“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.” — Walter Benjamin
What to write about today? Well, it’s Valentine’s day so perhaps about love. Love is deep and wide as a concept, known to all and yet re-articulated through millions of poems and songs and love letters. So what more can be said about love? Can we articulate love as a concept, perhaps? Or maybe this is simply another ode to love if an obtuse one.
I’ve been investigating love using AI tools and especially on the expanded definitions of love. One awareness about love is that while in English it’s a singular word, many languages have a far more expanded lexicon for love, denoting different shades of love in it’s myriad contexts. Love for a sibling is different than love for a romantic partner—this we know—so ought there not be different words to express these varied forms of love. This is what I set out to know.
My approach has been to query to the language model, trained on a vast corpus of expressions of love, for different definitions of love and expressions of love. I also decided to go back and look at ancient concepts of love, focusing mainly on Sanskrit and ancient Greek definitions. Once I had those roots, I went a bit further and explored new definitions of love that sit at the interstices of the ones we know. Let’s dive in!
The ancient Greek loves express a wide array of expressions of love in the context of interrelational dynamics. Let’s look at them closely
Ancient Greek Definitions of Love:
- Agape: Unconditional love, often seen as spiritual or selfless love.
- Eros: Romantic and passionate love, often with physical attraction.
- Philia: Deep friendship or brotherly love, often based on mutual respect.
- Storge: Familial love, the affection one might have for family or relatives.
- Pragma: Long-standing love, seen in long-term relationships or marriages.
- Ludus: Playful love, often associated with flirtatious and teasing behaviors.
- Philautia: Self-love, which can be healthy or unhealthy.
Reflect, where in your life do you experience each of these kinds of love? What do you tend to call them? When you express mutual respect for example for a friend or sibling, do you often acknowledge it as a kind of love? In English with our empoverished language for love we might call it a bond of friendship or mutual respect (philia) without acknowledging it as love. Sometimes we do say “I love you” to such a friend, but is that the same expression as love to a parent or child (storge)? Through these reflections, I feel the terrain of love is expanding and becoming more vibrant.
Reflecting on Philautia, self-love, I wonder how it’s been explored through literature and what it means to express self-love in an ongoing healthy, or unhealthy, way? Surely we’ve all had experiences with these expressions—self-care is an often cited verb that we use to express a kind of self-love, but what lies beyond it? What are other ways you experience or express self-love? Adding practices that exist behind these definitions might bring them into more vivid view. We find the ancient Greeks may have had a more exquisite understanding of how each of these seven kinds of love pertained to their lives and could speak to them more fully.
Here we come upon a limitation of using AI! If we research a term like Ludus we first ascertain that it means “game” or “school” in Latin, not ancient Greek, and moreover that it was a term for playful love coined by Canadian psychologist John Alan Lee, in reference to his color wheel theory of love, first introduced in his book Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving (1973). Here he identifies three different primary types of love Eros, Ludus, and Storge and three secondary types: Mania, Pragma, and Agape.
Here Lee gives a definition of ludus love,
Lee uses the term to describe those who see love as a desire to want to have fun with each other, to do activities indoor and outdoor, tease, indulge, and play harmless pranks on each other. The acquisition of love and attention itself may be part of the game.
Here we also find a new kind of love, mania:
Lee defines Manic love as flowing out of a desire to hold one’s partner in high esteem and wanting to love and be loved in this way, seeing specialness in the interaction. This type of love tends to lead a partner into a type of madness and obsessiveness.”
While I didn’t draw upon the color theory of love for my analysis, it’s interesting that the Ludus definition infiltrating the model in such a way that it is put forth as an ancient Greek definition of love. After all, ludus is actually a Latin term meaning roughly “play, game, sport, training.”
This is a classic case of model hallucination, but nevertheless useful as a scaffolding for thinking about playful love as it adds breath to our interpretive scaffolding about love, and it also lead us to Lee’s color theory of love.
Let’s now turn to the Sanskrit terms:
Sanskrit Definitions of Love:
- Kama: Often interpreted as desire or pleasure, can be related to sensual or aesthetic pleasure.
- Prema: Divine love or pure love, often used in spiritual or religious contexts.
- Bhakti: Devotional love, particularly in the context of devotion to a deity or divine being. (wiki)
- Karuna: Compassion or mercy, often seen as a form of love expressed through empathy. (wiki)
Let’s see what wikipedia has to say about Indian and ancient Sanskrit terms for love:
In contemporary literature, the Sanskrit words for love is sneha. Other terms include priya which refers to innocent love, prema refers to spiritual love, and kama refers usually to sexual desire. However, the term also refers to any sensory enjoyment, emotional attraction and aesthetic pleasure such as from arts, dance, music, painting, sculpture and nature.
The concept of kama is found in some of the earliest known verses in Vedas. For example, Book 10 of Rig Veda describes the creation of the universe from nothing by the great heat. In hymn 129, it states:
कामस्तदग्रे समवर्तताधि मनसो रेतः परथमं यदासीत | सतो बन्धुमसति निरविन्दन हर्दि परतीष्याकवयो मनीषा ||
Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire the primal seed and germ of Spirit, Sages who searched with their heart’s thought discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent. — Rig Veda, ~ 15th century BCE
Clearly the AI elided some terms, like sneha and priya, but overall confirms that in the case of Sanskrit we’re in the clear in terms of hallucinations.
Given these earliest terms come from the Bhagavad Gita, it’s not surprising that they are more spiritual in their orientation. Kama, ancient as it is presented in the Vedas, describes a kind of pleasure that can be sensual or aesthetic. This is unlike any of the Greek/Latin words for love we’ve seen in thus far. Prema a divine or pure love, is also deeply spiritual and could even be described as the ultimate goal of life—the pure love of Krishna. Meanwhile, Bhakti is a kind of devotional love but could also mean “attachment, fondness for, devotion to, trust, homage, worship, piety, faith, or love.” (Monier-Williams, Sanskrit Dictionary, 1899.) As wikipedia goes on to say “Bhakti is often a deeply emotional devotion based on a relationship between a devotee and the object of devotion.” Which, to me, seems to fall widely outside of Western constructions of love. Karuna is described as compassion or mercy, and sometimes as “self-compassion or spiritual longing” and can be seen as a kind of love expressed through empathy. This stretches the way we’ve come to find definitions of love a little bit, as this is rather love expressed through a virtue instead of a kind of love, but also opens intriguing questions in terms of how love can be expressed through other virtues even such as Maitri (loving-kindness) or Ahimsa (non-violence). I’ll leave this exploration for a future write-up, however.
- With these expanded definitions of love, come new points of reflection. How have you encountered pleasure in the sensual or aesthetic (Kama)?
- How does divine love (Prema) manifest in your own spiritual practice?
- How do you express devotional love (Bhakti), either as a devotee, or even in your relationships?
- How can acts of compassion, mercy, or even self-compassion (Karuna) be reflections of love?
- What acts do you perform in your own practice of love that are reflections of these disparate definitions?
Expanding our lexicon of love a little further allows us to widen the scope within which love occurs and the language we use to describe it. We can go further by delving deeper into these individual cases of love but also by going wider and asking what possibilities exist if we look for yet new words and new articulations of love.
That’s what we’ll do. One of the strange tasks I gave GPT-4 was to combine the latin/greek words with sanskrit ones to make new pairings and strange neologisms that could open up our thinking about love.
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Kāma (Sanskrit) & Philia (Greek):
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New Term: “Philikām”
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Description: Combines the sensual desire with affectionate regard and friendship, denoting a love that is both passionate and deeply rooted in friendship.
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Bhakti (Sanskrit) & Storge (Greek):
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New Term: “Storbhakti”
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Description: Merges devotional love with familial love, indicating a deep, spiritual connection within the family context.
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Sneh (Sanskrit) & Agape (Greek):
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New Term: “Agasneh”
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Description: Combines tenderness and affection with selfless, unconditional love, indicating a gentle, altruistic form of love.