As explained by therapists, unconditional love is not love which is eternal and unchanging. Mulling over the implications of a brain transplant is missing the point.
"I love you as long as you are rich" is an example of conditional love. It is abusive at worst or shallow at best.
Unconditional love does not mean a promise to love someone forever. That might be impossible: people change over time. It is a statement of "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not anything you do or have or appear to be".
Perhaps you are ascribing a more holistic view to the idea of what someone “does”. I think OP was referring more to a person’s roles or what they are known for.
Loving someone for, e.g., what they believe in, what they stand for, and how they treat people are examples of love that stems from a deeper understanding of a person’s values, habits, and personality than just loving them one-dimensionally for their wealth or a particular thing they’re well known for. I think that’s what they’re getting at.
author appears to be mingling eternal love and unconditional love. by adding the time element, author is taking love to the divine dimension. we, humans, can't fathom eternity.
> Unconditional love does not mean a promise to love someone forever. That might be impossible: people change over time. It is a statement of "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not anything you do or have or appear to be".
So how is this different from love? Why prepend "unconditional"?
The post explicitly explains this: it is not conditional on part of their state. Unconditional love is not loving someone because they have a job or because they buy you presents or because they have red hair or whatever.
These days the topic falls under "Secure attachment" as part of "Attachment theory." The phrase "unconditional love" proved thorny and IMHO ill-judged, misleading.
My experience raising children is that you're golden if the child knows you're on their side, putting their interests above your own. Helping them learn, not putting any moral puzzles in front of them that they can't easily solve, together with lots of misbehavior play so they can learn boundaries without actually misbehaving.
OP should read The Four Loves by CS Lewis. Unconditional love seems irrational if love is mainly a kind of feeling, but that's not the highest kind of love.
People generally have no idea what love is. They think it is a feeling. What a dreadful world this would be if that were so! Volatile and shallow. Sure, we may experience feelings for a loved one, but that itself is not the love.
At bottom, what is love? It is a rational orientation of the will toward a good (you cannot love what you do not know). We can, therefore, desire another for our own good, and we can will the good of another for their sake. The first is eros, the second agape (it also falls under charity or benevolence). Different human relations involve different mixtures and manifestations of these two basic loves. Both are good.
However, agape is the selfless form of love. This is giving love and something we can choose and decide to have. It is not subject to the volatility of emotion. Indeed, when we say that perfect love (benevolence) casts out all fear, it is precisely because we have placed the good of another above our own desires.
Apage is the basis for successful marriages, and all good friendships, in general. This is why marriages of convenience are often more successful than those that begin in romance. This isn't because the latter is bad or that romance is opposed to having a good marriage. Not at all. Romance is good. It is only that very often the expectations of the latter are more likely to be rooted in emotion, while the former has no such expectation. The latter is more prone to confusing love with romance. Love involves suffering and sacrifice, and so those who view love in terms of pleasant emotions are in for a world of disappointment.
Well, the problem is that people use the word 'love' to refer to all sorts of things from sexual desire, to attachment, to kindness, compassion, and benevolence.
The Pali word 'mettā' means something quite similar to 'agape'. In Buddhist traditions, mettā (or loving-kindess) meditation is all about cultivating this sort of sentiment by conscious effort. From the very little I've practiced this, I can confirm your point about how benevolence, for some reason, reduces fear and anxiety (often we aren't even aware that it's there).
Getting major Thomas Aquinas vibes from your comment! Are you by any chance aware of his works? The idea of a choice, of love as selfless "willing the good of the other" is a central definition for Aquinas.
> you can't expect to feel the same about someone no matter what because if that person you once had is gone, what is left to love? it is merely your imagination, your memory. it simply turns to grief.
You can still love the good moments, the good memories and all the happiness comes with it.
One of the thing that I grown to accept very early in my life, is the fact people change, so as their promises. Love is not a contract, it's more of an emotional statement, a statement which only applies to a specific context (sometime very narrow).
If love needs to be dissolved, make sure to do that in a fair manner so nobody gets hurt (at least not too badly), so the good moments in the past will always be good moments instead of painful memories.
The author misses the point - what people typically mean by "unconditional love" is that their love remains more or less the same even when some qualities about the person change, such as said person becoming handicapped due to an accident, losing their "status" due to unemployment or financial losses, and so on.
This seems to imply that 'loving' someone means continuing to treat them in a particular way or taking everything they do in stride. A person might love their partner, but still decide that they need to break up with them for one reason or another. You might say that they didn't really love them, but does love have to be overpowering?
That's an attitude I've definitely seen. It's rather strange to hear people say that "love" means being unconditionally supportive of whatever someone decides to do, particularly when it comes up in context of someone being blatantly self-destructive.
People can have unconditional love and be healthy.
However you need to have a proper mindset to do it well.
You might want to look at codependence. This can happen in any relationship.
It can happen with a partner, but it also frequently happens with a child.
Codependence is when people accept too much responsibility for someone and things can quickly go south. (really too much to get into here)
The way out of this is to understand that everyone is responsible for him or her self. Obviously not infants, but remember the airline "oxygen mask over your face before you help someone else".
I think Wittgenstein would say that the question of whether unconditional love is possible is a semantic game.
The critics would see from the perspective of “absolutely unconditional love” where the absolute aspect of this idea will provide the source of all the counter examples.
For this next part of the discussion, love is defined as to give or the act of giving attention, care, protection, and other benefits for something deemed worthy of loving or love. Yes, this is a recursive/self-referential definition. Deal with it. The proponents will be those who intuitively understand the need for a phrase to describe a feeling of depersonalization or a loss of one’s sense of strict individuality when one’s sense of self begins to merge with the subject of love. In a sense, it is like a self-love but where the self has now expanded to encapsulate another individual. It is self-evident that self-love is unconditional because we have to assume a non-pathological case. Self-preservation which is a form of self-love is in all living organism. The unconditional here is used as an emphasis for the strength of the love. An example of unconditional love is a parent being willing to give their life to save their child. Will all parents have unconditional love for their children? No and no one has ever claimed that. Only the Sith said parent-child love is unconditional because he is unable to equivocate and use a qualifier.
In this way both groups are using the same term to talk pass each other about different things. This is actually quite a boring discussion.
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"I love you as long as you are rich" is an example of conditional love. It is abusive at worst or shallow at best.
Unconditional love does not mean a promise to love someone forever. That might be impossible: people change over time. It is a statement of "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not anything you do or have or appear to be".
What is left of a "person" to me if excluding those?
Loving someone for, e.g., what they believe in, what they stand for, and how they treat people are examples of love that stems from a deeper understanding of a person’s values, habits, and personality than just loving them one-dimensionally for their wealth or a particular thing they’re well known for. I think that’s what they’re getting at.
Share your perspective.
author appears to be mingling eternal love and unconditional love. by adding the time element, author is taking love to the divine dimension. we, humans, can't fathom eternity.
So how is this different from love? Why prepend "unconditional"?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-attachment-theory-27953...
My experience raising children is that you're golden if the child knows you're on their side, putting their interests above your own. Helping them learn, not putting any moral puzzles in front of them that they can't easily solve, together with lots of misbehavior play so they can learn boundaries without actually misbehaving.
"Unconditional love" was just bad philosophy.
At bottom, what is love? It is a rational orientation of the will toward a good (you cannot love what you do not know). We can, therefore, desire another for our own good, and we can will the good of another for their sake. The first is eros, the second agape (it also falls under charity or benevolence). Different human relations involve different mixtures and manifestations of these two basic loves. Both are good.
However, agape is the selfless form of love. This is giving love and something we can choose and decide to have. It is not subject to the volatility of emotion. Indeed, when we say that perfect love (benevolence) casts out all fear, it is precisely because we have placed the good of another above our own desires.
Apage is the basis for successful marriages, and all good friendships, in general. This is why marriages of convenience are often more successful than those that begin in romance. This isn't because the latter is bad or that romance is opposed to having a good marriage. Not at all. Romance is good. It is only that very often the expectations of the latter are more likely to be rooted in emotion, while the former has no such expectation. The latter is more prone to confusing love with romance. Love involves suffering and sacrifice, and so those who view love in terms of pleasant emotions are in for a world of disappointment.
The Pali word 'mettā' means something quite similar to 'agape'. In Buddhist traditions, mettā (or loving-kindess) meditation is all about cultivating this sort of sentiment by conscious effort. From the very little I've practiced this, I can confirm your point about how benevolence, for some reason, reduces fear and anxiety (often we aren't even aware that it's there).
You can still love the good moments, the good memories and all the happiness comes with it.
One of the thing that I grown to accept very early in my life, is the fact people change, so as their promises. Love is not a contract, it's more of an emotional statement, a statement which only applies to a specific context (sometime very narrow).
If love needs to be dissolved, make sure to do that in a fair manner so nobody gets hurt (at least not too badly), so the good moments in the past will always be good moments instead of painful memories.
However you need to have a proper mindset to do it well.
You might want to look at codependence. This can happen in any relationship. It can happen with a partner, but it also frequently happens with a child.
Codependence is when people accept too much responsibility for someone and things can quickly go south. (really too much to get into here)
The way out of this is to understand that everyone is responsible for him or her self. Obviously not infants, but remember the airline "oxygen mask over your face before you help someone else".
The answer is to have a healthy neutrality.
The critics would see from the perspective of “absolutely unconditional love” where the absolute aspect of this idea will provide the source of all the counter examples.
For this next part of the discussion, love is defined as to give or the act of giving attention, care, protection, and other benefits for something deemed worthy of loving or love. Yes, this is a recursive/self-referential definition. Deal with it. The proponents will be those who intuitively understand the need for a phrase to describe a feeling of depersonalization or a loss of one’s sense of strict individuality when one’s sense of self begins to merge with the subject of love. In a sense, it is like a self-love but where the self has now expanded to encapsulate another individual. It is self-evident that self-love is unconditional because we have to assume a non-pathological case. Self-preservation which is a form of self-love is in all living organism. The unconditional here is used as an emphasis for the strength of the love. An example of unconditional love is a parent being willing to give their life to save their child. Will all parents have unconditional love for their children? No and no one has ever claimed that. Only the Sith said parent-child love is unconditional because he is unable to equivocate and use a qualifier.
In this way both groups are using the same term to talk pass each other about different things. This is actually quite a boring discussion.