Monday, May 22, 2006

Ask a Philostopher

Are you also imagining that John experiences deep pleasure from this faux love? If he is, then he's not "in love with" being in love (or not just in love with that)— since he's not in love. And it's interesting that what you actually wrote is of his being "in love with the feeling of being in love" (emphasis added). This raises the further question of whether being in love feels any particular way. If we assume that it does (which seems like a big assumption), then your question is whether we can imagine a situation in which: John is not in love with Hilary; John is having those experiences that characteristically attend, but do not exhaust, his being in love; (perhaps as a consequence) John believes that he is in love with Hilary; and finally John is taking deep pleasure in having those experiences. Putting aside major reservations about the presupposition involved in the description of the second feature of this situation, I don't see why not.
My professional reply is that love is like oxygen. You get too much, you get too high. Not enough and you're gonna die.

4 comments:

roxtar said...

I've also heard that love can rock you and that it will never stop you. According to this hypothesis, ah, ah, ah, ah, love is like a rock.

Of course, it's like oxygen, too. That's why trained philostophers are standing by to take your calls and answer your questions. It's not something lay people should be messing with.

MT said...

Back when I spent a lot of time thinking about these things, it struck me as less of an "other minds" problem and more to do with "other bodies."

helmut said...

That's where philostophy seems to be these days, MT.

Roxtar, we might add that research in interpretational semantics has yielded the hypothesis that
Love is like a boomerang, and all you have to do is
Send your love around the world and love comes back to you.
Round and round and round and round and love comes back to you.

roxtar said...

Well, you're the philostopher, so I'll defer to your learned opinion.

Have fun in Budapest! Just be sure not to come down with a case of yifnqidk.