Neal's Workshop

I have previously defined meaningful statements: they are assertions that are either true by definition, known as tautologies, or they derive their meaning by way of testability. “A triangle has three sides” is a tautology. “I can fly” is a statement that be proved true or false.

"Love" must be one of the most commonly used but poorly understood words in the English language. What is love? What does it mean to love? When we say, "I love you", do we know what we’re saying?

Many have tried to explain love. There are songs aplenty about the subject. What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me. All you need is love. I will always love you. Love of my life. One revered Biblical passage oft cited that speaks to love is 1 Corinthians 13:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

It sounds beautiful, but does it make any sense? We are inundated with references to love, but where is the meaning?

I posit that love is quite simply an expression of value. "I love you” means that I value you.

My definition of love fails to be eloquent or poetic – indeed, it is downright utilitarian - but its strength and beauty is in this rugged simplicity. Love as value elucidates a concept abused to the brink of meaninglessness and obfuscated by media, culture and peers.

We express value through action. Loving someone means acting in their benefit. Loving something requires similar beneficial action. Not coincidentally, the act of love is selfish: it benefits you. The selfishness of love intuitively follows from understanding "love" as action on property: we wish to increase the value of that which is ours. Through interacting with other people or things we become stakeholders in those things, even if only briefly and relatively powerlessly so. In fact, if you stripped the selfishness away from love, loving others would be absurd; you could only love those if such interactions of love did not benefit you. Love is necessarily selfish.

As your stake in people or things increases, so also does your ability and incentive to love. With individuals like your spouse, parents or children, your stake grows exponentially. As a result, you would bear increasingly greater burdens to provide benefits to those you love. You would sacrifice your life for a spouse or child, but you wouldn’t for a random guy on the street. The difference between the two is love (As a sidenote, Patri Friedman just posted an interesting discussion on Love and Intrapersonal Utility Comparison over at Catallarchy).

If you understand love to mean value, common statements about love begin to fall into place. When someone tells you, “I love you,” they are simply expressing in three words something [that should be] evidenced by a wealth of action. A history of beneficial action by the lover is a prerequisite for “I love you” to have meaning: love without action is meaningless.

Armed with this understanding of love as value, I want to tackle two important questions. What does “Jesus/God loves you” really mean? And does love really make the world go ‘round.

Feel free to opine below: my proposed answers will be posted soon.