[Extracted from Evolutionary aspects of love and empathy]
Empathy and love develop and are expressed above all in the family, in love between parents, in love of parents for children, in the solidarity of the family, which can be seen as the nucleus round which wider group feeling develops. Empathy and love extend from the family group to wider social organisations and ultimately to the community as a whole, the people, the nation. Love is not simply an aspect or an intensification of empathy nor is it to be identified with sexuality, which results in patterns of behaviour nearly universal amongst all living creatures other than the most primitive. Though empathy and sexuality are apparent in the behaviour of animals, by contrast there is little evidence of love in anything resembling the human sense in patterns of animal behaviour.
Love appears to be an eminently human phenomenon. We need to consider the evolutionary role of love; the evolutionary potential of love; the significance of love for survival of the individual and of the group, including the prolongation of this evolution into historical development, for example, of the Christian conception of love. Love in its most developed form is to be seen not as a lucky accident, an undeserved blessing for humanity, but as an explanation of and a necessity for the course which human development has taken. There remains the need for a more rigorous 'scientific' treatment of love in a much more basic sense which would explain love as a physiological/neurological pattern of inter-personal behaviour or of individual experience.
As a preliminary to examining possible evolutionary scenarios for love, it seems right to consider what has been said about love by other writers. Though systematic or scientific treatment of love as such by philosophers, psychologists, evolutionists, neurologists and even anthropologists has been sparse - it has been described as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study, this does not mean that there is any lack of literature about love; there is in fact a bewildering variety. Quite recently, there has been, particularly in America, a growth of interest in recording love behaviour and experience, as demonstrated, for example, in Sternberg and Barnes Psychology of Love(1988), from which the following remarks are drawn: " Without question the major preoccupation of Americans is love... Don't leave home without it... [rather than the American Express card].(Mursten, pp. 13, 37)... Love had always been the one thing - perhaps the only thing - beyond the research scientist's ever-extending grasp.... Dozens of love studies appear annually in the journals; dozens more are presented at regional and national conventions. There is even a Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that fills a large proportion of its pages with studies of love.... 'How do I love thee?' - Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have written in the 1980's - 'Let me count the articles'. [Nevertheless]... the science of love is still in its infancy" (Rubin, pp. vii-viii).
Love has attracted the rather spasmodic attention of major philosophers, starting of course with Plato, who in the Symposium treats of a fundamental issue, the relation between love and desire. Pascal before his renunciation of the world produced a Discours sur les passions de l'amour. "Les passions qui sont les plus convenables à l'homme... sont l'amour et l'ambition... Qu'une vie est heureuse quand elle commence par l'amour et qu'elle finit par l'ambition! "Qui doute... si nous sommes au monde pour autre chose que pour aimer? "les yeux sont les interprétes du coeur; "Quand nous aimons, nous paraissons à nous- mêmes tout autres que nous n'étions auparavant.... l'on a de la vénération pour ce que l'on aime. "il semble que l'on ait toute une autre âme quand on aime... "Quand on aime fortement, c'est toujours une nouveauté de voir la personne aimée. Après un moment d'absence, on trouve de manque dans son coeur. Quelle joie de la retrouver! l'on sent aussitôt une céssation d'inquiétudes." (Pascal, pp. 251 ff.)
Schopenhauer, a philosopher not noted for his tender attitude to individual human beings, said that the subject had forced itself on him objectively and had become inseparable from his consideration of the world. "Instead of wondering why a philosopher for once in a way writes on this subject which has been constantly the theme of poets, should we be surprised that love which plays such an important role in a man's life, has scarcely ever been considered at all by philosophers... I have decided to spend my life in thinking about it" (Schopenhauer, pp. 169-170).
Amongst psychologists, Stanley Hall (see Ross, 1972) in the United States attracted a good deal of opprobrium by making love a central topic. One of the few other psychologists to discuss love in depth, Erich Fromm, argues that any theory of love must begin with a theory of man, of human existence; the full answer to the problems of human existence, according to him, lies in the achievement of fusion with another person, in love; this desire for interpersonal fusion, he says, is the most powerful striving in man: "love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake"(Fromm, p. 28). Freud, with his jaundiced eye, could see nothing good, or indeed see nothing significant in love, an irrational part of human behaviour; he long promised a book on the love life of mankind but never produced it, though he was assiduous in amending his published essays on sexuality; towards the end of his life he said that we know very little about love (Santas 1988). Some eminent authors have recognised the significance of love but not been able to contribute to its study. So J.Z. Young commented in Programs of the Brain(1978): "Attempting to define love is indeed a hazardous enterprise, more suitable for a poet than for a scientist.... [but he added] What would be the use of a neuroscience that cannot tell us anything about love?" (Young, p. 143).
One of the most sustained accounts of love, surprisingly, was by a Jesuit, Martin D'Arcy(1952). He suggested that to produce a unified, and so to speak, scientific account of love would be of service, as it would enable one to pass from the poetry to the psychology of it. Love, he said, is as old as human nature, but it has taken long stretches of time for its significance to be taken as seriously as it deserves but the difficulties are great: it is hard enough to find something common in the variety of descriptions which have been given of it. Love appears in all literature, not as a passing episode, but as the marrow of it. Love is such a vast subject that a writer would never reach an end if he did not make up his mind to concentrate on one aspect of it. Referring to Scheler's (1913/1954) discussion of love and sympathy, he observes that while Scheler analyses what happens when we truly love, he does not explain why we should love in this manner; he gives us the fact but not the reason, and it is this final explanation which is so elusive and yet craved for by all. (D'Arcy, p. 233)
If scientific treatment of love has been scarce, discussion of love as an evolutionary fact has been even less favoured. One of the few exceptions was Mellen's The Evolution of Love (1981). Glynn Ll. Isaac pointed out in the preface that few have grappled with love as something central to human evolution but scientifically elusive; "a topic which in spite of its interest has no experts except in so far as we are all experts"(p. vii). Mellen says that apart from Darwin and a few other exceptions, self-respecting evolutionists have tended to shy away from love as a subject for study. (Mellen, p. 288)
It is obviously important to start by defining or characterising love. So what is love? Any woman's magazine has descriptions of true love in terms of the relation of man and woman. There are other types of love, mother/infant, brother/brother, plus a scatter of other uses of the term love of animals, love of the countryside, love of excitement, love of truth etc. The Oxford English Dictionary defines love as: "That state or feeling with regard to a person which arises from recognition of attractive qualities, from sympathy or from natural ties, and manifests itself in warm affection and attachment". This is not bad though by using 'affection' and 'attachment' the definition in the end dodges the problem. For affection, the OED has, surprisingly, nothing very helpful referring to 'affect': 'affectionate' has 'loving' as its most relevant meaning. For 'attachment' the OED has 'affection, devotion, fidelity' so as usual dictionary definitions go round in a circle. Perhaps the more useful ways of saying what love is are 1. to see how it has been described by a multitude of writers over the ages as a matter of personal experience, 2. by examining one's own experience which will tell one when the state of 'love' is experienced. In the end to say what 'love' means is much the same as saying what 'red' or 'pleasant' means. We just know. Little progress has been made in the more fundamental approach of saying what the behaviour and experience of love comprises and what the neurological/physiological substrates are.
Human love as we experience it, as it is reported and manifested, is essentially a relation between one person and another, not a bodily relation but a brain-relation, a neural relation; the existence and the structure of another person comes to be a prominent part of one's own structure, to alter the patterns of motivation, to alter the way the world and other people are perceived and of course to alter how the other person the object or subject of love is perceived. Without the development of the self, of self-consciousness, of conscious thought, human love would not exist, or would have a completely different character. But what contributed to or constituted the formation of the self, of consciousness, of thought? The most obvious candidate is the development of language, a new resource to enable the individual to categorise his world, to manipulate his perceptions of the world, to put a distance between immediate experience and 'himself'. Thus the contention is that the development of language played an essential role in allowing the development of human consciousness, of the self, of the person, and that this development of the self through language was an essential preliminary to, or concomitant with, interacting with, the development of human love as the experienced relation between one's self and the self of another human.
Insert here some questions: is love a momentary or enduring state? Love is not passion, it may even not even be correctly described as an emotion in the sense that an emotion is a response, most probably a motor and physiological response, to a particular situation, a particular set of events. Love on the view just presented is a capacity derived from neural interaction of a number of components, with the decisive event being a neural restructuring to accommodate the idea of another's self with and into the idea of one's own self. Love thus is something that can endure and unlike sexual desire cannot be satisfied or dissipated by any behavioural response. Sexual desire is certainly a powerful drive which is more likely to conflict with love than to strengthen it - sexual desire, when its object is achieved, indeed may kill the particular love relation.
Is love unitary or multiple? The capacity for love comes into existence from the combination of the other capacities already described. The decisive event is the 'falling in love' which happens almost automatically in the mother/infant relation but needs to be explained in other forms of love. Apart from the mother/infant relation, this capacity to love exists whether or not an object of the love currently has been found. It alters social relationships, deepens the awareness of the character, attitudes, tendencies of others, and so has a general effect within the community. When this capacity finds its object, the other person, then the neural structuring of the loving individual undergoes a massive change, with the self-centre, the centre of gravity, changing as a result of continuous awareness of the other, sensitivity to the other's needs, emotions, physical condition, happiness, response etc. At this moment then love is unitary and it is improbable that there can be two objects of love at the same time. This contrasts with the case for sexuality, sexual desire, where, certainly for the male, there can be many objects simultaneously.
Can there be degrees of love? For the individual, the force of love depends on his/her own neural structure. In the same way as self-awareness may vary between individuals, perceptiveness may vary, empathetic awareness may vary. So between individuals the degree of love may vary. The question remains whether for the same individual there can be degrees of love. Can we love someone a little, rather more, very much? If love is restructuring to incorporate a model of the other's self with one's own self, then love is all or nothing, and other relations, attachments, call for another description, affection, kindness etc. Can love be mistaken in its object? There can clearly can be mistakes in the perception of the character, attitudes, etc. of another as there can be mistakes in all forms of perception. But if love establishes itself despite the mistaken perception, then the love is not mistaken, though expectations as to what may follow from the love may be mistaken. In particular, the belief that the other experiences love in the same way as one oneself does, may be mistaken. But to experience love it is not necessary that love should be returned. We can love those who do not love us.
What does love actually do? There are the objective or external effects of love and the internal or subjective effects. As regards objective or external effects, in the mother/infant case love helps survival of the child and its emotional and social maturation. In an adult relation, the objective effect of love is to promote the interests, security and happiness of the loved person, creating a willingness to sacrifice everything, even life, for the loved person. As regards the subjective or internal effects, in the case of the mother/child relation love makes possible a heightened degree of perception, attention, concentration in the mother, organises her responses for the benefit of the child, creates endurance of the stress of care for the infant. In the case of adult love, the internal subjective effect is the creation of a new directedness in the one who loves, an overflow of energy, a reduction in concentration on the self.
Is love genetic or cultural or a mixed product? Since the capacity for love is the resultant of a number of other evolving capacities, language, empathy, self-awareness, consciousness, the question reduces itself to how far each of these capacities is genetic or cultural. Empathy is genetic not cultural; the capacity for language evolved genetically with the structure of language evolving culturally; self-awareness flows from language. The conclusion perhaps is that the distinction between what is genetic and what is cultural is one which it is not easy to make. Insofar as humans thrive, indeed can only exist, in groups and 'culture' is a group-related concept, and insofar as the fortunes of the group and the behaviour of members of the group have directly genetic consequences, the tangle cannot be straightened out.
Are infant-love and adult-love related? The capacity for love evolved in the context of the mother/infant relation and it was from this that love derived its first evolutionary importance. But the infant in the mother/infant relation was in due course the adult. The infant participated in the love-relationship as much as the mother; the infant in due course became the mother of the future; the child of a loving mother would be more likely to inherit the capacity to love of the mother and to have experienced development of that capacity as an infant. If love was an evolutionarily successful process, then it would increasingly be a constituent of adult behaviour; adult love and mother/infant love on this view are expressions of one and the same capacity.
Are the phylogeny and ontogeny of love related? The previous paragraph suggests that they must be. For the individual, the first experience of love is as an infant. The genetic capacity for love depends on the parents of the infant and the complex of genes bearing on the congeries of abilities etc. which make possible the capacity for love. Assume that an infant inherits the complex of genes which will make love possible: if the infant experiences love in the mother/infant relation, then the capacity for love can mature and the existence of this capacity will be manifest in the adult. If, however, as a result of the illness or death of the mother, separation, institutional upbringing, the process of maturation of the capacity for love is interrupted or crippled, the child may grow up into an adult without the neural structuring, behavioural structuring, necessary for the expression of the capacity to love. In earlier times an infant experiencing these situations might not have survived at all.
What is the physiological or neurological basis of love? Love may have all sorts of physiological effects: sharpening of perception, increase of energy, increase of purposefulness, improvement of health, complexion, brightness etc. This represents as yet difficult to identify changes in neural structure, neural functioning. Perhaps the most important will be the greater neural integration, the reduction of energy-sapping conflicts, of self-centred worry etc.
What is the nature of the 'resonance' of love? Since love depends on perception and particularly on empathy, then the 'resonance' of love is an effect of the potential 'resonance' of perception and of empathy. If I can empathise your emotional state, attitude, then this empathy alters me, alters my state. You can empathise the change in my state and this in turn alters your state and so on., a kind of continuous reflection between mirrors back and forth, except in this case each mirror changes as it reflects back the other. Hence the liebesglanz, the eyelock.
Has love a future? The capacity to love already exists in the human genome, insofar as the genome encodes, epigenetically, the capacities for consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, language. But we are now in a quite different evolutionary situation. Failures of love are not necessarily penalised by the death of unloved children. Failures of love at the adult level are not penalised by the exclusion of the unloved or the unloving from the ability to reproduce. The existence of adult love does not necessarily lead to the production of loved children (contraception, abortion etc.) The use of drugs may destroy the mother/infant relation without destroying the infant. The current problem is the relation of sexuality and love. Sexuality is not love but it is confused with love. The technology of sexuality has advanced, to stimulate, prevent, and distort the outcome of sexuality. One might say that, in the present evolutionary period,sexuality has no very important positive consequences whereas love has, and has had, many positive consequences for human individuals and human societies.
Without love, what happens? The use of drugs is an important case. Drugs constitute a going into oneself, away from others, a reduction in the capacity for relation to another person or other persons, including the infant as well as the adult. If in this way, the mother/infant relation fails or is distorted or inadequate, then the physical health of the child may be damaged - the mother may even transmit disease and addiction to the child - and even more importantly the child's maturation into a sociable, potentially loving adult is damaged. For adults, there is always a confrontation between the capacity for love and sexuality, the other-centred and the self-centred structure. The family, the group, the nation, ultimately depend for their strength on prevalence of an other-centred structure. If love is weakened or absent or replaced by drugs and sexuality, then the family, the group and ultimately the nation are weakened, on a path towards disintegration as the number of those who lack the capacity to love or replace it by drugs and sexuality increases.
The mother/infant relation, mother/infant love, was an evolutionarily virtuous circle; and the ontogenetic mother/infant relation, mother/infant love is a socially virtuous circle. The more adequate the mother/infant relation in developing the capacity for love, in serving the transmission of social and cultural structures to help the child to fit into the community in which it finds itself, the better able the future adult is to transfer the acquisitions both to participation in the community and to the relation with his/her own children and so on. Without love, there is an evolutionary and ontogenetic vicious circle. The distortion or absence of mother/infant love damages the capacity not only for normal adult love but also for all good empathetic relationships within the group, and then reduces the chances of an adequate future mother/infant, parent/infant relationship; sexuality and drugs in the absence of love in this generation lead to more sexuality and drugs without love in the next generation, and to the progressive disintegration of family, society and nation.
Offshoots of love? Insofar as love involves concern for the other rather than only for oneself, and softens and strengthens relations within the family, the group and the nation, then it tends to produce lasting beneficial changes, advances, which enrich the family, the group and the nation. Many of the cultural achievements of humanity derive from love or have been closely associated with love: poetry, song. music, painting, intellectual achievements of many kinds.
There remains one special attribution of love, religious love. Can there be religious love? This is said in the Western Christian tradition to take two forms: love thy neighbour and love God. Other religions have developed intense practices of the 'mystical' love of God, or of gods, though non-Christian religions place less or no emphasis on love of one's fellow-man as such. Love of one's neighbour, that is, love of those near to us, those who associate with us, can be seen as a plausible extension of love as a human capacity - in other terms, it would be extension to the group of love for another individual person, an overspill or offshoot of that love, related to the role of love as a socialising force described above in the mother/infant relation, though one would not expect the same intensity as in interpersonal love. The love of God is a more difficult idea. If love is a transfer of the self-centre, the centre of gravity of oneself, with the incorporation of a model of the other along with or in the model of one's self, then how can a model of God be said to be incorporated in or introduced alongside the model of one's self? What can we know about God or how can we empathetically perceive God? This remains a puzzle despite the voluminous writings of the mystics, both Christian and non- Christian.
CONCLUSION
Love has had a very good press for thousands of years (as the
quotations in the Annex show). A Martian might judge, and he would not be
far wrong, that love is the principal concern of humans. Nowadays
perhaps one may start to feel a growing disgust (or contempt) for this
preoccupation of humanity with the unceasing flow of popular songs,
magazine and tabloid newspaper articles on the theme of love (mostly
what Fromm would call 'pseudo-love'). Nevertheless we cannot ignore love
as an experience, as a fact; we cannot treat it as trivial, familiar and so
well understood. The power of love can tell us something about our
natures. Love is treated as an exciting mystery; Herbert Spencer said
that mind can be understood only by observing how mind evolved; one
might say similarly that love can be understood only by finding out how
love evolved. This paper is an essay towards this: it suggests that love
resulted from a combination based on what the Greeks called 
-
love between parents and children extended to apply to all forms of
other-regarding love; it depended on the growth, through language, of
the sense of one's own self and the self of others; empathy made possible
the visible, or visual, conversation between two persons, mirroring each
other, most obviously demonstrated in the smile reflected, back and
forth, by which the essence of love, the change in the neural
representation of oneself to incorporate a model of the other takes
place.
One could of course compose a panegyric of love, and many have done so. For example, love is the dissolution of the obsession of one's self; love is the road to understanding and the grasp of reality, the sympathy for existence; by loving we sense and know the reality and independence and beauty of others; intellect needs love to avoid losing itself in the dry desert; love needs intellect to escape drowning. We float with intellect; we quench our thirst with love. Love is a total state of organisation, Love is as specific for humanity as language. 'Love', as a principle of human existence, was a great discovery, a great gift. Love allows us to go beyond ourselves, overleap body, brain, mind, reach a Here-Now which is not our private Here-Now, a new dimension in which we can travel. Bertrand Russell in Marriage and Morals(1929) said that love was something far more than desire for sexual intercourse: it was the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. Love, the capacity to love and be loved, was an evolutionary step forward in man - a civilising, elevating experience.
Such is the kind of panegyric one could produce which could be criticised as ignoring the problems, the griefs, also associated with love. With it one might contrast the unsentimental possibility that if we come to understand better the process and state of love, through seeing how love may have developed phylogenetically and ontogenetically, then at some time in the future we may be able to produce a computer analog of love as the mutual interaction of two continually complexifying programs. A sad prospect!
ANNEX: Quotations
What is life, what delight is there, without golden Aphrodite? Mimnermus 600 BC
To love a thing means wanting it to live. Confucius 500 BC
Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods. Plato 400 BC
One word/ Frees us of all the weight and pain of life/ That word is love. Sophocles
Amantes amentes
Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. Catullus 50 BC
Me tamen urit amor
A new commandment I give unto you That ye love one another
Ardet amor cordis in antro. 10th century
This sweet little love which is fixed in the cloud of unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing
Though a man excels in everything, unless he has been a lover his life is lonely... a jewelled cup which can contain no wine. Yoshida Kenko c. 1330
Words have no language which can utter the secrets of love. Hafiz 14th century
Love is a great thing, a great good in every wise; it alone makes light every heavy thing and beareth evenly every uneven thing. Thomas A Kempis 1380-1471
Love is ane fervent fire Kindled without desire. Alexander Scott 1525-84
If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him... Because it was he, because it was my selfe. Montaigne 1533-1594
You are my all the world. Shakespeare 1564-1616
Love is a spirit all compact of fire.
Tell me where is fancy bred Or in the heart or in the head? How begot, how nourished? Reply, reply. It is engender'd in the eyes With gazing fed.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.
True love is a durable fire
Love is not love/ which alters where it alteration finds.
We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. Pascal 1623-1662
Il semble qu'on ait une toute autre âme quand on aime - on devient toute grandeur; dans l'amour on oubliait sa fortune, ses parents et ses amis.
Celle qu'on aime, elle entre en vous, dans le regard et dans le coeur, par sa voix, par tous ses gestes, on l'absorbe. On la dévine dans toutes les intentions de son sourire et de sa parole.
Alliance by blood or marriage is a frequent cause of war between Princes, and the nearer the kindred is, the greater is their disposition to quarrel. Jonathan Swift 1667-1745
Love has features which pierce all hearts. Voltaire 1694-1778
C'est l'étoffe de la nature que l'imagination a brodée.
Was ist das leben ohne Liebesglanz? Schiller 1759-1805
A life without love, without the presence of the beloved, is nothing but a mere magic-lantern show. Goethe 1749-1832
Das leben ist die Liebe.
Was du liebst, das lebst du. Fichte 1762-1814
Each strives to be the other and both together make up one whole. Coleridge 1772-1834
Liebe wintert nicht. Tieck 1773-1853
Lovers are traitors secretly striving to perpetuate all this misery and turmoil that otherwise would come to a timely end. Schopenhauer
Love is the only gold. Tennyson
There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness. Nietzsche
Love is the foundation of everything desirable or good. Peirce
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other. Rilke
Near the end of his life he [Freud] said that we know very little about love.
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. Bertrand Russell
Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things. E.M.Forster
One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life, the power of reunion of the separated. Tillich
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. Heinlein
Love is the pearl of life. Wittgenstein
This recognition of the other as a person, as another 'I' and lover is the decisive moment in the human experience of love. Martin D'Arcy
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self. Fromm
Whatever anthropologists may say I believe that falling in love is a real phenomenon. J.Z. Young
What would be the use of a neuroscience that cannot tell us anything about love?
REFERENCES