2

Life and Love

I
From Paradigms to Patterns

Life (prāṇa) and love (prema) are closely related concepts. Embodiedness is the basic common characteristic of both. Life without body is difficult to conceive. Similarly, a being without body can hardly love. This is, however, not to suggest that love has not wider and deeper senses.

The senses of life and love, if colligated or brought together in an orderly way, make the relation between the said two concepts very clear and meaningful. Affection or friendliness is traceable in old English to lu fu, to lu ve in Middle English, and its cognate, leof, dear. These words and their synonyms in many Indo-European languages are etymologically traceable also to Sanskrit, lubhyati, he desires strongly, Latin lubet, it pleases, libidin, stem of libido and Old Slav, ljubiti, to love.

Other senses of love available in different Indo-European languages are friendliness, strong liking, tenderness, attachment and devotion. Greek eros, the adjectival form of which is erotik and root is erot-, stands for love, desire, and god of love. It is supposed that Sanskrit word ariš, filled with desires, zealous, pertains to and deals with sexual love and desire. Other words to be recalled in this connection are Latin, venus, love and charm, Sanskrit, van-desire, gain, and Gothic wens, hope. Several other Sanskrit words like prṣ- (prīyate), substantive, preman-, Gothic, frijon, ‘love’ and Avestan friya. Other Sanskrit words that may be mentioned in this connection are kāma, desire, sneha that literally means stickiness and from which are derived words such as attachment and love. In Avestan and most other Indo-European languages are traceable, directly or indirectly, semantic cognates of these terms.

From the linguistic undertone of love if one moves to its biological or somatological overtone one comes across a cluster of closely relatable words like prajan or prajanan, conceiving, genesis, procreation and sex (organ or yoni). One of the paradigmatic words in Sanskrit to be recalled in this connection is prajāpati, the father or creator of all beings, that is, Brahmā or God. Similar cognates may be easily found in not only within the Indo-European but also such other languages as Semitic, Sinic and Altai-Uralic. It must be mentioned here that the phonetic similarity that one finds in the Indo-European words are for obvious reason not to be found in other families of languages. The similarity in those cases is to be traced semantically or in terms of meaning, as distinguished from sound, of the concerned words.

Here one moves from ‘the world of words’ to ‘the world of things and beings’. Conceptually speaking, the relations obtained between these two worlds, if perceptively explored, brings to our notice various other interesting dimensions and perspectives of life and love. The full richness of the meanings of love and the variety of meanings, admittedly relatable forms of life, can hardly be captured under a single paradigm. This simple and very important point has been brought out by comparative philologists and etymologists. This leads me to prefer the patternistic, rather than paradigmatic, approach to understand the relation of love to various aspects of life and the world. The word love has been extensively used to refer to a variety of dispositions, emotions and actions. The love between man and woman has for understandable reasons being taken to be the most preferred paradigm of life. Many Christian thinkers have taken God’s love for man as their paradigm. It seems to me, as stated before, that one single paradigm is not enough to explain different sorts of love and their nuances. For example, relationships of love between mother and child, between friend and friend, and between husband and wife, though may be generically viewed under one semantic umbrella, are obviously significantly different from each other.

Both Plato and Aristotle attach special importance to love between friends. The Vaisnava tradition in India highlights the aspect of surrender in love. Freud, among others, has carefully analysed the role of sexual desire, libido, in love yet distinguishing it from lust. This implies, among other things, the distinction between sexual attachment at the human level and its distinction from the animal one. This, however, is not to deny that even in the subhuman world of beings there is found attachment and affection of extremely deep and delicate types.

For very pressing and practical reasons we are unable to go into all the details of different paradigms of love. In fact, the paradigmatic approach often turns out to be stereotypic and its limitations become clearly manifest in the perusal of a complex and many-sided emotion like love. At times, love really proves e-motion-al, a directed or an intended motion of consciousness. At some other times, love is perceived to be a stable state or sentiment of silted consciousness. In fairness to lived life, it needs to be recognized that these phenomena of consciousness, of fleeting emotions and stable dispositions are interfused in their depth.

II
Love as Concern: Its Inadequacy

To start with, psychologically speaking, at the very surface levels love seems to be about concern. It is an unstable state of mind in which consciousness of other is mixed up with an element of valued appreciation of the concerned self itself. The other may be a thing like a piece of stone (to the archaeologist) or metal (to the metallurgist) or flower (to the horticulturist). In these cases, the archaeologist, the metallurgist and the horticulturist engaged in their research work get deeply involved in what they study.

At another level the other may be a human being, say, a friend becomes concerned about his friend who is known to have been a passenger in a flight reported to be missing on the way from one place to another. Concern may be of the father for the school-going child when it is known that the boy/girl is indifferent to his/ her study and class work. The policy-maker in a government, a defence minister, for example, feels concerned when the intelligence agencies report that the neighbouring hostile country has been mobilizing its forces on the common border.

The appreciation, both as a cognitive awareness and emotive response, need not be necessarily favourable or pleasant. A lover’s concern for the beloved is certainly marked by favourably valued appreciation. To the lover the beloved person is a valued being and for whom, or in whose welfare and success, he is deeply involved. But there are cases in which persons are concerned also with what happens to their opponents or enemies (who in a sense are disvalued or disliked persons for them). The exceptional cases in which a writer or a thinker may be genuinely interested in the views of his known critics are illustrative of this point. This is not because the criticized writer likes the concerned critic but takes due note of his point of view so that he can remove the mistake of his own view or its formulations and, consequently, improve his presentation, freeing it from some blemishes in the process.

To take another example, if a general, locked in a grim battle with another general, is told of the imminent arrival of the fresh enemy forces outnumbering his own strength, he is bound to dislike this piece of information. But, at the same time, this information is of extreme concern to him. Two generals fighting one another are not involved in what may be called a typical love and hate relationship. Rather, they are perhaps averse to, if not hateful towards, each other. If two persons in a sense hate each other, then there may be another sense that is not one of hatred but one of the real concern, or what is perhaps an element of concern. Concern as such is a mixed disposition or what some writers like Freud call ambivalence between love and hatred.¹ Strictly speaking, most of our psychological states or events are dispositional, not episodic, in character and composition. One may or may not be a subscriber to the gestalt theory of perception or defender of a stream-like view of consciousness. But, to be a literal atomist in psychology, particularly in the case of human psychology, seems to be highly untenable. Phenomenological reflection of our consciousness persuades or impels us to discard the view that mental events are really discrete and discontinuous. This is not to reject the more moderate view that highlights the possibility of pointed focusing of our consciousness on one particular object or content that is identifiable and discernible from its neighbouring, retrospective or prospective, objects or contents. For analytical purpose and in exceptional cases we may, and in fact do, use our language suggesting an episodic or proto-atomic view of consciousness. But that seems to me more a theoretical construct or after-thought, and not a lived psychological reality.

To clarify my point I may add few more words. A mother is concerned with her baby in very many ways. When the baby grows up, becomes an adult, mother’s concern does not totally disappear. It assumes a new character and complexion, in which the earlier awareness of concern becomes ingressed in a way. For the infant a mother’s concern is primarily directed to its elementary needs and to its protection. For the grown-up son or adult daughter a mother’s concern primarily is that he or she should prosper or succeed in his/her chosen line of profession or life. Again, we should be conscious and bear in mind that a blanket generalization of a mother’s concern for the child or even the grown-up son or daughter, unless suitably qualified, would be wrong. When a child becomes delinquent or even a confirmed criminal, mother’s anguish finds expression in some such words as ‘I wish you were dead’. Mother’s anguish is not curse. When a grown-up son becomes, say, a professional killer and all the efforts of his mother or of those in whom she has faith come to nothing, she treats him as dead. In that case, it may be said, she has reached the limit of her concern. Or, to put it differently, she is no longer concerned with what happens to him, the killer (son). Even at that stage, I guess, an element of dialectic or ambivalence is at play. And therefore, she tries to treat him as dead. But to her, perhaps he is not really dead.

The lover’s concern for the beloved expands and enriches the world of love. The world is inhabited and surrounded by their child or children, assuming that they have child or children. The childless mother’s world, all things being equal, is not large and rich, and ordinarily does not expand, unless, of course, she has other concerns, for example, concern for other’s children, nature, the poor, her neighbours or other interests, commitments. Some people, including mothers, are so fond of animals, gardening, and develop other interests with all their head and heart that they do not miss what is ordinarily recognized as family life.

Things have started changing since the late last century. There are couples I know who even before entering into married life decide by mutual consent that they will not have child or children. Because they think that children instead of strengthening and sweetening the bond between them often tend to create a sort of psychological distance between them, slightly diminishing their intimacy and compromising in a way the exclusive character of their mutual love. This becomes more evident when children grow and develop their independent personality and set up their own home.

This view for understandable reasons is not shared or endorsed by all married people. Whether marital life flourishes best in its exclusivity or when it is situated in a homogeneous, if not harmonious, familial milieu cannot be answered in a universally acceptable way. Generation gap, unevenness of income, education, taste, experience and exposure has also a lot to do in the matter.

It is true that rise of capitalism or/and industrial culture, generally speaking, encourages individualism. Sometimes this point is pressed strongly, pushing individualism to a kind of loneliness, particularly for the aged people and parents. It is a common phenomenon in the industrial culture and metropolitan ambience to come across a single parent who opts to live singly or in the home for aged people. Even those who can afford to have domestic help leave their original home of early or middle life where they used to live with their child or children and their spouses. It is true that while in some cases this turn of life proves psychologically fearful or frightening, in some other cases it is freely and genuinely solicited. The love-based sanctity of family life is on the wane in most developed countries.

Another evidence of the decline of the married and/or family life is clearly evident from the rising incidence of broken marriage and the steady rise in the practice of live-in relationships and its legal recognition in very many ways, including inheritance or succession of property. Concurrently we find the steady downward curve of the concern for the estranged or divorced spouse. Instead, separation is sought to be compensated by liberalizing the laws of alimony, and increasing old-age insurance.

The sign of increasing individualism is evident also from the increasing number of breaking up of the traditionally developed and family-centric business houses. It must be added here that these cases vary from country to country, culture to culture, and religious factors have something to do with this trend. In brief, it may safely be said that mutuality and reciprocity of concern of the self for the other is thinning down, unmistakably indicating the steady and gradual emergence of new types of values governing inter-familial relationship. The area overlap of ethics, economics, sociology and religion gets mixed up and increasingly influential in this context.

Concern, to start with, appears to be unidimensional and unilateral, a one-way traffic, from the self to the other. But there is always an incipient ambivalence in which the other responds to the self’s concern for it, and the self goes out of itself to reach the heart of the other. For example, an erring boy may not listen to his mother’s advice for study and instead prefers playing with friends; but in most cases it makes him uncomfortable nonetheless to be deviating from it. This is not to deny the social impact on the mother-son relationship or, more broadly speaking, on the relationship between the self and the other. This relationship is in a way morally underpinned. The self’s concern for the other is in a way oriented, influenced and affected by the response of the latter. Strictly speaking, the self cannot ordinarily take a could-not-care- less attitude to the presence or of the other’s concern for itself.

Closer scrutiny and phenomenological reflection reveal that both the absence and the presence of the other’s response to the self is marked by different degrees of intensity, extensity and potensity. If the other’s response to the self’s concern for it is warmly or lustily reciprocated, then the concern itself is fed back in one way; and obviously this feedback has an effect on the other. This dialect between self’s concern and other’s response goes on and on, to and from between the two. In case the other’s response to the self’s concern for it becomes very intense and articulate, and persists over time, relatively regardless of the nature of the self’s concern for it, the other’s response itself tends to assume the character of concern, initial concern, initiated by the other-as-self, for the self-as-other. Therefore, it would be wrong to think that in the multi-dimensional dialectic between the self’s concern and the other’s response there is an absolute initial move of consciousness. The initiative, once taken, may be lost by the self to the other or by the other to the self. In that case the identity of the self-as-self and the other-as-other is not, at least does not remain, fixed forever. In principle, this feeding-back and fed-back dialectic between the two may go on indefinitely and endlessly.

However, in practice, this to-and-from dialectic does not turn out to be endless. Its end or gradual cessation is brought about by other types of dialectic operative in between other selves and other others who form a social plenum. The self is not to be held exclusively responsible for how and in which ways its concern for the other grows or fails to grow. In a somewhat similar, but perhaps in a minor way, the other cannot be held exclusively responsible for how and in which ways its response develops or fails to develop. This complexity of humans-in-relation highlights at least two important things. First, humans, unless they die, are more or less active and can remain more or less responsive. Secondly, this implies and presupposes irremovability or strict irremovability of human freedom.

It appears to me that Sartre is wrong in maintaining that the self is wholly responsible for how its freedom of concern for other grows or fails to grow. His mistake seems to lie in his uncritical assumption that the self’s freedom is ontologically boundless. It is a very strong claim not borne out by scientific or phenomenological study of consciousness. I, for one, fail to see how as an existentialist, or for that reason any thinker seriously concerned with the question of human freedom, can plausibly accord primacy to ontological freedom, ignoring his sociological situation and its biological basis. The situation in a social plenum wherein other selves and other human beings are cybernatically active and reactive, there is no end to this process of action and interaction. Of course, we can run away in a sense from the situation and try to shut up ourselves within ourselves as if the social plenum is not there and I am free in the windowless monadic world of my own.

But even this metaphor of windowlessness of the monadic world is inexact. All monads, particularly human monads, phenomenologically speaking, are marked by mutual mirroring and which suggests that they are mutually conscious of each other, articulately or inarticulately, clearly or obscurely. Even in our worlds of dream, the findings of psychoanalysis strongly suggest that the personality structure of one is embedded in that of others. What is even more striking is this. Even in our so-called irreversible state of coma we are not strictly atomic, isolated and unrelated with other things and beings. Phenomenological analysis, backed up by neurological findings, indicate that the selves and others of our situation follow us everywhere, even in our dreamless state of consciousness. In our dreamless state of consciousness our memory-consciousness remains, of course faintly or remotely, under the influence of our awakened consciousness by its objects and social relations. The mode of operation of this kind of influence is extremely complex, certainly not marked by linear causality.

Sartre’s in-itself, for example, should not be construed as an exclusive moment of Being. In-itself is always, in waking hours, dream and sleep, being shadowed by for-itself. In-itself qua nothing (in the Sartrean sense) is not sovereign. Its being consists in the denial or negation of the supposed sovereignty of being qua for-itself.

Unfortunately, in Sartre’s scheme of thought both in-itself and for-itself, particularly the latter, are seamless, bottomless and supportless. In order to ensure the self’s freedom, to make it boundlessly responsible, Sartre appears to have belittled its social moorings and roots, which both pull and push, and in the process sustain and support it. His analysis fails to discover any what may be called ‘justification of human freedom’. Having failed in this respect, Sartre is obliged to fall back upon the rigidity and stability of the in-itself (‘concrete relation with others’ in Being and Nothingness) and of the ‘practico-inert’ (‘Collectives’ and ‘Institutions’ in the Critique of Dialectical Reason).² The concept of boundless freedom of the earlier Sartre is somewhat incompatible with his avowed Marxist commitment. To do away with this difficulty he brings in the concept of for-itself closer to that of in-itself, providing the latter a way out of its implied rigidity and exclusiveness. The same explanatory purpose is assigned to the concept of praxis in the later works of Sartre.

One of the main objections, rather inadequacy, which can be pointed out against the notion of love-as-concern is somewhat like this. Concern is more or less a purely subjective psychological phenomenon. I say ‘more or less’ because what we call concern, which often seems to be very close to anxiety, is often, not always, visible. Visibility has its different forms and shapes. For example, what is visible to the concerned one, dear and near one, may not be visible to one who is not perceptive. One may feel concerned even when there is no visible ground for it. One’s concern may be rooted in one’s knowledge or the background of the person in question and his situation.

Cases of groundless concern are also available. In those cases concerns stand close to what is called anxiety or, even worse, neurotic anxiety, which is believed to be absolutely groundless. The alleged groundlessness of the purely subjective character of concern can hardly be taken as a valid objection. It is our common experience that such mental phenomena as perception, or seeming perception, and memory, supposed memory, on scrutiny turn out to be mistaken or groundless. Perception may prove illusory. Memory fails.

Analysis reveals that even more the articulate modes of consciousness, for example, thought and reproductive imagination do, contain an element of subjectivity, subjective interpretation, in them. In thought, man tries to capture its intended object with absolute correctness or picturesquely. But intentional transcendence makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the thinker or the person in question to capture the intended object picturesquely. The complex character of consciousness, particularly the presence of the element of intentionality in it, takes the thought of the thinker beyond or around its intended object.

It is true that some thinkers have construed thought as an abstract entity,³ somewhat like a finished end-product of thinking. But it does not appear to be correct in my view. Thought-construction, or whatever is constructed by the process of thinking, cannot be totally freed from the processual character of consciousness. Extending this line of argument one can affirm that our reproductive imagination cannot be photographic in the mechanical or clear-cut sense. The cognitive modes of consciousness are open to non-cognitive influences of the mind. Past experience, expectation, and the like, colour not only the receptive but also the apprehensive modes of consciousness. Admittedly there is difference of degree between these two broad modes of consciousness. If this line of argument of mine is sustainable, the main objection against concern loses most of its force. Concern, as we understand it, and perhaps rightly so, has nothing peculiarly subjective in it. It is expressive of the freedom, though limited, of the self. Following Sartre one may affirm that concern is indicative of the self’s unsupported responsibility. The self that feels concern for the other is primarily, not exclusively, responsible for it.

In the ‘presence of the same other’ one self may feel concerned and another unconcerned or even totally indifferent. The persons of the sympathetic cast of mind or very responsive in character get easily moved by, or feel genuine pity, at the sight of a suffering person or tragic situation. But we know of many heartless or hardened persons who remain unmoved even at the sight of unbearable suffering of others. This is a social possibility that cannot be easily ruled out. But the more interesting thing in a human context is this: These possibilities are more or less limited within a particular range of human situation. Beyond the said range these possibilities become very rarely actual and this fact is to be explained by the epoche or bracketed or open-ended character of the expression ‘presence of the same other’. The term presence itself is systematically ambiguous. For example, Macbeth sees a dagger where there is none. The profound believer in God sees Him everywhere, in every being and every thing. Here again we may say that seeing is an epoche concept, begging further explication.

We would be well advised to remember that the picture model of capturing the objects of the world and designating the same with absolute correctness or rigid designator is more or less doomed to fail. I say ‘more or less’ but not ‘totally’. This is because our, normal human beings’, ways of knowing the world are open to our fallibility, vulnerability, and finitude. Rightly understood, it seems, concern is the subjective side of recognition by the self of loveable qualities in the other.⁴ Concern is not as unsustained or unsupported as it might appear from the ordinary association of the word. Even the ordinary uses of the word concern are not self-contained or without any objective reference. Concern is almost always concern-for, that is, concern for some object—a person, a group of persons or even a natural object of archaeological, aesthetic or cultural interest.

Cases of rootless concern are not unknown. It would be rash to criticize all of them as pathological. Psychological analysis brings out the invisible roots or the background of the so-called rootless concern. The roots are bound to be social institutions, cultural orientations and a shared and accepted value system. When we say that love is recognition by the self of some specific qualities in the other, we shift our emphasis from subjectivity of qualities in which concern is strictly or even unconsciously rooted. This, however, does not mean that love as concern and love as recognition (of qualities) are phenomenologically the same thing. In concern love is more an object-ward suspense than an objectual achievement. Concern is a stage in a transition. It moves out of the qualities— the object of love is captured, taken note of, appreciated, etc. It is a second broad form of love in which concern, the first one, finds its partial justification or ground, that is, root.

III
The Concept of Love as Recognition of Qualities: A Critique and Reconstruction

The realist philosopher seems to be at home with the concept of love as emotive recognition. In this disposition the presence of emotion does not take away the cognitive tone or epistemic claim of love. More explicitly speaking, in love the lover in his attitude towards the beloved, though infused with emotion or sentiment or both, is not devoid of cognitive content. In recognition he finds the admission of the objective grounding of love as an expression of self. The realist hates his so-called rootless or groundless or purely subjective nature of love as concern. When it is conceded that love, whether as a passing emotion or stable disposition, is not a subjective fantasy or an aberration of the lover, of the self, for the beloved, for the other, indirectly but unmistakably, its objectivity is recognized. The realist thinks that this concession only highlights the dignity and objectivity of love. With its objective grounding, it is believed that love, unlike infatuation, all things being equal, is likely to be more deep and durable.

But the question may be raised against the realist concept of love. If love is a bare recognition by the self of the intent of certain qualities in the other, does it express anything of the self in relation to the concerned other? Are we to understand that the recognition in this case is a sort of mere recording, that is, mechanical recording, in the self of what is there in the other? Does it not involve at least an element of interpretation in it? If recognition is nothing more than recording, how could it be regarded as an expression or outcome of an act or acts of appreciation or evaluation?

One might perhaps feel justifiably unhappy with the concept of love as recognition in its epistemic or ontological or both attempts to vindicate realism. In that case one may understandably think that this approach takes away or denies the spontaneous, creative and proactive character of love. Also, perhaps it underestimates the hermeneutic nature of love.

Another related difficulty, it may be pointed out, is that this realist concept fails to recognize the interactive character of the living dialectic between the self and the other. The denial of this dialectic is particularly difficult in the human situation, for example, in the situation between the lover and the beloved. At the human level it is very difficult to conceive that this dialectic is non-developing or stagnant or static in character. Even in the non-human situation, between animals, between an animal and its natural setting, between man and natural things/beings, this dialectic seems to be persistently and silently operative, though in varying degrees.

I do not quite see how the official spokesperson of the realist position can convincingly meet the above objections. The strength of the objection lies mainly in the realist’s eagerness to show what he calls the objective foundation of love in the qualities of the other, be a thing or a being or person. In other words, the realist’s accent on the qualities of the other makes him more or less blind to the proactive, interactive, affective and changing characteristics of the self. Once a lover is not or does not remain necessarily or always a lover. Once a beloved is not or does not remain forever beloved. This is what is indicated by such qualifying adjectives of love as dynamic and changing, affective and subjective.

It seems that the official realist is somewhat pre-critically committed to a concept of passively witnessing self and permanently given other. I do not see how really the concerned self can consistently remain ‘passively witnessing’ and how the other can possibly appear constantly ‘fixed’. My difficulty lies in the implied absence of non-interactive relation between the lover and the beloved, between the self and the other. To him the other, strictly speaking, is not even the living other but just dead, absolutely non-existent.

I am aware that the received realist position may be given several interpretations enabling it to meet, at least partially, the said criticism. For example, the realist need not posit a fixed and uninterpreted other or/and a passively fixed self. But what is called ‘monster-barring’ or ‘criticism-pre-emptive’ strategic sophistry of the realist may be somewhat safely avoided. If successful, this dubiously clever approach dilutes the realist position to such an extent that it ceases to be realist in the received sense.

But I for one maintain that the realism underlying the concept of love as we encounter it in lived life, suitably reformulated, can be shown to be compatible with love as recognition of objective qualities. Because, to my self-critical understanding, realism does not rest on the ‘simply given’. It is always to be viewed as inter-subjectively sharable. And it is to be borne in mind that intersubjective sharability does not mean arbitrarily subjective creation of the concerned self/selves. An important element of what is objectively given can hardly be denied. Without this element of objectively givenness the very possibility of inter-subjective sharing turns out to be meaningless, that is, comes to naught.

Realism, as I understand it, does not entail the denial of the dialectical relation between the self and the other, of the searching interplay between the lover and the beloved. Even a so-called natural object like a tree, passing cloud, and a blossoming or withering flower has a message to deliver to the concerned human percipient.

It may be pointed out that the concept of love as recognition is very abstract and amounts to the very denial of the individuality of love—love in the case of inter-human relationship. For, it is argued, if love of the self for the other is entirely due to the qualities in the other, the qualities being what they are, that is, persistently universal, it is difficult to imagine a person who is loved for something genuinely individual in him or her. Obviously, it does clash with our experience of love. We do come across cases when people are loved not entirely because of their qualities but also because of the qualities of the loving person. This point becomes very central in aesthetic discourse. Most of the art critics tend to agree that the role of connoisseurs in art appreciation is extremely important.

As regards the objection against the concept of love as recognition of qualities is based on the assumption that it denies the individuality of love, perhaps it may be plausibly argued that even though the qualities, in a way, are universal, their combination in different persons may be different, peculiar or even unique. The qualities of the other for which the self loves, or is obliged to love, him or her may be the same in different persons, but in each person their presence is so differently combined or uniquely mixed that the recognitionist concept of love need not be taken as virtual denial of the individuality of the beloved, and, rightly understood, it is not even open to the criticism of abstractness or mechanicalness of character.

In different persons or even objects ‘the same’ qualities exist in different measures and combinations. Besides, the concept of recognition itself has to be taken carefully. The ‘same’ hereditary factors and ‘identical’ environmental influences fail to ensure the sameness of the organisms, human or otherwise, in question. Because the question of the third important factor, genetic endowment, also comes into play. For, among other things, living or organic bodies have their own mode of response, chosen by their ‘wisdom’ of selection and rejection of the stimuli in which they are placed by the laws of nature and/or culture. In a sense, bodies also recognize the qualities of the stimuli around and in them. And thus, in a sense, bodies or even their cells have their mind.

The power of recognition of a free person, as distinguished from the reaction or affection of the mechanical eye of the camera or that of the mechanical ear of the radio, or TV dish or screen, bears the imprint, in this case variation, of freedom. A unique combination of universal qualities and the variable nature of freedom, taken together, may satisfactorily account for the character of uniqueness of inter-individual human relationship. For even the causal or quasi-causal powers of hereditary and environmental factors cannot totally overwhelm or render inoperative the power of the organic bodies (informed genetic systems and their wisdom) in the ‘choice’ of stimuli. For example, this point is persuasively evident in the ways of the growth and spread of plants and creepers. They respond visibly to the calls of light and air (and their varying absence).

Another objection which has been raised against the concept of love as recognition of qualities is that it is ultra-intellectualist, a sort of compulsive cognitive response of the lover to what is there, in this case a unique combination of qualities, in the beloved. Love is neither one-rayed causal compulsion, unique and unilaterally directed from the lover to the beloved, nor, the critic can argue, an exclusively cognitive achievement. ‘To love’ is not at all an achievement verb nor is it an occurrence verb. A follower of Davidson may argue that ‘X loves Y’ is implied by ‘X’s love for Y is an occurrence’ and also by ‘X loving Y is an event’. It is an act-process and this is the import of the verb. Such adverbial modification as ‘passionately’, ‘tenderly’, ‘self-effacingly’, ‘possessively’, etc., of ‘love’ make little or no sense if they are not taken to be designation of a continuous process or, at least, of a relatively stable disposition. In either case, it is not a one-time achievement or occurrence. In other words, adverbial modifications of ‘love’ are not necessarily howlers. ‘Loving’ and ‘loving passionately’ are obviously not the same thing. Love goes on, lingers on, perdures, persists, lives through, and abides. It does not stop or terminate, may only come to an end. What is loved is not an event and, if the objector presses his point, it may be said that loving is not a one-time act.

I see the point in objection and am partially in sympathy with it. In fact, I do admit, love is not a compulsive response. An element of compulsion, however, may be at work there in a cognitive and moral sense. That means unless a person is quality-blind he can hardly fail to take note of what is there in the beloved. Even if the lover hates the person whom once he loved, it is not because he fails to see what is there (the qualities) in him. One can recognize the otherwise loveable qualities in another person and yet may hate the latter. And this brings out the point missed by the critic, but which, in fact, is an integral part of my view of love as recognition of qualities. In love it is not only (what is there in) the beloved that is disclosed but also, at times more so, the lover himself that is disclosed and expressed.

X’s love for Y may be designated as an occurrence or event at time t₁, provided t₁ stands for a period of time spread over several weeks, months or years, and not for a single moment. The possible objection, in this case, may be that weeks or months are nothing but totalities of relatable singular moments. But the points to be remembered in defence of the act-process characteristics of love, in this case of X’s love for Y, are (a) X is identical with himself over a span of time (despite other changes in him); (b) Y is identical with herself over a span of time (despite other changes in her); and (c) X’s love for Y perdures through time, through totalities of relatable singular moments, which may introduce change in it, that is, in the said love, but without destroying its recognizable continuity. Perhaps the process-character of love may be presented more correctly if it is put in the form: ‘There is X and there is Y and X loves Y over t (1(i), t(1(ii)… t(1(n)…’

When I speak of the proactive nature of love, I have one of the two or, more often, both the things in mind: (i) Love is a sort of X’s going out (to Y) or to use a rather technical phenomenological term, (X’s) intention for (Y) and (ii) object-ward (Y-ward) stable disposition of X (for itself). Negatively speaking, X’s love for Y is not merely a cognitive recording of Y’s qualities (or a particular combination thereof) in X (X’s consciousness). In other words, X-in-love-with-Y cannot remain unmoved or unaffected by either the presence or the absence of Y. Absence in this case proves positive and more or less active in character. He cannot be a passive witnessing self—cognitively witnessing the quality in Y but not conatively affected by the same in the least. In relation to the beloved the lover may fail to be a mover but can never remain himself unmoved. The lover-loved relationship cannot be unilateral. It is not an upshot of a definition of love, still less a definition in itself. When I say X cannot love Y without himself being moved or affected by the act or proactive disposition of loving, I am indeed describing an objective situation, and, to my mind, this is a complex description. The complexity consists in the (relational) dialectics between X’s love for Y ‘effect’ on X (X as loving Y), in the involved character of X’s love for Y and X’s modification by Y (Y-as-loved)—by the qualities in Y as recognized by X (X-as- lover)—and in the multiple levels of the said dialectical relation and the active involvement. Love may be strong or weak, very strong or very weak, and so on. When, for example, it is said, ‘X loves Y very strongly’, the adverbial modification of ‘love’ in this case makes clear and distinct sense. And it must not be confused, for example, with seemingly the same sort of adverbial modification of ‘poisoned’ or ‘killed’ by ‘cruelly’ in the sentence ‘A killed B’ or in the sentence ‘A poisoned B’. ‘Killing’ and ‘killing cruelly’, one might argue, are not referentially different, but different only in respect of sense—from the psychological point of view—the psychology of the killer.

Here, the point may be raised: Can there be difference in sense without any difference in reference? The same argument may be extended to ‘poisoning’ and ‘poisoning cruelly’. For the argument that ‘poisoning’ or ‘killing’ is ‘cruel’, one might point out, does not apply, by parity of reasoning, to ‘loving’ and ‘loving passionately’ or ‘loving tenderly’. The point of the argument becomes intuitively even more plausible when the difference between ‘willing’ and ‘willing strongly’ or ‘willing weakly’ is brought out by the use of language. The words for such an act-process as love do refer to what is in loving and not merely to surface physical and perceptible features. The intuitive point may also be buttressed by phenomenological analysis (as offered, for example, by Merleau-Ponty⁵ and Paul Ricoeur⁶) or logical analysis of action sentences (as offered by Chisholm,⁷ Davidson⁸ and Castañeda⁹). However, the points mentioned here do not appear to be decisive. For, first, sense could be made out of the difference between ‘killing’ and ‘killing cruelly’, between ‘poisoning’ and ‘poisoning cruelly’. Killing may be merciful, more painless, or less painless and not necessarily cruel. Socrates or any less famous convict may (according to the law of the land in question) be poisoned to death, but whether this sort of cases should be ‘described’ as cruel is largely a matter of (accepted or shared) morality and/or legality, and not a matter of pure or pre-suppositionless description.

This brings me to the second point. Once it is accepted that such description as ‘cruel’, ‘merciful’, and ‘painless’ of killing are impure or loaded and that the impurity or the load is necessarily grounded in some theory or social presupposition, one must admit that the difference between ‘killing’ and ‘killing cruelly’ is not one of sense but also of reference. This further shows that what is in loving or killing, for example, is related to and may be gathered from what is out there—around them who are loving/loved or killing/killed.

Finally, if this is considered, and I do not see why it should not be, to establish the referential distinction between ‘loving’ and ‘loving passionately’, and between ‘loving tenderly’ and ‘loving passionately’ becomes relatively easy. And, incidentally, this also shows that adverbial modification introduced by such words as ‘passionately’, ‘tenderly’, ’strongly’, ‘weakly’, etc., are indeed genuine and not merely linguistic howlers.

IV
Love and Expression: Direct and Devious

In and through love the lover expresses himself. This expression, though basically intentional, is not without qualifications, which vary from type to type, even from person to person, within a type. For example, in its initial phase, a man-woman love relation is marked by various forms of repression, round-about or devious expression; and, in contrast, a mother-child love relation is remarkably simple, straightforward, free and uninhibited. But, Freud tells us, the latter kind of relation also conceals certain aspects of love which are neither simple nor straightforward nor free in the strictest sense. Sex has its say, articulate or inarticulate, more or less indirect, in either case. If Freud is right, an element of indirectness or ‘deviousness’ is inherent in all types of love. When the beloved, or any aspect/quality of it/her, is expelled by the lover under the influence of social dos and don’ts or their devious derivatives, it is allowed to take refuge in disguise in the lover’s unconscious. The deviousness and the character of the derivatives may at times be due to the peculiarity of the individual in question.

In its primal stage the disallowed quality of love gets into the unconscious in an unaltered form. It is only later, under more attentive ideational influence, the said quality undergoes a radical identity-change, gets associated with other similar experiences and expectations originating elsewhere and ‘connected’ with the increased mental energy. Repression proper, thus energized after expulsion from the conscious life, to use Freud’s language, ‘develops in a more unchecked and luxuriant fashion’, ‘ramifies like a fungus…in the dark (unconscious), and takes on extreme forms of expression’, which when psychoanalytically translated, to the concerned neurotic appear not only ‘alien’ but also ‘terrifying’.

What Freud calls repressed desire is a sort of arrested intention. Arrested intention, for example, the lover’s prohibited or inhibited love for the beloved, is never at rest, not even on payment of the necessary bail money, so to say. The repressed desire continuously tends to surface, comes out, at the level of consciousness, and therefore, success in maintaining a repression involves constant expenditure of energy and continuous replenishment, that is, cathexes, of the same. The lover tries to arrest his intention to avoid the embarrassment/shame of the social disapproval/condemnation, to deaden or dull the pain of not getting the intended/ loved one. Or, as it happens at times, because of its intuitive pleasure-pain (not necessarily hedonic) calculus is not sure of the worth of the pursuit of the loved one.

Freud overemphasizes the role of the instinct-preservation in repression and systematically underestimates that of the informed worth-assessment. Information or assessment, or even both, may turn out to be wrong. But that is a contingency that lies even closer to the emotive-instinctive approach, unless, of course, it is presupposed in a pan-cognitivist vein that all emotions and instincts planted directly by Nature in man are best-informed and almost infallible. Neither Freud nor intentional analysts like Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur think that though we are informed of the world of objects in and around us, the said information is not necessarily very transparent, still less infallible. Both, psychoanalysts and phenomenologists recognize, of course in their different ways, the role and legacy of the body, its systematic ambiguity (that is, non-transparent character), in understanding the Nature of Love. Their ways of avoiding what I call the cognitivist fallacy are, therefore, of interest to me.

One root of the fallacy is inadequate perception of the difference and discontinuity between the self and the other, between the ego (of the lover) and the world (of the beloved). The direction of consciousness of the lover towards the beloved is neither linear and steady nor exclusively cognitive. It is not ‘linear and steady’ because the orientation and disposition of the body in love do not remain identical over a long period of time. The same can be said of the body—rather of the embodied person—beloved. Besides, the social situations or the worlds in which the loving body and the loved one are mutually oriented by love are not the same either in affirming their influence on or indifference towards the two. The lover-beloved relation is not the same for all possible worlds. The worlds themselves are partially constitutive, both naturally and normatively (through dos and don’ts for example) of the love in question. A concern that is expressive of a genuine (subjective) feeling of love in one situation may be disparagingly regarded as merely psycho-neurotic in another situation because of its alleged utterly rootless character. And this conversion or degeneration of concern into psycho-neurosis is substantially attributed neither to the lover as such nor to the beloved as such but to the world they-are-situated-in. One might point out that the qualification ‘as such’ is pointless, for the world tolerates no persons, lover or beloved, as such.

It is true that Freud does recognize the difference and shifting discontinuity between the lover and the beloved and, what is more, brings it into sharp focus by highlighting three polarities or antitheses: subject (ego)-object (external world), pleasure-pain, and active-passive. But the Freudian polarities are ‘within the mind’. Unless the constitutive role of the world itself is recognized in defining the said polarities the almost irremediably ambivalent nature of love, otherwise repeatedly mentioned by Freud, cannot be satisfactorily accounted for. Not only the ‘biological’ (active-passive) polarity but also the ‘economic’ (pleasant-painful) one is grounded in the ‘real’ or ‘ontological’ (ego-world) polarity. Freud is prepared to recognize the ‘sovereignty’ of the ‘real’ polarity only ‘in our intellectual life’. He seems to be justified in denying the exclusive or autonomous functioning of this polarity. And this, I understand, as the effective say of the world in shaping the ambivalence of love and in the explanation of the same.

The cognitivist fallacy is rooted in the failure to recognize the significance of the shifting relation (I deliberately avoid the term polarity) between the initiative and the receptive, the transparent and the opaque, and the spontaneous and induced characters of the human body. Once the say of the world is borne in mind, the first and the third of these pairs of concepts are not likely to be confused with Freud’s ‘biological’ polarity. The human body never apprehends the world within and without it in a unidirectional and autonomous way, for, besides other things, it cannot take leave of its own awareness of being one among other apprehending and apprehended bodies in the world. The initiative of the body, in the case of the love of the lover, can never be completely snatched away by the world of the ‘beloved’. Speaking from the other end, acceptance or reception of the beloved cannot be total either, for the lover’s self-denial, self-effacement, self-sacrifice encounter a limit at every point of time. In other words, every love-begetting drive involves a minimal self-love (not in the autoerotic sense). The lover cannot know exactly the beloved, what qualities there are in her/him, without somehow ceasing to be a lover. The passionate lover, frankly speaking, is not the best knower.

As regards the second pair of concepts (transparency-opacity) I would make only a few remarks. The lover’s body can hardly be diaphanous in the strict sense, like windless air, without any direction or resistance whatsoever. The same could be said of the beloved’s body. Elements of density, even darkness, turbidity, mistiness are bound to be there in the lover-beloved relation. To say this is only to admit that, in spite of his/her best will, even in the most intense love one cannot either give or get the other completely. It should perhaps be politely pointed out, illustratively speaking, to the Kantian that the jewel of the goodwill, in fact, is neither self-luminous, nor as luminous as Kant himself imagined. Paradoxically enough, the body that makes willing possible is itself responsible for its inability to be locus or agent of absolutely unblemished goodwill. All parts of a human body cannot be identically free in willing the object willed by the embodied self.

This brings me to the third pair of concepts (spontaneous-induced). The volition of the lover is not uniformly spread over his/ her body—some parts are more affected and involved, others less so. The more highly organized parts of the body can easily recognize, readily respond to, and take the initiative in obtaining the willed objects. Some types of physical exercises and yogic practices (psychosomatic) can progressively redraw the line of demarcation between what is spontaneous and what is induced, broadening and deepening the sphere of the former. But since both structurally and functionally the human body is a unity (notwithstanding its dysfunctional parts and lack of awareness of the same and even of the said overall unity), the spontaneous, that is, the highly organized and readily responsive parts of the body have their brim-over effects on the rest, stimulating some parts more others less, and leaving still others ‘undisturbed’ in their unresponsive density and inertia. It should be noted that these last characteristics do have their say in the matter of response as a whole. Spontaneity remains always somewhat incomplete.

All these I say in support of my contention that the expression of love is variously qualified and coloured. And this also lends support to a dialectical version of the theory of love as a recognition of qualities (in the beloved), avoiding what I call the cognitivist fallacy, and focusing our attention on the multi-level dialectic between the lover and the beloved as situated in their world.

V
Eros of Plato and Freud: Expression and Body

The classical (realist) version of the theory of love as recognition of qualities may be reconstructed taking cues from Plato’s Phaedrus (244a–256c) and Theaetetus (200d–210d). The lover fails to get to the beloved if his love is primarily appetitive, and pertains to the subrational part of the body. Even if the former’s love is purely rational, inspired by the vision of beauty of reality, but is not shared by the latter because of the primacy of her own appetitive character, the love in question can hardly attain its ideal. Spontaneity is not unknown to the appetitive parts of the human body, but it cannot truly and durably unite the lover and the beloved. Body-based likeness of human beings, of man and woman, or friends, is not a real unity of souls. In the common pursuit of bodily pleasure or the avoidance of bodily pain persons of quite unlike persuasions may get together in friendship or marriage or both, but the primacy of body prevents them from knowing their true unity, conceals from them their unlikeness, and deludes them into believing (specially in romantic love) that their temporary love is permanent. In brief, body separates the lover and the beloved, does not really unite them. Only when the inspiration of madness of love originates from the rational part of the souls in love, do they recollect and steadily realize their real and timeless unity—their bodies do not then stand in between and acting as a separative factor. Reason of soul enables them to recognize not only their common qualities but also their common aim.

The crux of Plato’s proof is this. The body because of its inertia is incapable of initiating motion, itself subject to (different and contrary) motions and perishable. In contrast, the soul is self- moving, never ceases to move, itself initiates motion in all others that move, and is immortal. The soul is, to my mind, metaphorically speaking, winged and ‘the wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine’; and what nourish the wings of the soul and lend it the power to soar are beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like. The body and its senses, ‘not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation of nature’, make the soul somewhat forgetful of the divine beauty, bind it to this earth, to the fleeting pleasure of intercourse with the beautiful body. But a true, loving soul, steeped deeply in the contemplation of spiritual beauty, spreads its wings wide, rises easily above earthly charms, gladly forsakes his society and brushes aside its customs and conventions, and soars above to be in union with the beloved, trying to mould the latter into a more and more perfect image of ‘God’, in whose continuous service they are together and get closer and closer to each other.

A neo-Freudian version of Plato’s theory of love is also available. However incredible it may sound, some neo-Freudians, and Freud himself, expressed their views on the subject. Rightly understood, according to the neo-Freudian view,¹⁰ there is no essential difference between sexual love and spiritual or saintly love. ‘The Eros of Plato is exactly the same as Libido’, says Reik referring to the later Freud, ‘and so is the power of love which Paul the Apostle praised in his famous Epistle to the Corinthians.’¹¹ These ‘love-tendencies’ are identical at bottom with ’sexual instincts’ (of psychoanalysis). Freud himself affirms pointedly:

The majority of the cultured people felt this terminology an insult and found revenge by hurling the Epithet of ‘pan-sexualism’ at, and blaming it on psycho-analysis. The person who considers sex to be a shameful and humiliating aspect of human nature is always free to make use of the more distinguished expression of Eros or erotics. I could have done so myself from the start and spared myself much opposition. But I do not like to make concessions which seem to show a lack of courage. You do not know where such a road may lead. At first it is only in words, but in the end you have made concessions in the subject matter itself.¹²

Freud’s annoyance and attitude are understandable. He hates to be known as an exponent of pan-sexualism, taking sex in a very narrow, almost organic sense. If the Freudian concept of sex is taken in its most liberal sense, including friendship, love, affection, tenderness, and sympathy within it, then Reik for one is reminded of Alice’s scepticism in Wonderland, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’. In that case perhaps sex is not the right word to capture and convey the meaning of Plato’s Eros or Idea, purging it off its systematic somatic or to be more precise, appetitive associations, and denying, incidentally, its lodge in the unconscious and subconscious. It is difficult to conceive why love that is expelled by the conscious mind, censored by society, and is obliged to take refuge in the dark unconscious and grow there in a disorderly manner, like fungus, that is, irrationally, should be likened to the light of reason, the divine part of the (Platonic) Soul.

The rationalization, moralization or spiritualization of sex seems to be an uncalled-for undertaking at least on two counts. One, sex has its own rationality, morality and even spirituality; both as such and symbolically sex has been admired, adored and even worshipped. For example, in many parts of the world, including India, sex is taken to be a symbol of the cult of fertility. In Sanskrit sex is lińga, which stands for mark, phallus and also gender. One of the chief deities of the Hindu pantheon is Śiva and the Śaiva cult is very widespread and popular in many parts of India. Analogous cults are found in many other parts of the world as indicative of the deity for fertility. Śiva in India is worshipped primarily as the bestower of welfare or good (mangala). Two, it need not be given an alien shine and look borrowed from another world; for a proper understanding of sex what is needed most is complex and faithful description of its role and not emotive evaluation, this way or that, erotic or divine.

I find it difficult to endorse the strong thesis of Reik to the effect that ‘sex and love are different in origin and nature’. Sex is not necessarily related to lust, nor love unrelated to sex. Symbolic of spontaneity and creativity or fertility, sex largely neutralizes the inertia and enfoldment of body. As my main concern in this work is not sex, I do not propose to dilate on the subject here. But, since its role in love is very comprehensive and many-sided, though diffused, and at times proves even central, it deserves deep and delicate attention.

Intimately related to the spontaneity and creativity of body, sex, itself a very responsive part and dimension of body, is expressive of the outgoing drive of the latter as a whole. Sex is body’s intention towards the beloved, human or natural; but, in the human situation it is extremely complex and indirect. Freud’s main credit lies in trying to map, though incorrectly at places, this deep and complex human situation, which once did appear as an unmappable terrain marked by unpredictable and endless ups and downs, crevices, holes and soft spots. Sex tends to take the lover out of himself and towards the beloved, divine or natural. This is how I interpret Reik’s observation that ‘love is the most successful attempt to escape our loneliness and isolation’.¹³ Obviously, ‘this success’ is qualified, for the world does not fully oblige the lover. I must add here that at times Freud’s excessive emphasis laid on libido at least partially justifies the critic’s reference to him as a pan-sexualist.

I would say even in his failure, the lover is best expressed in love; sex may be at the centre or margin of this expression. Neither body nor more responsive parts of it, including sex, are ever fully at rest. The unity given to body by its reflective enterprises can temporarily arrest the local initiative of its parts or even its total initiative at a different level. These powers of the body, of reflection and of initiative, at different levels and in different parts, are often designated as the intentionality of consciousness. The spread-out-ness or spatiality of the body together with its powers, exhibiting a sort of functional unity, enables it to orient itself to other bodies, living and non-living and to try to reach out to them. The body in love, even in silence, is expressive, both of its own love and of its beloved’s. Its ‘rest’ and ‘silence’ never lack in orientation. It goes out, comes out, speaks out, or, at least whispers. Body, in a manner of saying, can be described as linguistic or symbolic. An extreme and somewhat unrealistic way of putting this role of body in love is that its being is out-of-it. An exteriority without any corresponding interiority to support it from behind or from down below makes little or no sense. Since this formulation may sound like pan-somaticism or remind one of Heidegger’s Dasein, I prefer to avoid it. For I find in the powers of the body a unitary structure; though changing, this structural unity is recognizably enduring through time. It is an overplus in the bodily behaviour and cannot be logically identified with the structure of the evident behaviours itself. The paradigmatic case of the use of body as symbolic- or meaning-conveying organism is dance.

When I say that body expresses itself in love, it is almost needless to add that body is taken in the sense of human body. The bodily attachment of subhuman animals for each other is not love in the paradigmatic human sense, though there maybe certain love-like properties in their relation too. One of the properties clearly evident even in animal attachment and affection is expression. Expression takes different, almost endlessly different, forms—only some of which are being briefly mentioned here. In the case of the humans, unlike that of animals, dispositional underpinning of expression is relatively heavy. This is not to deny that animal expressions are totally devoid of dispositional underpinning. The difference between the two sets of cases is a matter of degree.

VI
Substance and Forms of Expression of Love

One who is in love feels an urge to share, even to part with something valued for the sake of the beloved, and also to enjoy the solicited partnership or union. The urge may take the forms of giving, transference, imparting, communicating, contacting, touching and conversing. Except the last one, that is, conversation, perhaps all the other forms of expression are there in the communities of subhuman species as well. Obviously, at the human level the forms are more articulate and immensely varied, at times very indirect, abstract and symbolic. Through dance, for example, both birds and humans enticingly and charmingly use their bodies and express their say—emotive, conative and informative. But it goes without saying that the subtle, symbolic and complex contents that human bodies are capable of conveying are unknown to the world of birds and many other animals.

To be cautious, perhaps I should add, it is not that animals have certain expressiveness in them that their bodies fail to express. Implicit in this caution is due recognition, but not acceptance, of Merleau-Ponty’s very radical, partly metaphorical, thesis that speech is the speaker’s thought and, analogously, dance is the dancer’s expression and not merely its ‘sign’ or what it ‘means’. In his bid to avoid a Cartesian body-mind dualism, Merleau-Ponty has, it seems, travelled too far, doing away altogether even with the distinction, which undoubtedly sounds metaphorical, between the exterior and the interior of the human body. Fortunately, perhaps as an after thought, Merleau-Ponty admits a distinction between body-as-speech and body-as-authentic speech.¹⁴ In that case the said distinction turns out to be one of somatic or bodily ‘depth’. It is bearing this seemingly undeniable fact in mind that I insist on maintaining a definite, but admittedly changing, distinction between the structure of bodily behaviour and that of ‘self’, ‘mind’, or ‘soul’, whatever name one gives to it.

The expression of love becomes more intimate and authentic when the lover and the beloved are in a position to actively participate in each other’s experience without inhibition and pretence, and act together amidst genuine conflict and co-operation. Emotional exchange not rooted in, or even tempered by, relevant information is a sign more of infatuation than of love. This is to remind ourselves of the cognitive orientation (not necessarily foundation) of love, the main component of my view. In order to avoid the cognitivist fallacy, on the one hand, we are obliged to take note of the non-exclusive or heteronomous nature of the self’s knowledge of the other, the lover’s knowledge of the beloved, on the other hand, to account for the more or less definite orientation of the body in love we have to get to its in-built or acquired informational resources. Love can hardly put up with the opposition of the negative, disruptive or ‘practico-inert’ situation without honest and continuous mutual exchange of information, whatever that might be, between the two or the concerned many.

Information, it appears, is not exchangeable without some form or other of expression, direct or indirect, simple or complex, by means of utterance or even silence. General observations on these forms of expressions are found to be more or less uninteresting, because they are bound to miss the qualitative richness and peculiarities of this or that particular expression that reveals the nature of this or that lover or beloved. Even within these unavoidable limitations, some remarks on a few well-recognized forms of expressions of love are perhaps in order.

To start with the more direct forms of love. Ignoring various possible and called-for qualifications, one might cite the mother-child and the (widely believed) God-man relationships are clear examples of direct love. A mother’s love for her child and, particularly, the latter’s for the former are said to be total, pure and free from all taints of selfishness. First, it is pointed out, a mother’s concern for her child is so deep that she readily forgoes her own comforts and needs, even denies herself the things that, rightly understood, she needs for the good for the child itself. To speak less emotionally and more rationally, the depth of a mother’s concern for her child at times appears unreasonable, if not definitely harmful for it; for the pampered child the mother is not infrequently blamed for and her unbounded (and, perhaps therefore, partly unfounded) affection is held specifically responsible. Second, it might also be said, there is an element of expectation, though implicit, in a mother’s love for her child, and it is somewhat of this form: When grown up he/she would look after me/us, provide security and add to our social standing or status. Further, third, as we are aware, some psychoanalysts, for example, Freud, find a touch of sex, not necessarily out of natural, in the mother-child relationship. Fourth, so far as the child is concerned, one could plausibly argue its dependence on the mother, up to a particular age or stage of maturity, is so total that its inability to choose otherwise, that is, not to love the mother, takes away much of the (attributed) virtue of its love for the mother. A child’s love for its mother is said to be put to real test only when the former grows up, becomes economically and also otherwise independent, and has his own family to look after and/or source of (other) emotional satisfaction. Often it is observed in a critical (but, to my mind, prereflective) vein that the mother-child relationship is in most cases one-sided: Love flows normally downstream, from the mother to the child and not upstream, from the child to the mother, unless, of course, some other extraneous factors intervene, such as the offspring’s unusual dependence on the mother, for its some or other physical/mental impairment or mother’s higher social/economic standing.

Perhaps the crux of the matter is somewhat like this. First, socio-economic factors do significantly influence the character and kind of mother-child love relationship; for example, in a highly industrialized society, where the family structure is becoming increasingly atomic, it is, generally speaking, quite different from what we find of it in a developing society like ours, in India for example, where the molecular structure, though in the process of breaking up, is yet to break-up, and, normatively speaking, efforts to prevent the threatening break-up are often admired by the older generations and grudgingly tolerated or honestly hated by the younger ones.

In the societies in which the forms of property ownership are largely collective, for example, tribal, the sphere of love is large and inter-generation relation apparently much more cordial. I say ‘apparently’, for the said cordiality is not marked by mutuality, the dominance of the elders is clear and distinct in the major spheres of life. Second, it is perhaps advisable for us to recognize that the forms of love between the mother and the offspring cannot be and, one can safely add, should not be the same at different ages of life and in different societies marked by different stages of economic growth. By relating love to economic growth, I hope, I am not committing any naturalistic fallacy, provided, of course, one remembers the praxiological characters also of our economic activities. The positive point, in brief, I would like to submit, is that the metamorphosis as such of love does not mean its extreme ephemerality. The modern man, though exposed to unprecedented stress and strain in his daily life, has not ceased to be a loving or loveable person. The lack of rarity of the ‘direct’ or straightforward forms of love of earlier days should not be taken to be a proof of the ‘deviousness’ of all the modern forms of love. One can raise the question in a reductio way: Are we justified in flattering ourselves with the idea that ours is the best of the truly loving and loveable generations of mankind, and that our children and their descendents would be persons with no grace of love left in them? Are we leaving this world to a loveless human species? Would not these species without love then cease to be human?

The points that have been made about the relationship between mother and child may also be made, taking due note of the limits of similarities, about that between God and man, another form of proclaimed direct relationship. The objections raised against the claim of directness and my response to it, with appropriate modifications, may be repeated here; but one common point, to my mind a very important one, which I have not mentioned before, may be briefly delineated here. In the case of God-man love, as in that of mother-child relationship, the almost total dependence of the one and the overflowing and boundless grace of the other bring out, incidentally but clearly, the relative lack of mutuality and reciprocity, that is, dialectical character, of the relation in question. I have deliberately qualified my statement by ‘almost’ and ‘relative’, bearing in mind several well-argued theistic views, for example, of Edward Caird and Tagore, to the effect that individual men are necessary for God’s own self-expression; that is, in a sense God also depends on man. True, all God(s), or, as one would put it, all views on the nature of God, are not alike; nor are all mothers equally loving. Conversely, one could point out, all individuals are not God-oriented, nor even all devotees equally devoted to God. Children, when grown up, remain rarely very attached to mother; even those who are ‘good enough’ to remember all that she has done for them do not continue to feel affection for or gratitude towards her. In the industrialized societies of today, where the number of broken homes is on the increase, the mutuality of mother-child love seems to be on the wane.

The directness or, its contrary, that is, circuitous character of love, as I have tried to show, is not only an age-related function but also a social one. And, rightly understood, these two functions are closely related. Generally speaking, the more one grows up and is exposed to different and often conflicting institutional influences, the more one is obliged to try to adapt oneself to these influences and, in the process, compromise the ‘straightforwardness’ of one’s infancy and adolescence and enter more and more into the area of complex relationship. My qualifying words, ‘generally speaking’, should be taken seriously for I do not mean to say either that all adult relationships are not oblique or, what is more important to note, all complex relationships are bad. Even the word ‘devious’ may be taken in such non-pejorative senses as ‘deviating from a straight path’ or ‘roundabout’ or ‘moving without a fixed course’ (errant but not like erring breezes for example), forgetting and avoiding pejorative synonyms such as ‘tricky’, ‘crooked’. Even ‘tricky’ and ‘crooked’, I agree, have descriptive, that is, non-pejorative, uses.

I am trying to give here a description of the complex human situation, that is, love. The point is that indirect relationships, ‘internal’ and ‘external’, which are not straightforward, need not be necessarily bad or inferior in quality and, therefore, unwelcome. On the contrary, positively speaking, love between mature human beings, steeled, tempered and enriched by variety of social interactions, are rarely simple and direct. In them there is always an element of what may be critically referred to as the hide-and-seek game. This is necessary for the depth of expression—in and through non-hostile opposition of one’s love for another, it is not only tested but also gets strengthened. Opposition or resistance provides both the lover and the beloved opportunity to reflect on and review their ‘original’ intention; and if the intention survives the acts and tests of the reflection and review, it is bound to be firmer, affirmed, or reconfirmed, that is, it becomes stronger than before. In the process it is likely to be richer in quality.

But this does not happen necessarily, for there are men (self- righteous, dogmatic, fanatical, and hyper-romantic, etc.) who, in the face of increasing opposition and resistance, feel increasingly determined to follow their chosen paths without reviewing their choice in the light of what the opponents/resistants have to say and do in the matter. The legendary love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa illustrates, among other things, how opposition, social don’ts fail to dissuade the lovers and, on the contrary, strengthen their bond. I am ignoring here for the time being the religious, philosophical undertone of the legend. I shall return to it later on. What I call the hide-and-seek elements of love are in fact surface features and an outcome of the deep institutional-cum-individual dialectics; deep, because we, the institutionalized individuals, are not ordinarily conscious of its operation in, effects on, our beliefs and practices. Generally speaking, most of us follow the beaten tracks of society, paths of least resistance and accept the existing beliefs and practices without taking the trouble and responsibility involved in questioning and trying to change them. But, fortunately, some of us refuse to confirm, and gladly face the hazards of living in a non-conventional, socially disapproved, and often strongly condemned life. The proverb is: In a storm small birds fly for cover and the eagles come out and soar high.

Both philosophically and morally, perhaps the more important point to note is that there is an objective, though changing, limit to which we, human beings, in spite of our deep (personality) structural affiliation to a number of institutions, ‘succeed’ in conforming to the existing beliefs and practices, forms and norms of thought and action. Regardless of the fact whether he is in love or out of it, the common man may, often largely does, shirk his social responsibility, and cannot totally show it. By substantially unloading his burden of freedom certainly man can live a very normal life, but without totally debasing, almost dehumanizing, himself he cannot barter away all his freedom for an absolutely normal life. This assertion of mine is not an upshot of a surreptitiously introduced definition of man in terms of inalienable freedom but a purported true description of the available human situation.

The point I am trying to drive at is this: Exchange of views between two or more human beings, if they are minimally free, cannot indefinitely go on without entailing partial reviews; more positively speaking, exchange of information entails transformation of that information. It may be recalled, incidentally, that this is also a theorem of the general theory of information. When this is extended to the specific cases of exchange of powers, the magnitude of transformation becomes considerable, at times enormous. This issue I have dealt with at length elsewhere.¹⁵ To my mind, love between human beings involves exchange of powers, rather influences—emotive, conative, somatic, intellectual, etc. To love means to move and to be moved, to affect and to be affected. Loving is a sort of yearning, yearning to get, yearning to share, and to transform. It is, as I said, a self-exceeding-and-yet-self-begetting urge. In this urge bodies, of course, are involved. Not only body itself but also those capacities and parts of bodies believed to be specifically responsible for forming and transforming ideas are also involved.

VII
Implications of Expression in Love

Now the point I would briefly analyse here is the implication of expression in love. ‘Love without expression’ is very difficult even to imagine; for, as I have tried to show its psychosomatic drive is self-exceeding and other-seeking. Even when this drive is not somatically obvious, that is, there are no perceptible movement or actions of the body, the perceptive observer, the beloved one, for example, can and does notice the changes in such bodily states as stiffness/relaxedness of the facial muscle, the postures of standing-sitting-lying of the concerned person, look of the eyes, and colour-complexion of his/her face. Uneasiness, shyness, responsiveness, unresponsiveness, etc., are not only understandable but also visible. When I say all these, I do not forget that one can pretend, act, feign, and may thus express something without meaning it.

But what does this admission amount to? If one acts, one does so by and through one’s body. If one can pretend one thing and intend something else, one does so embodiedly—with the help of one’s body, orienting and using the body in some socially recognizable manner/way. Some of these manners/ways are context-bound, some transcend bound of this or that society. ‘Silent love’ is not a self-contradictory term. It is a metaphor. Its base is a body which can act or express itself in very many ways.

Body as such, I agree, is not expressive; the dead human body does not express anything. When one says, ‘a dead body looks sad/ terrible’, nothing is being described; only the speaker’s reaction/ impression is being expressed, or his social obligation discharged. Expression, strictly speaking, does not survive bodily death, unless it is otherwise recorded. Preserved records of body’s acts/ orientations, including pretence and acting, are not what the body expresses. Memories of expression are not expression. Mummies as such cannot be said to be expressive, though historians and archaeologists say and interpret many things about them.

Only the human body—not mummy or corpse—that is able to imitate and act, and can will, can express. One can perhaps add further, ‘it can hardly help expressing’. It is only in this context that we can make out the meaning of such apparently puzzling statements as ‘the sleeping artist is artist’, ‘her expressionless face is not as expressionless as one might think’, and ‘it is deliberate’. The points to be noted here are these: First, the sleeping body, simply because it is sleeping, does not cease to be a body of the artist. Second, simply because body does not exhibit any visible sign of deliberation, it cannot be truly said of it that it cannot or does not have the dormant or dispositional deliberative capacity in it.

It seems to me that expression of love is doubly intentional. It certainly intends to express the lover; it also intends to modify, mould, influence and affect the beloved. The lover’s expression is not shut up within himself, self-enclosed, self-enfolded. As I said before, it goes out, reaches out there and touches the beloved, as it were, and returns enriched thereafter to itself. In extreme forms of the self-affirming expression of love deliberately and consistently refusing to be self-exceeding, the lover tends to ‘destroy’ the beloved as beloved and therewith his own love. To him the beloved tends to become a non-person, dead, nothing, at least for the time being his self-loving expressions are active, alive, and very firm. His self-love, firmer in its expression, consciously or otherwise, tends to be come masochistic or, at best, narcissistic. Lack of dialectical interaction with the beloved throws him back almost entirely to his own eroding and un-replenished resources: ‘Eroding’, because to initiate and sustain the expressions the lover’s powers are continuously, though silently, spent; ‘unreplenished’, because in the absence of mutuality of relationship, an exchange of information with the beloved (as socially situated), the lover becomes increasingly poorer and unbearably lonely. The life and strength of love needs such expressions as it would influence and affect the beloved, and persuade her to let the lover know and feel convinced of her love and affection for him.

The lack of double intentionality may apparently take another extreme form. And that is sadistic (not to be taken in the Freudian sense). The lover may try his best to cast the beloved in the mould he likes most. Perhaps one might say he likes the mould more than the beloved herself—for him she is mainly, if not only, to be moulded to his taste and liking. His influence on her may be so demanding, dominant and strong that she may feel overwhelmed. The feeling of being overwhelmed is not necessarily welcome and pleasing. For it may damage or destroy her individual personality; take away her power to resist, her ability to say no to whatever he says and does to her, and bring to a silent or noisy halt the interplay with his individuality. Needless to add, this may happen either way, that is, woman can also destructively overwhelm man. However, the outcome is same; diminution of life and strength of love in the absence of exchange of persuasive and authentic expressions. Free expression sustains love. It provides sustenance in and through this dialectic—the exchange of information and powers— between the lover and the beloved.

One may cite cases of love in which ‘total surrender’, or ‘complete self-effacement’, or ‘giving everything without the least expectation of getting anything in return’ is said to be their constitutive essence as counter-examples to the dialectical and realist view of love that I have presented. As we know, elaborate theories, mostly religious and some secular, are available on the matter; and there is the example of Rādhā’s love for Kṛṣṇa, of Dante’s for Beatrice.

Let us analyse very briefly the story of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa that is very popular in India and on which elaborate theories have been built by thinkers of different theistic persuasions. The story goes like this. Kṛṣṇa drew Rādhā irresistibly; her love was total, unquestioning, and not responsive in the least to the social criticism against it. They were prohibitively related and, therefore, in a sense their love was criticizable ab extra. She was prepared to forgo and leave everything behind for him, for his love. One might ask: Where is the dialectic in this case? Well, this question seems to be satisfactorily answerable within the framework of our view, which I claim to be a general descriptive view. First, if one takes a strictly philosophico-religious view of the matter, one can perhaps simply get away with saying that they symbolize two supreme and complementary metaphysical principles—creative divine consciousness and the evolving worldly consciousness drawn towards and guided by it—and that they are united in and through līlā (creative sport). And their union in love, it has been said, is purely bhāva milana (spiritual/ideational union) not deha milana (bodily union) as ordinarily understood, for their bodies are essentially divine (divya). In their case, body does not prove a separative factor. That explains their perfect or complete union (pῡrṇa milana).

But one can take a purely human view of Rādhā’s love for Kṛṣṇa. He had so many loveable qualities in him, beautiful both in nature and appearance, brave, dutiful, friendly and loving. To speak of Rādhā’s total surrender to him without taking note of these qualities, especially Kṛṣṇa’s own passionate and persistent love for her, is to highlight her concern as a mere subjective phenomenon, as if it were unfounded or an anxiety for one who is indifferent to her. The situation, as we are told, is quite otherwise. Their love was mutual. It was strengthened through opposition and separation, trials and tribulations. Further, whatever one can say for or against them and their love, one can hardly deny their powers of expression, delicate and at times not so delicate, that is, naughty, and yet sweet, musical, very human. I would not repeat here what I said before on surrender and dependence in the contexts of the God-man and the mother-child relationships.

Expression is indication of the dialectic inherent in every human situation. In his relation to the subhuman life-world and to the mute, non-living world, man is bound to be more or less responsive and expressive. The beauty, variety, vastness, barrenness, complex forms, horrible features, and orderliness of the living and non-living worlds go on impressing our consciousness in such phenomenologically persistent ways that we find it difficult, if not impossible, not to respond to and express them.

By denying the very possibility of suppressing our impression or of keeping silent over it I do not certainly intend to trivialize my view of the matter. But what I maintain, and have already indicated before, is that by tracing the source of our impressions, relating the mnemonic traces of impressions (as organized and interpreted by our conceptual framework) to the highly uneven areas of suppression and/or silence, we can obtain, may be very inarticulately at times, the communication content of the same.

Suppression mapped on expression becomes expressive. Silence mapped on expression, articulate and inarticulate, becomes communicative. In other words, suppression and silence in the familiar human situations are never without presupposition. There is nothing like suppression as such or silence as such. Suppression is always of something by someone, or by something, and often what is intended for someone but deliberately or otherwise held back from that someone. Similarly, silence is of someone over or on something. The silence of a mountain, for example, or even that of a dumb person, is not of much significance for us. This is another way of showing obliquely the presuppositional character of expression and silence. To clarify the point further, let us take the case of the dumb again. Though otherwise silent, he can express himself by means of gesture; specific expressions, as distinguished from expression as such, have their determinable meanings.

Similarly, specific forms of silence, as distinguished from silence as such, have their determinable meanings. And in the process of determining one has to relativize them to their social contexts and presuppositions. The meaning of a silence is like the meaning of a human situation—a function of multiple variables, and one would be ill-advised to assimilate it to the model of referential meaning characterized by uniqueness and necessity. The meaning of a silence, like that of a suppression, is extremely context-sensitive.

Every attempt to interpret it otherwise, that is, in a context-invariant manner, denying altogether its critically justifiable relativistic undertone, is doomed to fail, and leaves much of the poetics, dramatics and empirics of love, hate and indifference unexplained. The logic that can capture the dialectical spirit of a human situation is not easy to spell out, but it is possible. It is ‘not easy’ because the concerned ‘logic’ is many-valued but it is ‘possible’ because it is ‘basically intelligible’ despite its complexity. But that demands of us a delicate, almost poetic, perception of the concerned human beings in their appropriate context, a mathematician’s insight, the skill to reconstruct a situation from a sort of zero coordinate, and much besides. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that in the delineation of love, its expression and suppression, and of silence, the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, that is, the dealers in primary or basic modes of human experience, have always got the better of the dealers in secondary and other relatively abstract modes of experience, for example, the historian, the psychologist and the philosopher.

Expression is influential. It is influential in a twofold way. The lover certainly expresses himself and, in the process, influences other(s) and himself; expression brings about changes in him; may unburden him, give him satisfaction, or cause remorse to him, depending on the situation in question. Expression is simultaneously self-facilitative and other-elicitative. The lover’s expression of love facilitates further his expression of love, yet-unexpressed depth, nuances and relations of love with life. It also elicitates the beloved’s expression, which, in turn, influences the lover and his expression. One’s expression, the other’s response, feeding expression and fed-back expression, the dialectic of influence and expression, though subject to the laws of imponderables—the surface phenomena of human freedom—are never anarchic. The minimum condition to be satisfied for facilitation and elicitation of love-expression, the mutuality of love in life, is never to try to damage or destroy the other by the power of expression. Another condition to be satisfied is never to try to sustain love in isolation, isolating it from the rest of life as a whole, an exclusive approach noted in the cognitivist’s fallacious notions of love.

These conditions, though apparently very easy to imagine, are, to my mind, extremely difficult to satisfy. In the real-life situation I often find people hurt them most for whom their love is deepest; I often see the lover, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, putting the beloved in the ‘prison’ of love, whom he once honestly intended to free from the bonds of pathetic routinized daily life. In the course of time ‘the prison of love’ turns out to be just another prison, a sad reminder of its pathetic past. Unlived and unemotional love languishes and to keep love alive it has to be attended and kindled and rekindled. It has to be nourished by releasing and relating it to the larger human situation, shifting it away from its affiliation to an increasing number of unlived institutions and practices. In brief, to keep love alive, more love has to be infused and invested in it to compensate for the almost inevitable and routinized institutional wear and tear, and the resulting psychosomatic decay.

Implicit in this assertion is the natural assumption (already explained) that both ‘soma’ and (more so) ‘psyche’ have their explorable depth-reservoir. I for one do not maintain that institutions are the devils that always destroy love. Without institutions love is shapeless—flesh without bony support, incapable of sustaining itself. Unstructured and alienated from the human situation, it languishes, often turns in vain more and more to the metaphysical and theological beliefs and supports borrowed from an alien and unlived society. At times, the anti-institutionalist lover not only turns his back on institutions, gods, and everything unloving, but drifts away from the recognized sources simply because they are recognized, returns and dips within in search of love, sustenance for love, and in the process empty anger and disappointment shatter and consume him. I have genuine sympathy for one who refuses to get even meaningfully into the ruts and routines of daily life, revolts against the deadening and dulling effects of customs and conventions and risks his life for the freedom of boundless love (or to propagate the related ideas).

But the point is that without minimal institutional aid and affiliation one’s non-conformism, revolt against the existing order, or (what he things) disorder, and his boundless zeal for reform, turns out to be romantic and of little or no practical consequence. Effective movement against institutionalism and for freedom is often found to be launched simultaneously both from within and without. This is a point I have argued at length, elsewhere.¹⁶ Even to execute a plan of abduction, for example, the lover has to conform to, and make use of, certain available institutions—language, law, police, transport, etc., obvious, too obvious to be mentioned. Similarly, a guerrilla movement determined to oust an established government is obliged to infiltrate into its different organs and agencies—administration, army, etc. — and try to wreck it from within. I give these examples to highlight the simple point mentioned earlier: The lover’s minimum institutional affiliation does not compromise either his love or his freedom. The lover, like the user of a language, is both its ‘consumer’ and its ‘producer’. This is what I call the institutional individualist’s way of understanding love. Related to and partially determined by our social situation, love, as it appears to me, is a self-exceeding-and-yet-self-begetting drive.

If the self-exceeding drive, under the strong influence of emotion and impulse, becomes exclusively other-seeking, forgetting the self, it impoverishes itself as well as self’s own love. If, per contra, the self-begetting drive concerns itself exclusively with the self, forgetting the other, the beloved, totally, it too impoverishes love. But these two extremes remain merely possibilities in the normal human situation; for individuals are not only sociologically but also ontologically oriented and related to each other, weakly or strongly. Whenever one thinks or speaks of love one does so under the presupposition that it is someone’s and for someone else. To speak of love in purely general terms, without reference to the specific lover and the specific beloved, is not very interesting. Nor does it bring out the fascinating and delicate dialectic of love.

Expression is the life-breath of love. Through expression the lover not only sustains his love but also allows others, especially the beloved, to share it in a variety of forms — suffering, joy, work, pursuit of an objective, and so on.

VIII
The Place of Love in Human Nature

Many thinkers and writers, poets and saints, from the ancient to the modern time and in different religions and cultures, have been asserting that love is the very essence of human nature. Love has been claimed to be all-pervasive—from nature to culture, from the self to others. It has been pointed out that in the prehuman Nature, before the emergence of homo erectus in it, when only plants and animals had been the forms of life on the earth, this stage could not be understood except in terms of a supposed form of love. Without that their co-existence could hardly be explained.

Even if the truth-claim for the struggle for existence, marked by what is called ‘the law of jungle’, is admitted, that does not mean total absence of mutuality or at least interdependence of plants and animals. Broadly speaking, life, environment and love are co-operative powers and principles. For example, in the wild life sanctuaries both the principles of conflict and co-operation are clearly evident, some species of animals use several others as their food and for their survival. At the same time, it is observed that when the mightier animals like lions and tigers are on the prowl, stealthily move and prepare themselves to attack, kill and devour the less strong animals, who are less equipped to defend themselves, the latter form a sort of co-operative and defensive behaviour. For example, when tigers start approaching to pounce upon the spotted deers, crows start crowing flying overhead, monkeys start shrieking and strongly shaking the branches of trees, and other less strong animals like reindeers start running and making noise in concert, alerting the possible victims of the impending danger. This co-operative behaviour of the weaker animals may not, strictly speaking, qualify to be described as loving behaviour. But that the notable elements of love like mutuality and reciprocity are evidently and consciously present in their behaviour.

Sympathy is akin to love. While pathos means suffering, sympathy stands for fellow feeling of suffering. Both at the human and animal levels, sharing of both suffering and joy are evident. In the feeling of love it seems to be more articulate, widespread and comprehensive. Some philosophers, both ancient and modern, are of the view that sympathy is not only mere pity but in its self-transcendence is positive in both existence and delight. It has been said that love is a positive kind of release from pain and discontent. In it humans return to themselves, to their true inner nature, overcoming different kinds of alienation. Its positive character has at times been elevated even to the cosmic level, endowing it with a creative force. For example, in the Vedic literature it has been asserted that all beings, both human and non-human, are expressive of the delight (ānanda) element of the supreme reality. The highest possible constitutive aspects of it are said to be existence (sat), consciousness (cit) and delight (ānanda). When this reality as the highest and unique consciousness is free from every form of alienation, then, positively speaking, it is in the nature of bliss of self-existence. In that status it is said to be impersonal and eternal. The human forms of love are faint analogues of that highest form of self-existent bliss. In the human context bliss takes the form of love—love in which the lover and the beloved are united under the aspect of the temporality as distinguished from eternity.

The human form of love has been described as foretaste of the illimitable within the limits of the human frame. Love, says Sri Aurobindo, is the illimitable beauty within the limits of finite, beautiful and embodied consciousness. It is embodied yet it is self-conscious heredity in its upward ascent to the boundless beauty of self-existence and higher fulfilment of delight. It is efflux of perfect harmonization of all types of relationships.

Love is recognized to be a source of value and generative of beauty. No thinker or creative artist has ever thought of banishing it from the life of human beings, notwithstanding its various attending difficulties. For example, love in most cases is, or at least seems to be, tempted by partiality, excessively highlighting the value of a single attribute or type of attributes to the exclusion of others. Another often-cited negative trait of love is said to be its ‘blindness’. While a subject or an object has plenitude of attributes and abilities, the lover, in his moments of loving madness, concentrates his attention and consciousness only on those attributes and abilities that are valued and admired most by him. Further, finally, as a blemish of love it has been pointed out by the critic that the lover, in his moments of anger and phases of frustration towards his beloved fails to see her positive, virtuous and beautiful traits of character. This may safely be said blindness of another sort. It is not therefore surprising that intensity of love and extremity of frustration prove seriously obstructive in the path of fair love.

Extending this line of argument from the limited social context to the international context of inter-state relationship, it has been asserted, with considerable justifications, excessive attachment based on such ethnic qualities like religion and race, promote unholy alliance or aggressive fraternity. Much of the discourse on the so-called clash of civilization seems to rest on ethnic partiality or blindness. It is not therefore surprising that this sort of alliances or designs does not last long or, at times what is worse, takes quickly a quite opposite character or complexion. History bears countless evidences of how religious alliance and ideological fraternity has perished on the rocks of negative historical contingencies like sudden economic crash, military victory or defeat.

No interpretative generalization of love or hatred, war or peace—philosophical, religious, political or economic—on scrutiny is found to be universally valid. While some historians in their writings have given disproportionate emphasis on the role of contingent factors, some others have accorded undue importance to general laws in history. Like David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Hegel, Karl Marx, Comte, Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin have argued for and against general laws or patterns exhibited by history. Strictly speaking, these laws or patterns are not so much exhibited by history as attributed to it by the concerned historians and philosophers in the course of developing their own views. Those who argue in favour of laws or general truths of history are predisposed to show that, like other disciplines of knowledge, history can also be understood or interpreted in terms of laws. The critics of these views maintain that the freedom of man if real, their thoughts and actions cannot be subsumed under exceptionless general truths. It is true that without some or other forms of restrictively general truths the human mind cannot satisfactorily understand, present or interpret endlessly particular thoughts and actions. Also the assumption of endless forms of human thoughts and actions gives rise to highly questionable assumptions about the human nature itself. The mutual intelligibility of ideas and events that we come across in different parts of the world and over a very long period leads us to believe that there is found at least some structural similarities of the concerned human minds and their expressions.

This speculative view has at times been understood, particularly by philosophical and religious thinkers, to support their views in favour of the primacy of peace and co-operation or that of war and conflict in the course of human history. Those who have leaned heavily in support of peace and love to describe human relationships, emphasized the possibility of growing convergence of human views and values and gradual decrease in the causes of war and conflict.

Thinkers like Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Aurobindo strongly believe in the essential goodness of the human nature. While they do recognize at the factual level the undeniable reality of class struggle, inequality, and conflict, their faith in the essential goodness of human nature and about the optimistic future of a peaceful humankind remains unshaken. Religious and philosophical underpinnings of their views are unmistakable. They are learned and perceptive enough to have realized the passing reality of disharmony, conflict and war that mark our history of the contemporary times and, to a certain extent, of the near future. They are firm in the faith that ultimately the will of God and the ideals of peace and harmony will be vindicated. The main argument on which most of them mainly rely is the goodness of God and that of the human nature rooted in it. These are kinds of metaphysical and theological arguments that cannot be conclusively either established or refuted, for these are matters of faith. The term faith, if rightly understood, is neither pejorative nor refutable. In many roots of the Indo-European family of languages faith means trust, loyalty, bhakti, and the Sanskrit word śraddhā and the Latin (adjectival) word credibilis are strikingly akin both phonetically and semantically. All that we accept and follow is not rational in the narrow sense of the word but is often found to be rooted in faith and credibility. Without the fuller implication of these words inter-human relationship cannot be fully understood. It seems love has much to do with the credibility and faith both at the individual and collective level.

IX
Critique of Love

There are only a few thinkers of depth and fame who are thoroughly critical of love as a value and have written against it. Schopenhauer seems to be one of those few. Even this reference does not go well with Schopenhauer when we carefully read his ideas on Indian thought and Buddhism in particular.

In the early phase of his life he was more influenced by the Vedic or Hindu ancestry of Buddhism rather than the latter itself. In the love-related views of Schopenhauer one notices three strands of thought—Platonic, Hindu-Buddhist, and Kantian. Critical of Kant and influenced by him, he developed his own theory on the subject.

Of all the aspects of human consciousness, Schopenhauer attributes primacy to the willing and what flows out of it. Instinct, desire, craving and love are all informed, in varying degrees, of willing. Influence of will on love, according to him, makes it somewhat animalistic. The animal legacy of human existence survives very clearly in its drive for love and that leads humans to the sex-dominated aspects of love. As a driving force sex, propelled by libido, drives the rational being in man to crave for the fleeting satisfaction of sexual desire. To the fleeting character of sexual satisfaction Schopenhauer attributes a major cause of human sufferings. He is not opposed to love as such. His ideal of self-renunciation does not rest on his aversion to sex-driven love. He is not an ascetic in the received sense but a distinct streak of asceticism is discernible in his views on love, which is said to be basically rooted in sexual urge.

In this connection the influence of Hinduism and, particularly, Buddhism on his thought is unmistakable; especially his theories on ethics and aesthetics deserve deep attention and appropriate articulation. In the Indian ideal of desirelessness, niṣkāmatā, haunting the human existence and the Buddhist’s ideal of freedom from psychosomatic affliction, nirvāṇa are very important in his system of thought. To be ethical at a higher level humans must wrestle with their natural drive to will and whatever is driven by it. In other words, it is imperative upon the ethical person to refuse to be enslaved by or, even if possible, influenced by will. In this respect the Kantian influence on Schopenhauer’s ethics is unmistakable.

His writings bear out his wide and deep acquaintance with different forms of art and their underlying theories. In his aesthetic ideas the discerning reader finds not only Indian and Buddhist influence but also those of Pythagoras and Plato. The more the art forms are purged off sensuous components and impact of will on the artists’ consciousness, the resulting art works become more and more enjoyable and elevating. To the extent the impact of instinct, emotion and will could be kept apart from the aesthetic creative process, art and its different forms gain clarity, transparency and directness.

The relative subjugation of will to idea bring out the ideal essence of art works. It may appear puzzling to many why in literature Schopenhauer attaches high importance to tragedy. The reason is not far to seek. He thinks that experience of suffering and misery has a filtering effect on the connoisseur’s appreciative capacity, enabling him to get into the heart of the art forms. Free from the pain-imparting effect of aesthetic experience art object makes the connoisseur deeply pleased and purely happy.

Of all the art forms Schopenhauer finds music most satisfying and fulfilling and that is said to be due, according to him, to the fact that it is minimally affected by the particular forms of pleasure, pain, horror or gaiety. Its appeal is most direct and immediate. At the same time he points out all these modes of aesthetic experience, music seems to him most direct, harmonious and calming.

Love between men and women and their marital union have several dimensions. Perhaps the two most important of them, of those dimensions, are (i) procreation and raising family and (ii) through raising of family the preservation of species turns out to be immediately related. In India, as we know, we have a proverb to the effect that it is for the birth of a male child/progeny we solicit wife. I am quite aware that this narrow construction of the aim of marriage is at present time criticized and largely rejected because of its implied exclusion of other positive as well as normative aspects of marriage and family life. But the basic point which it brings out, viz., solicited birth of child, male or female, depending upon the family structure—patriarchal or matriarchal, remains valid. The growing feminist movements all over the world and views supporting the same are intended to reject the male dominance, both in the family and in the society.

It may be added here that preferred forms of family and human union are not uniform all over the world and in all cultures in all ages. For example, homosexuality, lesbianism or hermaphroditism though, until recently, was generally speaking, regarded as a kind of sexual abnormality and used to be frowned upon, at present in many countries laws have been enacted recognizing marriage between lovers belonging to the same sex—male or female. Those who like most of us are emphatic in according recognition to species-preservation as a part of both social requirement and ethics of marriage are logically obliged to reject this philosophy of homosexuality. The echoes of this view are heard in the widely prevalent preference for male progenies on the ground that they, unlike the female ones, can father children. The flaw of this logic and ethics is obvious. If it is said that without males birth of children are impossible, it can be asserted with equal force that without females birth or procreation, ensuring the continuity of species, cannot be possible either. This is an area in which we have many views but none of which can rationally and consistently perhaps deny the desirability of heterosexual love, love between males and females, and thus survival of the species. In terms of heterosexuality love and marriage seem to be much more defensible and acceptable than it is in terms of homosexuality, despite its growing recognition as an existential human reality and waning disapproval due to its traditional stigma.

Life and love, conceptually speaking, are intimately related. Lived life, after a period of biological growth and social exposure, leads to love or kindred emotions and dispositions like care, concern, sympathy and friendship. The relation of love does not necessarily lead to marriage and begetting children. But birth, unlike death, generally speaking, is a welcome phenomenon in social life in general and family life in particular. To celebrate birthday indicates this welcome attitude very clearly. However, this does not mean that unrestricted or unplanned expansion of family life is welcome in all cases and in all contexts. There was a time when the idea of big family was not frowned upon because in those days the rate of child mortality, due to inadequate medical care, poverty (in many cases), conflict and war had been relatively high. On these aspects of generalizations we should be culture-specific and history-specific. For example, in the tribal societies, which frequently witness conflict, addition of new members to family or tribe is generally welcome. But when the tribes in question are poverty-stricken, the picture is different and the attitude towards birth and death differs. In today’s developed world the ideal family is small. The sociology of this changing ideal relating to family size is to be understood more in terms of the desirable quality of life than in that of the size of the family. The assumption in most cases is that the society would be stable and peaceful and the threat to life and living would be under control.

Unlike in the traditional or orthodox families, wherein the idea of free love was not favoured and the idea of negotiated marriage was relatively more acceptable, in the modern time marriage based on love is very common. Even this generalization needs to be taken with added qualifications. For example, affiliation to caste, tribe, religion and several other forms of social organization used to be more rigorous and demanding in the past. With the passage of time and the growing influence of what is called modernity these structural restrictions and rigidity are gradually disappearing. Even this assertion is culture- and history-specific.

Marriage as an institution has started losing much of its past lustre and sanctity. Separation and divorce have been losing the traditional stigma that was attached to them. Both love and marriage, with the spread of education and/or growing economic independence of the earning women, have been assuming increasingly individualistic character. Who will love whom and who will marry whom are now primarily becoming a decision of the concerned individuals, not of their families, and still less of their social milieus. Rising influence of individualism and gradual decrease of organizational control over the lives of the individuals make love as a relation and marriage as an institution more and more free. Whether this freedom is necessarily good for the society as a whole is a separate and debatable issue. For both directly and more so indirectly, individuals, economically and morally speaking, are subject to the principles of accountability to the concerned aggregative life. Larger social aggregates like country, race and state are bound to be affected by the decisions and actions of the concerned individuals.

Even if this qualification is accepted, it seems factually undeniable that individualism is growing in its impact due, among other things, to spread of general education and economic independence of women, and the resulting strength of feminist movement. None of these factors as such, rightly understood, have a direct negative bearing upon love and the resulting union between the concerned men and women. But indirectly speaking, perhaps it needs to be mentioned that unless these emotional ties and types of women’s freedom are normatively regulated, the number of broken families would steadily grow, entailing psychological problems for the concerned children.

It is true that this problem is, to a considerable extent, transitional and not permanent. But it must be added here that unless we are prepared to take the gradual break-up of the family system as socio-economically inevitable, the resulting negative consequences deserve careful considerations so that the same could be reasonably regulated. Till date, we have no strong reason to believe in the inevitability of the break-up and gradual disappearance of the family as a much needed and, therefore, solicited social unit.

It is well known that love, though often leads to marriage, but has no necessary relation with it. Therefore, we conceive of it as an independent psycho-social phenomenon without reference to marriage or/and family. In such groups or communities that are described as ideological or religious the closely related persons are often found very dear to each other. In the monastic life or political groups, underpinned by this or that order—Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, etc., we find very strong bond of fraternity. But that bond does not bind them always in a familial way. Although it is true that at times we refer to or described these groups as family-like. But that is a clarificatory or explanatory metaphor.

Religious fraternities or schools of thought and action, broadly speaking, are found to be of two broadly different types—inclusive and exclusive. In some religions, for example, Hinduism and Christianity, one finds a strong and long streak of inclusivism. Following the Vedic ideals many Hindus are inclined to think that the whole mankind is a family. Accent on the ideal of love induces many devout Christian to consider all Christians and non-Christians as a single brotherhood.

But it must be added here that the history of all major religions unmistakably show how sectarianism gradually comes up and at times makes both theoretical and practical dissension between the sects belonging to the same religion not only clearly separate them but also terribly hostile to each other. While most of the founders and chief exponents of major world religions emphatically highlights the ideal of unity, in effect, it is found, their followers gradually get divided, giving rise to more and more sects and subsects. This development seems to be a fall out of the growing forces of individualism.

It may be recalled here that Hinduism, unlike many other religions, is not attributed to any great spiritual master or teacher or founder and insistently claim to be sanātana, which literally means eternal, as distinguished from historical. Notwithstanding this laudable claim the recorded history of Hinduism, substantially like that of other religions, shows that time and again it has been deeply divided and has proved to be a victim of distressing dissension. Casteism is often referred to, not without justification, in this context. Also the history of the rise of various sects within Buddhism and Jainism within and around the fold of ancient Vedic (and sanātana) Hindu dharma too is unmistakably indicative of theoretical and practical dissension notwithstanding its unitary claim. Some Jain and Buddhist scholars are of the view that the history of their religions is to be understood and interpreted independently, that is, without reference to Hinduism.

An important caveat is called for here. In many parts of the world, particularly where the forces of industrialization have proved very strong, social influences and the resulting views and values seem to have clearly overridden those of religion. To illustrate the point it may be said that the basic identity of an Indian, generally speaking, is that he or she is primarily an Indian and that his/her religious beliefs and practices are secondary or tertiary. This trend is evident also in other countries where the impact of industrialization is even more pronounced and emerged well before the last century. In other words, there is a co-relation between the rise of industrial capitalism and decline of the primacy of religious identity of the educated and relatively affluent human beings. This point can be buttressed by referring also to the religious communities as Islamic and Jewish. From history it is reasonably clear that during the last few centuries, particularly the nineteenth and the twentieth, in the wake of growing industrialization of the Euro-American continents, the influence of socio-economic conditions have been proving overriding, entailing relegation of religious factors to a relatively subordinate level of influence. In relation to political economy religion has been pushed to a back bench.

Increasing ethnic inter-mixture, resulting in the gradual waning of religious factors in the sphere of marriage and other related, including legal, affairs has a distinct bearing on this area of social life. Demographic dispersal and migration, due to increasingly modernization of shipping and aviation technology, are significantly contributing not only to the growing trend of capitalism-based globalization but also the change in the character of self-perception of different groups and the factors effectively related to identity-determination. In brief, the inter-mixed history of colonialism, imperialism, industrialization and globalization have been exerting a fundamental influence on the significantly changing human identity.

It is extremely difficult to define, in a brief and simple way, the unitary traits of the human nature taken as a whole. To speak of the human race in a univocal way or to describe the human beings spread over the globe as a family is more metaphorical than real. This is not to deny the hidden universal reality of the widely used metaphors suggesting the unity of different forms of human aggregates, smaller and larger, tribal and national, racial and religious. What can possibly and, in fact actually, bring distinctly identifiable human groups together may be viewed in very many ways.

First, ontologically speaking, it has been and is being affirmed that essentially or innately all humans, irrespective of their environmental conditions, on analysis, are found to be consisted of some basic elements that have been discussed in different sciences—physical, biological and psychological. For example, in India the basic elements are clubbed together under the expression pancabhῡta (five elements)—earth, water, energy, air and empty space or vyom. Strikingly, similar and comparable ideas are available in the Hellenic thought. This ontological typology in many cases is found to be underpinned by a kind of monism, which affirms that ultimately all these elements are expression of one single reality. In some systems of thought it has been described as water. In some other systems it is believed to be fire. This speculative attempts to trace the ultimate stuff of which all that is real is expressive of the human mind’s aim of discovering a unitary explanatory principle. But the patently perceptible difference of physical events, biological activities and psychological capacities have obliged the enquiring human intellect to search for some specific capacities and dispositions in different types of the fundamental elements that are proclaimed to be the basic constituents of human reality.

Second, at the life-level humans have been credited to have three discernible levels, namely, animal-appetitive, emotional, and intellectual. Various versions of this view is available in different systems of thought—Eastern and Western. At the same time, in each case, it is found, these levels are not claimed to be sharply separative. Appetence, emotion and cerebration are more or less interactive. Each of these psychosomatic capacities is informed of the remaining ones. In other words, these capacities cannot be justifiably claimed to be isolable structurally or functionally. This truth is indicated by the law of continuity or by the expression of apperceptive unity. Even the very biological foundations of language, on analysis, seem to be based on this basic truth.

Third, sociologically speaking, what brings different human individuals together in some form or other—familial, national or ethnic—also appears to be mutually informed. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain how human beings, or persons, embodied differently, are informed of common pleasures and pains, weals and woes. Somatic separateness is no proof of psychological isolation. Events like war and conflict between different countries or nations cannot and, in fact, do not totally separate them. Elements of care, concern and sympathy somehow bind them together, notwithstanding the external facts and forces like officially declared war at the level of polity. The implications of these assertions are clear. Love or its weaker surrogates like sympathy and fellow feeling, in spite of their difference in kind, hold us together.

Fourth, all things being equal, people sharing the same social space and living in the same historical time are ordinarily found to be mentally and socially kindred. This fact is paradigmatically illustrated by the kinship relation found in the familial context. Family members and members of the same clan and commune (kauma in Sanskrit) are found to be affine in many of the theoretical beliefs, practices and rituals. This socio-anthropological truth seems to rest also on ecological and genetic factors. Related to these factors are similar food habits, religious beliefs or ethical dispositions.

Though the terms love and sympathy are seemingly very simple, they rest, directly or indirectly, on many of these factors mentioned above and which will be elucidated below. The terms and expressions that have family resemblance with love are fondness, affection, sexual passion, yearning, sneha, rāga, anurāga and praṇay. The last four words are Indic/Sanskritic. In the Indo-European family of language there are various distinctive words for various aspects of love. Love for parents, children, friends, kins, neighbours, and non-human creatures cannot all be denoted by same or similar words. The main Indo-European roots of love-related words are leubh (Germanic), eros (Greek), amor (Latin), ljuby (ChurchSlavic) and prī (Sanskrit).

• Kindred words of love in the Germanic languages are liubi (old High German) and liebe (Middle High German and New High German). Besides these substantive terms the other adjectival terms to be mentioned in this context are Gothic liufs and Old Norse (Old Icelandic) ljufr. The Old English word leof and the Middle English word leve, the Old High German words liob and liub, the Middle High German liep and the New High German word lieb are strikingly close in their phonetic character. So is the Dutch word lief. The Sanskrit word lubh stands for longing in a strong sense. The Latin words lubet and libet mean what is pleasing. From these words it is assumed that the well-known word libido or strong desire of the Freudien psychology has been taken. The Greek word eros with Homeric eramai and the Attic word erao are all normally related to sexual love. The Greek words phileo and philia stand for such concepts as love, friendly love and friendship.
• The Latin word cāritās denotes love and affection and from which the Italian and Spanish word caro and the French word cher are derived. Other Latin words like amor, dīligere and venus are also love-related words, associated with the ideas of charm, sexuality and esteem. The Sanskrit word van- has a ring of seeking, desiring and gaining. Similar word-stems like wens (Gothic), wyn (Old English), wunna (Old High German) meaning great joy, bliss, and their cognates are found in several other Indo-European languages.
• Other words that are closely related in their meanings with love are dear (English), priya (Sanskrit), frya (Avestan), buz (Spanish, meaning ‘kiss of respect’), buziă (Romanian), buziă (Polish), lip (Romanian). Many of these words are bound to remind one the Sanskrit word, chumvan (Sanskrit). A distinction is drawn between a kiss of affection and that of erotic love. Other words related to love are embracing, peace, respect, regard and yearning (kāma and kāmanā).

The psychosomatic implications and associations of most of these Indo-European words of love are very natural, that is, biologically rooted. But, it must be noted, their psychological ramifications and mental implications are unmistakable. For example, our love for parents are often associated with touching knee or feet, depending on local custom. Bowing head before the parents, teachers and other seniors is another form of showing respect or love or both towards them. Also to be kept in view that our love for children and, in some cases, even (pet) animals, are expressed by physical patting, fondling, caressing, (often object of foolish or non-human affection). Some animal-lovers, we should bear in mind, have more love for animals than for humans.

X
Thirst for Life and Dread of Death

Love leaves behind lingering effects. Those effects may be short or long—very long or very short. The deeper the effects are, generally speaking, the longer their operative influence or efficacy last. But this is not always so. It is a qualitative question and therefore depends partly upon its recognized excellence and partly upon the depth or frivolity of the concerned love, its content and, perhaps above all, the character of the lover and that of the beloved. Also the attending social circumstances and the state of mental health of the concerned persons are found to have an important say on life of love and its longevity. Social support for or/and disapproval of the said love relation puts forth considerable influence in shaping it.

• Understandably, kindred to this relation are, among other things, proximity of their living and frequency of their meeting. It is not at all surprising that if happily and long-lived conjugal life breaks down or ends up in separation/ divorce that proves very painful at least to one of the partners and, at times, to both. A somewhat similar emotional situation emerges when friends, good old friends, or even business partners or playmates fall apart. Union, enjoyment and amorous pleasure, as we know, have their bodily basis. Lack or impossibility of union of the near and dear ones like friends, husband and wife are admittedly painful. Death, distance and separation cause pain of different forms, marked by different sorts of emotive undertone or overtone. Terms like attraction, attachment, pulling power and drawing capacities are closely associated with love.
• Love may be soothing, satisfying, fulfilling and endearing. It may also be incitive, excitive, arousing, educative, seductive, elicitory. Very many capacities, propensities and properties, on close analysis, are found, broadly speaking, of two different, but implicitly related, character—positive and promotive, on the one hand, and negative or somewhat debasing, on the other. For example, the finest kinds of art works, including literature, music, painting and epics are rooted in love-related themes.
• Antithetical to love (prema, Sanskrit) is viraha (separation, also Sanskrit). The letter r (ra) [pronounced as raw in English] in Indian languages often means fire—fire of love, and viraha stands for separation or distance between the lover and the beloved. The Sanskrit raw also means fire of passion and the word viraha, which grammatically follows, means that one is away from that sort of fire of passion/ love. The underlying concept of this word has been extensively used in the theistic modes of Indian thought.¹⁷

In the legends and theories of different schools of Vaiṣṇavism the love between Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā is regarded as supreme in its form and in terms of its divine excellence. Linguistically speaking, the word Kṛṣṇa in the case of the deity is derived from the word karṣa, which means to draw, or drawing power. It is said of Kṛṣṇa that at the time of deluge, pralaya, He holds the whole universe in himself. Kṛṣṇa, who is really God, is said to be an incarnation of Viṣṇu in the Kaliyuga and it is because of his association of this (kali) yuga (period), which is mythologically believed to be inauspicious or ominous, He (Viṣṇu) is known as Kṛṣṇa (black or dark). In the theological and philosophical literature of India, Kṛṣṇa figures in different contexts, human and Divine, and different forms as lover (of Rādhā), charioteer (of Arjuna) during the epic war of Kurukṣhetra and killer of the monstrous snake (kālīya). Also of him many forms of playful acts, fun and frolic, roles and episodes (līlā) have been mentioned. Rādhā, the consort and integral part of Kṛṣṇa, is said to be the symbol of creatrix force, force of consciousness, intrinsic power of Krsna himself, and is known as hlādinīśakti or Rādhikā. By prayer she is credited to have acquired the power to fulfil the desire of Kṛṣṇa. Symbolically speaking, Rādhā is the universal prayer-power that works in all beings and for which they get drawn towards Kṛṣṇa.

The belief of the universal yearning of all human beings to life and living is theologically and metaphysically said to be underpinned and sustained by the inseparable relation between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. Strictly speaking, Rādhā is Kṛṣṇa and Kṛṣṇa is Rādhā, and only in their playful [līlā] form and stance they are conceived as separable. The common-sense belief that most of us are attached to this life of sense, knowing fully well that it is mortal and perishable, on reflection appears to be really surprising. It is because of the deep-rooted desire or sanṣkāra, due to repeated sense-object contacts. In some systems of thought even this body is said to be an external articulation of sanṣkāra. Essentially, it is claimed to be consciousness and spiritual. The elaborate and ornate theories and legends of the love-relation between/of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā is a distinct characteristic of pro-Vaiṣṇava schools of Indian thought. Rarely one finds such rich diversity of theological and metaphysical speculations about love of the human situation to manifesting its proclaimed Divine roots.

My discourse on love and the love-related themes with distinct bearing on the human life may rightly raise many critical questions even in the minds of those readers who do recognize the importance of love and its many-sided relevance to the human life. Of all the critical questions that come to my mind in this connection the most important one seems to be: Why this edification? Must we highly praise the positive aspects of love? Does not excess of love—parental, born of self-interest and the like, make many of us blind to the negative aspects of the persons whom we love? Even in the cases of positive love, is it not often proved to be a fact that it glues us so deeply to our day-to-day life that our attachment to life makes it difficult for us to take an objective and balanced view of the very important issues of life? Have not some great minds, of the past and the present, warned us against the maleficial effects of love on life, power of judgement and other traits of character that tend to make our world view myopic and one-sided?

My reflection on possible answers and responses to the questions raised here have led me to think of the close relations of different types obtained between what is loveable and what is beautiful. I feel deeply intrigued, impressed and educated by my perception of the various sorts of interaction between the beautiful and the loveable. Some beautiful objects are sensible, while several others are abstract and available only to our intellectual cognitive capacity. This is not to suggest in the least that there is no interconnection between the sensible and the intelligible. Every object and theme, whether they are relatively abstract and relatively concrete, have at least two related layers of their being. For example, a beautiful and fragrant rose (a flower) is not only beautiful in our eyes and smells sweet but it is also symbolic of an impulse of expression and expansion or blossoming. An object of beauty for sight and sound are marked by such qualities as fitness, suitability, satisfaction and pleasure-giving. Also the combination and just proportion in the relative size of the various parts of an art object imparts to its grace of line and perfection of form.

Beauty may be appropriately used as an adjective of a setting sun or a glorious morning—both natural. It may also be predicated of some such abstract qualities as truth, sincerity, justice, benevolence and holiness. The Sanskrit root of beauty is dūvaś [honour, respect and homage] and the Latin root is beāre [blessed, happy and gladden(ing)]. We speak of the beauty of a face, façade (of a building), and feature, for example, of women, scene and picture. Also we hear of beauty of voice, of a melody, verse and style. Expressions like moral and spiritual beauty are also not impermissible or rare. In brief, it may be safely asserted that ethical and aesthetic qualities, works and achievements are both admirable and loveable. Our love for a person depends much on his or her moral qualities and aesthetic disposition and performance. Geometrically speaking, some one may be endowed with perfect forms yet he or she may not be loveable because of some ‘inexplicable’ lack in his or her outer appearance or inner qualities or both. In a sense both loveability and beauty are intuitive and indefinable. And that partly explains why it is said to be there in the beholder’s perception or conception, that is, subjective.

Our thirst for life is rooted in our will-to-live, and will-to-out-live death. This may appear surprising to our logical mind that is more or less familiar with such disciplines as evolution, archaeology, history and many other disciplines concerned with the human past—dead past. In all these works we find accounts, legends and myths about the humans who are no longer alive.

Direct or indirect evidence of the annals of lived lives left behind by them and which fall well beyond the ken of our memory have not proved convincing to most of us about the finality claim and conclusiveness of death in some form or other. We are strongly inclined, in spite of all material and biological evidence, in support of the mortality of the self, towards immortality. Except the uncompromising materialists of different theoretical persuasions, who maintain that the human beings emerged out of matter-in-motion, at the end of their life, get merged into the originary matrix of life, that is, matter-in-motion. Even some of these materialists think that practically speaking immortality is a credible and useful theoretical fiction or notion. For example, thinkers like Kant maintain that without the Idea (not existential reality) of immortality some insistent moral phenomena like justice remain inexplicable. Even those who like Buddhists and Jains do not believe in immortality in the received sense have surrogate concepts in their systems of thought and action. The concepts of incarnation, resurrection and their cognates available in many religious and philosophical systems have also their own substitute theoretical views or rituals or both.

The importance of the belief in immortality is evident, among other things, from the writings of those thinkers who do not believe in God or some such transcendental and existential entities and who do not hesitate to refer to it as a metaphor. They know fully well that metaphorical assertions have their own literal or real underpinning. For example, it has been said by some of them that human beings live beyond death in their fruits or results of actions. What most of them mean is that the values generated by ideas and actions of humans, unlike humans themselves, have a life of their own that is not circumscribed by physical space and time. Bounds of sense, memory and life are not bounds of values.

To us, the people living in (what we call) the scientific age, or, to be more specific, the twenty-first century, most of the views available from religious and anthropological literature, seem to be incredible because of their associated mysteries and occultism. But close analysis and deep reflection on these views yield some very interesting and intelligible ideas. First, most of the cultures belonging to different ages suggest a common characteristic and that is respect for the dead and supposed ancestors. If the strict scientific views of death are taken as conclusive finality, beyond which there remains nothing, the respect for the dead ancestors and ancestor-worship are bound to appear as purely superstitious. But the question remains: Why are religious thinkers and learned anthropologists studying this phenomena so seriously?¹⁸ This area of research is bound to give rise to the idea that what seems to be superstitious or irrational has some or other ‘reason’ behind it. Only the die-hard sociological positivists may contest this thesis. There are uses of the word reason that are not to be found in the narrow academic sense.

Second, both among the literate and non-literate people of the hoary antiquity, interestingly enough, many had seriously entertained the belief in the deathlessness of the personal being as a precondition of the continuity of the group-life or of the human race itself. Belief in the ancestors may be interpreted as an exemplification of the concept of immortality. Our forefathers, one may affirm, live in us. Those who started affirming this view in the forgotten past had no idea of the modern genetic theories.

Third, the belief in reincarnation in its different forms is also suggestive of the same basic idea, that is, immortality, notwithstanding the various ups and downs of life, marked by blissful delight, painful suffering, disease and physical disintegration. In the mantras or sacred ideas uttered during the death ritual some words often figure that unmistakably suggest revitalization. In many cultures even separate rites of revitalization are found and actually observed. In this connection extensive records indicating different culture-specific and period-specific views, viz., ancestor- ism and funeral ritualism have been traced in Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, the ancient religions of Mexico and the Andean peoples of South America. Among the Euro-Asiatic and the Finnico-Ugric peoples are also noted strikingly similar ideas, notwithstanding their geo-cultural difference and separation. Many of these peoples believed in their two-tier life of the human beings— corporeal-somatic and ethereal-psychic.

Fourth, many of these peoples believe in the conception of the road of the death under the watchful gaze of the gods—the sun god, the rain god and a great serpent as a symbol of cosmic wisdom. The diversity of the religions and eschatology should not make us blind to their hidden affinity. In these anthropogonies one notices a sustained attempt to provide a cultural interpretation to the natural phenomena like life, death, light and darkness, and periodic variations. To subscribe to these views one need not be a follower of structural anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss who believe that by rightly decoding the symbolic totems or legends of widely separated peoples or tribes one can discover the mental/structural universals of the human mind.

Fifth, the concept of death (mṛtyu) and deathlessness (amaratā) are claimed to be interpenetrated ideas. To these ideas are related the Hellenic word, am(b)brotos (immortal) and ambrosia (elixir of immortality). It seems the Avestan word ameretāt, which implies an abstract divine entity symbolizing deathlessness or immortality, belongs to this linguistic family. Strikingly similar is the import of the Latin word immortalitas.

Sixth, it must be considered that it is impossible to discuss exhaustively, even in bare outlines, the vast Vedic literature on death and immortality. Difficulties compound in this research by the profusion of symbolism of the language followed in different phases of the Vedic literature—Vedic, Brāhmanic, Upanisadic and Bhakti. About Bhakti already we have briefly said some points earlier. While in the Vedic phase the idea of immortality was articulated through sacrificial symbolism and it was affirmed that immortality revolved around the sun, symbolized by fire (agni) or soma, in the Brähmanic phase the idea was further refined by introducing the concept of perpetual renewal. The continuity of the basic idea of these two phases may be understood in this way: Fire (agni) is never extinguished and, similarly, soul knows no definite end or terminality. On the contrary, passing through inextinguishable fire soul becomes purer and its creative force gains in strength.

Finally, in the Upanisadic phase of the Vedic thought the Brāhmanic ritualism became secondary and the interrelated concepts like ātman and karman proved more influential. Ātman was affirmed as expression or manifestation of Brahman and the relation had been indicated by some analogies like fire and its spark, paṭākāśa (infinite space) and ghaṭākāṣa (space circumscribed by a pot).

The Buddhist concept of nirvana may rightly be recalled in this connection. It is true that many Buddhists do not believe in the concept of self and in place of the Vedic ātman, self, they speak of anātman or no-self and every person is believed to be a collection of aggregates, a functional whole, marked by ceaseless change. Looking at the matter from the other end, it has been asserted, seemingly in a paradoxical way, that saṃsāra is nirvāṇa and nirvāṇa is saṃsāra. In other words, the empirical is the transcendental and the transcendental is the empirical. Those who are deeply familiar both with the Vedic stream of thought and the Buddhist one, are inclined to believe in their common seminal parentage.

In order to understand the very importance of the discourse on such themes as life and death, the relation between immortality and after-life are to be profitably understood. If we keep simultaneously in our view the importance and complementarity of the diachronic and synchronic approaches to these basic issues, we will be well advised not to forget that in this very modern age, modern to many of us, we are required and expected to know the views of the peoples who lived long before us. History of ideas of the previous ages and alien cultures have their relevance to our own patterns of life, thought and actions. Also we should bear in mind that academic interests of all people are not identical. Many of us who do not believe in God, soul and immortality are, nonetheless interested in knowing others’ views on the subjects. Cultural pluralism and the diversity of academic interest are not merely abstract theoretical imperatives but also in many ways central to our ways of living.

In the context of life, death and immortality many famous philosophers and great religious teachers have left behind their views that are studied even now. For example, Plato, the famous Greek philosopher, believed that persistent human quest to know what is still unknown is indicative of the will-to-know disposition of most of us. Curiosity and question about the unknown seem to be native to the human nature. Some spiritual philosophers like Sri Aurobindo maintain that aspiration (āṣprhā) for the Divine is suggestive of our transcendental and pro-cognitive attitude to know the Divine. The terms like aspiration and inspiration are believed to be innate in our nature. These are not merely floating and fleeting psychological phenomena. Many scientific philosophers are committed to the view that our linguistic capacity is innate. For example, Descartes to Chomsky have defended the view of linguistic innatism. Similar views are found in the philosophy of structural linguists like R. Jakobson and structural anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss. In the Indian tradition also one finds that theories of language rooted in the spiritual metaphysics. In the very concept of Śabda-Brahman and its ramifications found from the Vedic times to the writings of Bhartrhari and Ānandavardhana this view, linguistic innatism, is clearly evident.

Ordinarily life and death are believed to be antipodal or opposite in character. Life is taken to be affirmative, a sort of presence and continuous, whereas death is conceived as negative, a sort of absence. But these common-sense views are not shared by and have been contested by many thinkers and writers, philosophers and poets. What is even more intriguing is that they do not agree between themselves and, accordingly, offered diverse views on the subject like life and death. Contrary to the view, alluded above, philosophers of different persuasions reject the view of the fearfulness of death. Interestingly enough, this view has received support from philosophers of different persuasions. For example, many theists, like Vaiśṇavas, find a spirit of elevation, a feeling of divinity, in death. In the Vaiśṇavas literature we come across songs of Rādhā who, in praise of death, is singing, ‘Oh Death, you are like my Śyāma or Kṛṣṇa, intensely loved and prayed for.’ Even those thinkers in the Eastern tradition, particularly pro-Buddhists and pro-Naiyāyikas, to whom negation is positive and nirvāṇa is real, not merely emptiness, death has its own reality and deserves to be recognized seriously. In nirvāṇa human aspirations for the highest form of enlightenment are fulfilled and freedom from mortal extinction is attained.

In the Western traditions, among those who discussed the issue of death seriously, are the Epicureans and from them right to the followers of Wittgenstein. Epicurus is credited to have observed that the death is nothing to us: It does not concern either the living or the dead, because for the living it is not there, and to the latter it cannot be anything. For a quite different point of view Wittgenstein observed: ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death…our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits’.¹⁹

It seems to me that the people of serious mind, people who are poetic or deeply contemplative, are not pained or distressed by the idea of death. To some it is like an endless and happy sleep after a long day’s work. To many others the contemplation of death is highly elevating. It lifts mind from the small, petty and fleeting problems of the day-to-day life. Death seems to have no intrinsic character of its own. It can take one both to the dark depth of endless silence and also wake one’s soul up to the height of heaven in the morning light. It is like a muse that can take the form of music, kindling the genius of underlying poetical inspiration or taking us down to the bottomless depth of meditation.