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Full Idea
The relationship we seek in love is essentially one of mutual reciprocation. As much as I desire my beloved, I want them to desire me; to seek in me the source of their well-being. It makes no sense to have this desire for landscapes, art or the stars.
Gist of Idea
Love is a mutual reciprocation, not just a desire for something
Source
Tom Cochrane (The Aesthetic Value of the World [2021], 1.2)
Book Ref
Cochrane,Tom: 'The Aesthetic Value of the World' [OUP 2021], p.12
A Reaction
[contra Nehamas] Does this mean that being 'in love' does not count as love at all? Presumably we have to distinguish love with someone from the yearning for that love. (This the view of love is the one my wife and I settled on many years ago!).
| 24164 | Even non-theists can wonder what, if anything, makes the universe good [Cochrane] |
| 24165 | Pleasure has an intrinsic (independent) value, but that is not a final (for its own sake) value [Cochrane] |
| 24166 | Pleasure serves to maintain our relationship with its source [Cochrane] |
| 24167 | Love is a mutual reciprocation, not just a desire for something [Cochrane] |
| 24169 | We can treat value as a verb; we value something when we positively engage with it [Cochrane] |
| 24168 | Aesthetic value appreciates a thing objectively, as a good in its own right [Cochrane] |
| 24171 | Morality is not a final value; it concerns how we distribute the things we actually finally value [Cochrane] |
| 24173 | We can only understand form if we grasp the whole of which things are parts [Cochrane] |
| 24174 | Beauty is fittingness, of details uniting within a pattern [Cochrane] |
| 24175 | Accounts of sublimity differ over whether we learn something good about ourselves [Cochrane] |
| 24176 | A person's activities have value when they receive full attention [Cochrane] |