What does it mean to love? The classical philosophical debate between empiricism and idealism can unravel two different traditions of love, loving and being loved. Empiricism is the view that all knowledge and reality emerges from our senses and experience while idealism is the school of the thought that reality is dependent on the creation of concepts in the mind. Do our experiences lead to our ideas or do our ideas shape our experiences is the central question in this chicken-or-egg debate.
The empiricist school of love may claim that it is impossible to love someone without knowing that person. Love and knowlegde go together. “Let’s get to know eachother better” is the beginning of many modern romances. One must love only after certain experiences with the person. One must share a history with one’s beloved. Love is then about the way in which memories are created. Love is about the different moments in which one has ‘been there’ for the beloved. Memorialization may have an important place in this empiricist view of love. This takes a material form in the infamous box of things that is thrown away on a break-up. Our relationships get memorialized into objects like clothes, pictures and movie tickets and we find those objects painful after a beloved’s exit from our lives.
What does it mean to love? The classical philosophical debate between empiricism and idealism can unravel two different traditions of love, loving and being loved. Empiricism is the view that all knowledge and reality emerges from our senses and experience while idealism is the school of the thought that reality is dependent on the creation of concepts in the mind. Do our experiences lead to our ideas or do our ideas shape our experiences is the central question in this chicken-or-egg debate.
The empiricist school of love may claim that it is impossible to love someone without knowing that person. Love and knowlegde go together. “Let’s get to know eachother better” is the beginning of many modern romances. One must love only after certain experiences with the person. One must share a history with one’s beloved. Love is then about the way in which memories are created. Love is about the different moments in which one has ‘been there’ for the beloved. Memorialization may have an important place in this empiricist view of love. This takes a material form in the infamous box of things that is thrown away on a break-up. Our relationships get memorialized into objects like clothes, pictures and movie tickets and we find those objects painful after a beloved’s exit from our lives.