Love

Love is an immediate, intimate and deep feeling, the subject of which, above all, man acts, but there can also be other objects of special vital importance. Love can be different: the so-called free love from the hippies, such as Sartre in the story "Intim" or Nabokov in "Lolita," can be like Romeo and Juliet. It is multifaceted, unpredictable, sometimes unhappy, but more often it is the apotheosis of everything, from the senses to the life path of a person

A person is gifted with reason, he realizes himself, his neighbor, his past and the possibilities of his future. It is the realization of oneself as a separate being, the realization of the shortness of one's own life, the fact that he is not born of his own will and will die against his will, that he can die before those whom he loves, or they are before him, and the awareness of his own loneliness and remoteness, own helplessness in front of the forces of nature and society - all this makes his alienated, disunited existence unbearable.

The word "philia" ("love-friendship") denotes the connection of individuals, conditioned by social or personal choice. This love affects the relations of people close to each other, it is usually satisfied with the presence of a loved one and the development of natural feelings. These feelings, appeared without much effort, in the process of personal communication, their value is that they are necessary for man as something whole, and not as taken in its individual features. The main spiritual state here is "spiritual peace," inner affinity, mutual understanding. Thus, "philia" means a spiritual, open, love based on inner sympathy, expresses a combination of such principles (whereas eros is a struggle and a mix of opposites).

The word "storge" means love, which is associated with organic generic ties, unbreakable, not subject to cancellation (especially family ties). It is a gentle, confident, reliable love that is established between parents and children, husband and wife. In such love, a person finds peace and confidence, a sense of confidence. This term expresses feelings not of an individual person, but a sense of a generic community, without which the Greeks did not represent their existence.

The term "agape" in the Greeks meant intelligent love, arising from the evaluation of a particular feature of a loved one, his character traits, and so on. this love a person can reasonably justify, because it is based on beliefs, and not on spontaneous feelings, habits. This aspect of love is historically associated with an adequate assessment of another personality, which underlies mutual respect; in it the more understanding, the less room for feelings. It is love, the strengthened activity of the mind, therefore it is abstract, impersonal more than other forms of love. It is the will guided by the mind.

In the Middle Ages, Christianity treated love as the highest principle of morality, which most widely reveals the human essence. By love was meant some kind of inner strength of a man who never runs out, but constantly, without fatigue, spreads to all the actions of a person, directing him to prosperity.

The Christian thinker Aurelius Augustine singled out three forms of love: man's love for God; love for one's neighbor; God's love for man.

The first form of love is expressed as a man's striving for perfection on the way to God. It is connected with man, his nature, which gives him the opportunity to think, to decide. Love for one's neighbor is the second form of love accepted in Christianity. It is possible because the "neighbor" is the likeness of God. It unites all people without exception into a single whole. The third form is the love of God for creation. God does not only love, he is love. And his love breaks out like a creation and deliverance of a person from sins; although in this aspect it is not comprehensible in its initial depth, it is not accessible to man.

Classifications of love, having a reasonably clear basis, have the merit that they succumb at least to a theoretical test. Such classifications are useful in psychology, in the study of emotional relationships. But their role in the philosophical analysis of love can not be significant.

Love is very heterogeneous, it includes not only different species and their subspecies, but also what can be called forms of love. Kinds of love are, for example, love of neighbor and erotic love. The forms of showing love for one's neighbor are the love of children, love for parents, brotherly love; Modes are the love of a man and the love of a woman, the love of a northerner and the love of a Southerner, love of medieval and modern love. One can speak simply of loving one's neighbor; we can talk more specifically about the love of children, or, more specifically, about paternal (maternal) love. Specification can go further, as a result of which not only forms and modes are distinguished, but also "modes of modes".