularly in the animal kingdom. However, if there is one thing that we must be clear on, it is that we are not animals, or at least we are not animals in the general sense of the word. Sentience prevents us from being classified with what we traditionally hold as animals and with sentience comes the many aspects of humanity. Love, then, is a construct that perhaps inhibits the biological base urge that we have to spread our genes as widely as possible. Is that all that love is? Absolutely not.
You see, we as a species revolve around this concept of Love and whether you take the evolutionary approach that Love is a biological construct designed to keep a mated pair bond together for the purpose of raising off spring, or the romantic approach that love is an emotion brought about by caring and compassion and the want to take care of another person, or any one of the numerous psychological approaches to Love there is one thing that we can say with total certainty: We have no idea what Love is.
Perhaps this is for the best? Beilby Porteus has a rather heart-warming quote that provides the most comprehensive definition that isn’t a definition I’ve ever seen; “Love is something so divine, description would but make it less; ‘Tis what I feel but can’t define, ‘Tis what I know, but can’t express.” It is wonderful to think of Love in these terms and it certainly strikes a chord with me, because I for one cannot express what Love is. I can express how it makes me feel, in terms of other emotions and physical sensations, but therein lies an important distinction. The feelings we associate with love all have more simplistic, more base names once we break it down. The majority of these revolve around the medium of “Happiness”, but we may also feel content, safe, secure and a number of other emotions.
Does this mean that Love is an amalgamation of other emotions? If so, what we call Love is essentially nothing more than say, Lanthanide’s or indeed nothing more than any overarching concept that is defined by the sum of all of its parts. Could we, therefore, define Love mathematically as a set of all relevant emotions? Is Love Gestaltian, perhaps? I cannot say with any measure of certainty but what I can say is that this seems unlikely. In the same way that we do not call the activation of a particular network of neurons in the temporal lobes a “memory”, it does not seem plausible to call the “Love” the activation of a particular network of emotions. This becomes somewhat more clear when we consider that all the emotions that make up Love can be obtained from people whom we merely like, or in some cases don’t even know.
Maybe, then, Love is when a particular person provides a proportionate percentage of permissable paradigms? Alliteration aside, what I mean is that Love may be when all the emotions that make up love are conjured by one particular person. Most likely this person would be an attachment figure in our lives and probably our primary attachment figure (for those who don’t know what this means, read this). But the distinction between primary and non-primary attachment figures brings with it its own confounding variable, specifically that we can have certain forms of love for certain people and by the very nature of being different forms, these types of love will have distinct features.
Perhaps we must look at Love in this way. Love may be a multi-faceted thing and we may have Companionate Love, which is feelings of intimacy and affection without physiological arousal or passion, Passionate Love, which is an intense longing for another person including physiological arousal and may be characterised by shortness of breath and heart thumping when in that persons presence, and Compassionate Love, which is a combination of both of the above and has been suggested to be generally found in people who are romantically involved. But then where does it end? Are these our only forms of Love or are there more? What about Obsessive Love? We couldn’t simply disregard that as not a form of Love, though it could certainly be argued otherwise. Or what about an example that a friend of mine was happy to provide, that of ‘True, week-long love for characters in books and tv shows’. We can argue that this is not Love but without knowing what Love truly is then all we are doing is forcing our own conceptions and definitions of Love onto other people.
In the end, that may be what Love is all about. Not the forcing of definitions, but the acceptance that Love is not something that we can universally define or perhaps even understand. Perhaps we human beings evolved brains capable of sentient thought and other wonders but evolution had no way of translating our primal selves into that sentient thought. Maybe that is why the brain is segmented into essentially “Primal” areas and areas of “Higher Functioning”. If we were created by some higher power, who is to say that the spark of life implanted in us by this entity did not create our brains with the inability to truly comprehend such things as powerful as Love. But then, we are capable of understanding where happiness, sadness, anger and other emotions come from and they are all rooted in biological systems, systems which we have defined, studied and can certainly wrap our heads around. Why then is Love so difficult a concept to define and understand? Is it a fundamental inability in our brains, or simply a lack of appropriate knowledge and technology, such that we feel about Love the same way that people must have once felt when trying to understand the stars?
I honestly don’t know and whilst there is a part of me that wants to know everything, there is another part of me that wonders if knowing about Love would remove all the magic and wonder from it. Perhaps Porteus was right in saying that defining Love would only make it less. But then, what is something if we cannot define it? You tell me.
From SPACE 