What is love? A philosopher explains it’s not a choice or a feeling − it’s a practice

 

How we understand love shapes the trajectory of our relationships. MicroStockHub/iStock via Getty Images Plus

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How do you define love? Is it a choice or a feeling? – Izzy, age 11, Golden, Colorado

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Love is confusing. People in the U.S. Google the word “love” about 1.2 million times a month. Roughly a quarter of those searches ask “what is love” or request a “definition of love.”

What is all this confusion about?

Neuroscience tells us that love is caused by certain chemicals in the brain. For example, when you meet someone special, the hormones dopamine and norepinephrine can trigger a reward response that makes you want to see this person again. Like tasting chocolate, you want more.

Your feelings are the result of these chemical reactions. Around a crush or best friend, you probably feel something like excitement, attraction, joy and affection. You light up when they walk into the room. Over time, you might feel comfort and trust. Love between a parent and child feels different, often some combination of affection and care.

But are these feelings, caused by chemical reactions in your brain, all that love is? If so, then love seems to be something that largely happens to you. You’d have as much control over falling in love as you’d have over accidentally falling in a hole – not much.

As a philosopher who studies love, I’m interested in the different ways people have understood love throughout history. Many thinkers have believed that love is more than a feeling.

More than a feeling

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought that love might cause feelings like attraction and pleasure, which are out of your control. But these feelings are less important than the loving relationships you choose to form as a result: lifelong bonds between people who help one another change and grow into their best selves.

Similarly, Plato’s student Aristotle claimed that, while relationships built on feelings like pleasure are common, they’re less good for humankind than relationships built on goodwill and shared virtues. This is because Aristotle thought relationships built on feelings last only as long as the feelings last.

Imagine you start a relationship with someone you have little in common with other than you both enjoy playing video games. Should either of you no longer enjoy gaming, nothing would hold the relationship together. Because the relationship is built on pleasure, it will fade once the pleasure is gone.

Relationships that endure are based on more than just feelings of pleasure. Westend61/Westend61 via Getty Images

Compare this with a relationship where you want to be together not because of a shared pleasure but because you admire one another for who you are. You want what is best for one another. This kind of friendship built on shared virtue and goodwill will be much longer lasting. These kinds of friends will support each other as they change and grow.

Plato and Aristotle both thought that love is more than a feeling. It’s a bond between people who admire one another and therefore choose to support one another over time.

Maybe, then, love isn’t totally out of your control.

Celebrating individuality and ‘standing in love’

Contemporary philosopher J. David Velleman also thinks that love can be disentangled from “the likings and longings” that come with it – those butterflies in your stomach. This is because love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a special kind of paying attention, which celebrates a person’s individuality.

Velleman says Dr. Seuss did a good job describing what it means to celebrate a person’s individuality when he wrote: “Come on! Open your mouth and sound off at the sky! Shout loud at the top of your voice, ‘I AM I! ME! I am I!’” When you love someone, you celebrate them because you value the “I AM I” that they are.

You can also get better at love. Social psychologist Erich Fromm thinks that loving is a skill that takes practice: what he calls “standing in love.” When you stand in love, you act in certain ways toward a person.

Just like learning to play an instrument, you can also get better at loving with patience, concentration and discipline. This is because standing in love is made up of other skills such as listening carefully and being present. If you get better at these skills, you can get better at loving.

If this is the case, then love and friendship are distinct from the feelings that accompany them. Love and friendship are bonds formed by skills you choose to practice and improve.

Love is a skill that takes practice. PeopleImages/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Does this mean you could stand in love with someone you hate, or force yourself to stand in love with someone you have no feelings for whatsoever?

Probably not. Philosopher Virginia Held explains the difference between doing an activity and participating in a practice as simply doing some labor versus doing some labor while also enacting values and standards.

Compare a math teacher who mechanically solves a problem at the board versus a teacher who provides students a detailed explanation of the solution. The mechanical teacher is doing the activity – presenting the solution – whereas the engaged teacher is participating in the practice of teaching. The engaged teacher is enacting good teaching values and standards, such as creating a fun learning environment.

Standing in love is a practice in the same sense. It’s not just a bunch of activities you perform. To really stand in love is to do these activities while enacting loving values and standards, such as empathy, respect, vulnerability, honesty and, if Velleman is right, celebrating a person for who they truly are.

How much control do you have over love?

Is it best to understand love as a feeling or a choice?

Think about what happens when you break up with someone or lose a friend. If you understand love purely in terms of the feelings it stirs up, the love is over once these feelings disappear, change or get put on hold by something like a move or a new school.

On the other hand, if love is a bond you choose and practice, it will take much more than the disappearance of feelings or life changes to end it. You or your friend might not hang out for a few days, or you might move to a new city, but the love can persist.

If this understanding is right, then love is something you have more control over than it may seem. Loving is a practice. And, like any practice, it involves activities you can choose to do – or not do – such as hanging out, listening and being present. In addition, practicing love will involve enacting the right values, such as respect and empathy.

While the feelings that accompany love might be out of your control, how you love someone is very much in your control.

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Edith Gwendolyn Nally, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Kansas City

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Poor South African households can’t afford nutritious food – what can be done

 

 

Food insecurity is a feature of life for millions of South Africans. Food insecurity refers to a lack of regular access to enough safe and nutritious food for average growth and development and an active and healthy life. This may be due to unavailability of food or a lack of resources to buy it.

The extent of this was recently mapped by the Human Sciences Research Council. For example, in Gauteng province, South Africa’s economic powerhouse, 51% of households experience food insecurity. A national survey between 2021 and 2023 found Gauteng households were affected to different degrees: 14% faced severe food insecurity, 20% moderate food insecurity, and 17% mild food insecurity.

The research also found that South African households survive on nutrient-poor food groups such as cereals, condiments, sugars, oils and fats. Consumption of nutrient-rich food groups such as fruits, pulses, nuts, eggs, fish and seafood is limited.

Dietary diversity is useful for measuring food security. A diverse, nutritious and balanced diet prevents nutritional deficiencies and diseases. A fall in dietary diversity is linked to a rise in the proportion of people who are malnourished.

The HSRC findings were the most recent to point to a growing crisis of food insecurity in the country. In an earlier study, we examined the diets of people living in South Africa’s second largest city, Tshwane.

 

We found that due to income, and other socio-economic factors, none of the poor households in our study were getting adequate nutrients from what they were eating. Mostly they were eating cereals (grains such as wheat and maize), vegetables such as legumes, roots and tubers, and oils and fats because they couldn’t afford anything else. Most had little to no income. And most were poorly nourished.

On the basis of the findings we recommended a range of interventions. These included better implementation of existing policies aimed at opening up opportunities, such as the Expanded Public Works Programme. And we recommended campaigns be run to increase people’s awareness about nutritional foods and growing them.

The help of the private sector and NGOs is also recommended.

Mapping eating habits

The study measured what households were choosing to eat from among the various food groups. These were 775 households from food-insecure areas of Tshwane as mapped by the 2016 Statistics South Africa Community Survey. We asked which food groups had been eaten in the previous seven days by any household member at home, including food prepared at home but eaten, for example, at work (such as a packed lunch).

Twelve food choices were used: cereals, legumes, roots and tubers, vegetables, fruits, milk, eggs, meat, fats, fish, sweets and beverages.

The Principal Component Analysis was used to analyse the Tshwane study households’ consumption of these food groups. The analysis is widely used to derive dietary patterns from the daily eating patterns of households.

We then used the Simpson index to measure how nutrient rich the diets were. An index score greater than 0.5 shows a highly diversified diet. The Simpson Index was profiled on socio-economic determinants of food insecurity variables, such as age, household size, income, and food expenditure.

The average dietary diversity score was low for all the poor households in the Tshwane study.

What we found

In our survey, the households with the least diversified diets were those headed by women, people with no more than secondary education, unemployed people, and/or recipients of the social support grant. This suggests that the grants are insufficient to cover people’s food needs.

Households with low dietary diversity rarely reared animals or had food gardens.

Households chose mainly four food groups. The first group was associated with a vegetable-based diet (roots and tubers, legumes, vegetables, and fruit). The second group was associated with people who consumed sugar, honey and miscellaneous products (coffee, tea, soft drinks, and instant foods). The third group comprised people who consumed fats and proteins, eggs and milk products. The final group was associated with the consumption of cereals or staple foods.

It was not possible to identify a group of urban food insecure households that ate a mixed selection of all food groups. This suggests they all lacked adequate dietary requirements to boost nutrition. This was regardless of their socio-economic status.

We also found that households faced a number of obstacles beyond income constraints that limited their dietary diversity. These included unemployment, household size, education, and the lack of land, skills and resources to practise urban agriculture.

Next steps

The City of Tshwane in Gauteng has adopted numerous strategies to alleviate food insecurity. These include the 2017 climate response strategy, meant to reduce food insecurity due to climate vulnerability, and the Expanded Public Works Programme, which provides job creation and skills development, supporting sustainable socio-economic development and poverty reduction.

But execution has been suboptimal.

Poor coordination among government departments and agencies about priorities has led to interventions being ineffective.

A list of the challenges facing the public works programme was presented by a parliamentary monitoring group. They included delays in implementation and reporting as well as non-submission of quarterly evaluation reports by some public bodies.

As a result, funding from the central government to local and provincial administrations was withheld for the 2024/25 budget.

In addition, the City of Tshwane faces financial challenges that affect its ability to get things done. This means the city cannot solve the problem of food insecurity and nutrition alone.

What’s needed is collaboration between government, the private sector and civil society. Policies could include prioritising food security and nutrition, such as subsidies for nutritious foods, regulations to improve food safety and incentives for sustainable agricultural practices.

Second, public-private partnership must be established to implement food security programmes targeting marginalised households, urban smart agriculture, and community gardens.

Third, there is a need to fund research on innovative food production technologies and sustainable agriculture practices, and share industry data on food supply chains and consumer preferences.

Fourth, there is a need to conduct community-based research on food needs and barriers to access.

Fifth, contribution of financial resources by investing in startups and enterprises focused on improving food security and nutrition outcomes.

Finally, monitoring and evaluation frameworks need to be established to assess the impact of food security policies and programmes and ensure accountability and transparency in resource allocation.

Adrino Mazenda, Senior Researcher, Associate Professor Economic Management Sciences, University of Pretoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.