Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 1956
In the application of mathematics to society, what better place to start than with love? Without love, there wouldn’t even be societies, just isolated individuals.
By love, I don’t mean romantic love, I mean love in general. Romantic love is a much more complicated thing that we should talk about another time.
What is it about love that holds societies together? It is not just that people have good feeling about each other. It is that people act to help and support each other. Thus love is really more about action than about feeling. To love someone is to give them food, give them medical care, defend them from adversity, etc. It does include having certain feelings towards the person you love, as these feelings might spur you to help the person, but the feelings are not the heart of love: the action is the heart.
We now distinguish four types of love:
Kinetic love is the heart of love, actual substantial help. Without kinetic love, love would be useless. What’s the point of someone loving you if they never kinetically love you, i.e. actually help you in some way? Kinetically loving someone could be helping them access things they need such as food and water, it could be giving them advice and emotional support, it could be working to make something happen which they want to happen, or something else. However, if you love someone purely kinetically, then this person cannot rely on you. What assurance do they have that you will continue to love them kinetically when they need you to? Maybe you kinetically loved them just that one time for a reason that had nothing to do with them. That is why potential love is also necessary for love to be real. In between the discrete acts of kinetic love, potential love (i.e. the willingness to kinetically love) retains.
Kinetic and potential love both rely on each other. We would not kinetically love unless we were willing to (i.e. we potentially loved). And we would can only be truly said to potentially love if we indeed kinetically love when the need arose. Kinetic love is the actual act of love, but the intentionality of the act resides in potential love. Though in a sense kinetic and potential love are different types of love, they are really two aspects of love itself, because one could not possibly exist without the other also existing.
To ostensively love someone is to seem like you love them. This includes shows of affection, confessions of love, sex, and actions of kinetic love that people know about. We can make an Euler diagram to illustrate the distinction between kinetic love and ostensive love:
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I know that hugs and compliments do have a component of kinetic love, but their main function is to communicate that you love someone, i.e. to ostensively love someone, so I put them in the “ostensive but not kinetic” part of the diagram.
The left part of the diagram, kinetic but not ostensive love, is sought by some religious people, who try to do good things secretly so nobody will say that they were just doing it to get a good reputation. Cf. Maimonides’ eight levels of Tzedakah, Matthew 6-1, Qur’an 2:271
A lot of writing on relationships focuses more on ostensive love than on kinetic love, that is, more on caring-about than on caring-for. It is really important to figure out healthy ways to show that you care about someone (ostensive love), but it is even more important to learn healthy ways to actually care for someone (kinetic love). We need to band together and help each other get food, shelter, and other essentials of life, and defend each other against adversity. Just showing affection is not enough. I am not saying that ostensive love is not important, just that it is not as important as kinetic love. The importance of ostensive love is that without it nobody would know that you kinetically loved.
Some clarification is needed on the meaning of “ostensive love”. First of all, ostensive love is subjective. It might seem to person \(X\) but not to person \(Y\) that you love a person \(Q\). Then you would be said to ostensively love person \(Q\) with respect to \(X\), but not with respect to \(Y\). For example, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet ostensively loves Romeo with respect to Romeo, but not with respect to Juliet’s father. This is because to Romeo it seems like Juliet loves Romeo, but to Juliet’s father it does not at all seem like Juliet loves Romeo. And if, in an alternate world, Juliet had never confided her love to Romeo, but instead sought her father’s counsel on the matter, then she would ostensively love Romeo with respect to her father but not with respect to Romeo.
If we write “\(A\) ostensively loves \(B\)” as above without specifying to whom this ostensive love is with respect to, then we are being vague, but in many cases this is ok because it’s clear from the context who the ostensive love is with respect to. Often we will mean that it seems like \(A\) loves \(B\) to any onlookers who happen to be around, i.e. \(A\) loves \(B\) with respect to onlookers.
Second of all, it is possible to ostensively love someone without intending to do so, just as you can kinetically love someone as a unintended consequence of an action you took for a completely different reason. Whether or not you love a person \(Q\) ostensively with respect to some person \(X\) solely depends on whether or not it seems to \(X\) like you love \(Q\), and \(X\) can totally get it wrong and think that you love \(Q\) when you actually don’t, and never intended for \(X\) to get that impression. So it’s actually possible to ostensively love \(Q\) without really doing anything at all, if someone happens to get the wrong idea and think that you love \(Q\).
This lack of intentionality in ostensive love is why potential love is important. It would be possible, though extremely unlikely, for a person who bases all their actions on dice rolls to both kinetically and ostensively love someone for many years, but all their actions would be accidental. It would only be a very small chance that they would continue to love the person the next day (when an unlikely thing happens lots of times in a row that doesn’t make it any and more likely that it will happen again. This is the reverse gambler’s fallacy). There is no intentionality to either kinetic or ostensive love. The intentionality resides in potential love, the willingness (or intention) to love when needed.
To talk about normative love, we must first talk about normative forces.
A Digression on Normative Forces
A normative force is a force that controls your actions and/or thoughts. For example, if you see a pen on a table, you really have no choice but to believe that there is a pen on the table. The normative force of rationality compels you to believe that there is a pen on the table. Even if you really wanted not to believe that there was a pen on the table, you wouldn’t be able to. The normative force of morality, also known as “conscience”, prevents people from doing things that are immoral. This normative force prevents people from doing things that are immoral, even if nobody would know about it.
There have been many attempts to reduce morality to rationality, to rationally prove once and for all that one should be moral. Debra A. DeBruin’s paper Can One Justify Morality to Fooles surveys these attempts, and concludes that the normative forces of morality and rationality are independent and one does not reduce to the other. If we would reduce morality to rationality, then we still would need to answer the question, “why must we be rational?” Rationality is not transcendent, it is a normative force just as much as morality is. Humans evolved to be subject to both normative forces because rational humans could better adapt to their environment and moral humans could better work and live together in communities.
I don’t mean to imply that there are only two normative forces, rationality and morality, because I’m sure there are others as well (though I can’t think of good examples for some reason). I just talked about these normative forces to give background for the idea of a normative force, a force that controls your actions and/or thoughts. The existence of these forces is an easy counterexample to the simplistic idea that an individual is completely free to do whatever they want to do. No I am not! I cannot choose to do something immoral, as my conscience prevents me! I cannot choose to disbelieve the conclusion of a convincing argument, as my rationality prevents me! These limitations on my actions and thoughts are what make me a human living in a community with other humans, rather than a (true, not pseudo-) random number generator, or the lonely god of a far-off, empty world.
Normative forces are not absolutely compelling. It is possible to fight against them, and sometimes two normative forces will fight against each other.
For me to normatively love someone is for a normative force to exist which compels me to love them. Normative love is an essential component of love, because it helps love maintain itself. It is hard to stop loving someone when you love them normatively, i.e. there is a normative force compelling you to keep loving them. It is also involved in the genesis of love: a person will often start loving because of a normative force to love, i.e. normative love precedes and causes love.
These four types of love largely rely on each other, so they might be more aptly called aspects of love. They can stand alone, but their existence alone is tenuous.
Potential love is willingness to love if needed, but which type of love? We can distinguish subtypes of potential love:
We spoke before about how kinetic and ostensive love have no intentionality, and could even happen as a result of dice rolls. However, kinetic love acquires intentionality if it arises from the intention to kinetically love, i.e. potentially kinetic love; and similarly, ostensive love acquires intentionality if it is arises from potentially ostensive love.
Often we will not make this subtle distinction, and we will just speak of “potential love”. This can be interpreted either as an unspecified subtype of potential love, or as the willingness to love in a holistic way that has all four types of love as aspects.
Similarly, ostensive love and normative love have subtypes. I ostensively normatively love someone if it seems like I am compelled by a normative force to love them . I normatively ostensively love someone if a normative force compels me to seem like I love them.
We generally won’t need or want this level of precision, but it is important to know that it exists. It gives love a nice fractal structure, since three of its four aspects (potential, ostensive, and normative) include within them the full structure of love itself, with all four aspects.
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