define "love"

[chadwhitacre]

Our mission is to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.

@tshepang suggests at #319 (comment) that "love" is "vague, and depends too much on context."

I've offered at #319 (comment) that love, for Gratipay, is an "interdependent union of wills."

@mattbk links us at #319 (comment) to another conversation about defining love in a financial/economic context.

This question seems to warrant its own thread.

[chadwhitacre]

@tshepang at #319 (comment):

I don't even really understand what "interdependent union of wills" means.

Fair enough. May I try to explain what I mean?

Let's start with will, that's the heart of the definition of love I've offered. Here's Wikipedia on "will" as a philosophical concept:

Will, in philosophy, refers to a property of the mind, and an attribute of acts intentionally committed. Actions made according to a person's will are called “willing” or “voluntary” and sometimes pejoratively “willful” or “at will”. In general, "will" does not refer to one particular or most preferred desire but rather to the general capacity to have such desires and act decisively based on them, according to whatever criteria the willing agent applies.

Here's the related entry on "volition" as a cognitive psychological process:

Volition or will is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. It is defined as purposive striving and is one of the primary human psychological functions.

It's primarily the philosophical concept I mean to employ. Now, what's really in view for us is the interaction of individual wills within a group—in a word, "politics":

Politics [...] is the practice and theory of influencing other people. Politics involves the making of a common decision for a group of people, that is, a uniform decision applying in the same way to all members of the group.

The great question of culture, as I see it, is the relationship between the individual and the group. As over at #319 (comment), "What we want is tyranny-less structures." This is a political question, that is, a question of will: how is it that the wills of many individuals are gathered together into a singular group will?

[chadwhitacre]

/me discussing with a friend in the coffee shop ...

[chadwhitacre]

Talked about this with a couple other friends last night as well.

[chadwhitacre]

One way we could proceed: let us identify love as an essentially contested concept:

The term essentially contested concepts gives a name to a problematic situation that many people recognize: that in certain kinds of talk there is a variety of meanings employed for key terms in an argument, and there is a feeling that dogmatism ("My answer is right and all others are wrong"), skepticism ("All answers are equally true (or false); everyone has a right to [their] own truth"), and eclecticism ("Each meaning gives a partial view so the more meanings the better") are none of them the appropriate attitude towards that variety of meanings.

[chadwhitacre]

Picking up in #431 ...

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in favor of #431.