(http://neurology.about.com/od/NervousSystem/a/The-Brain-In-Love.htm)
More and more the common reductionist view about love held by science is becoming normalized and accepted as cause and case. It is a biological process. Chemicals of the brain
(dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin), hormones, the firing of neurons: a bond that can be broken down into areas of the brain that experience pleasure when two people are near physically or mentally. This is love, it is well accepted.
Generally, those who parrot these sentiments and discoveries
have not offered much to the intellectual-cause itself. They have seen images
of brains lighting up or read reports that this hormone or chemical is found at
elevated levels when two lovers are in proximity, thus love is nothing more
than a body state. Ah good, let’s put a nail in Aphrodite’s coffin and move on.
This view fully objectifies reality as observable,
measurable phenomenon and denies the transcendence of personal experience—as well
as narrowly defining love to an extraordinarily narrow and contemporary view,
ignoring past attached connotations of fealty, loyalty, kinship, admiration, and
respect. The notion of ‘love thy neighbor’, for example, is a rather difficult
one to reduce to body states, as is the idea of ‘love of wisdom’ (philosophy).
The science of love pretends that love is fully concrete and not having its
origins and experiential power as an abstraction that describes a drive beyond
what is attainable—a commitment that needs continuous re-kindling of passion.
The contemporary satisfaction that we seem to experience as
a society in being able to ‘locate love’ in the body speaks volumes, however it
tells us more about our societal values than it does about love. We have become too easily pacified by the
merely quantitative, observable, testable world of science. The narrative powers and explanatory mysticism
of published scientific language and discoveries has authority over the value
of experience itself—the ‘what it is like to be in love’ aspect of love, which in
everyday experience should seem to be the part that holds more value.
What becomes of the
place holder for ‘love’ as the ideal of personal commitment and perpetual
striving? Love is instead a highly personal affair in the most literal sense
imaginable: it is an individual’s body state in a certain circumstance or
proximity—at its very best it is viewed here as a historically poeticized and
healthy addiction.
For most, that is, those not doing the hard work of the scientist, the scientific answer offers us the simple ‘Aha’
answer that we can catalog and put to rest the question. In the words of Nietzsche, I must protest that, "it is not more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance." What part of our lives does not rely upon the charms and security of appearance? Indeed, reading the reports of studies pushes us no closer to the truth of love than ever we were; it only re-brands the experience under the grounds of reductionism and materialism and removes the value of the non-scientific input.
In experience, the concept of love does not contain a single
morsel of what the biologist or neuroscientist defines love to be—but rather it
contains a whole world of doubts, worries, desires, expectations, and striving
that exceed any measurable analysis that nullifies the subject / object
relationship in any observable field, thus alluding measurable analysis. Any
objective, explanatory language might point toward some definite world event
but the simplification leads only to an objective falsification.
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