Which One Will You Choose: a ‘Determined’ or a ‘Free Will’ Love?
A famous and influential writer in American literature, Mark Twain, said in one of his quotes, “Love like you’ve never been hurt”. Some people may be able to live by doing this idea easily, but some may not. The idea about loving may also be a simple thing by some people, while for some others it could trigger some painful memories in the past. As an example of human behavior, loving itself is quite complex to be explained. But how do we look at this idea of “loving” in the perspectives of philosophy? How could “loving” be explained in relations with human’s past and present experiences? Can we see or even predict any patterns of “loving”?
Semantically, love is defined as a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection; while loving is defined as to have love or affection for another person – or be in love. Love is also defined as a desire to enter, maintain, or expand a close, connected, and ongoing relationship with another person (Reis & Aron, 2008). Basically, everyone has their own philosophies about loving which usually guide them to at least three things: 1) the qualities or characters they look for in the people they love; 2) the emotional needs they expect will be fulfilled by loving other people; and 3) the way they treat the people whom they love. Since loving is a form of human action, I will also give some explanations in the view of psychology, in addition to other explanations philosophically related to human’s past and present experiences.
The behavior of loving someone is usually started with an attraction. Harville Hendrix, founder of Imago Therapy, described that psychologically, some people are so attractive to us in part because they embody not only the best, but also the worst emotional characteristics of our parents (Page, 2012). All of us have unresolved childhood hurts due to betrayal, anger, manipulation, or abuse. So unconsciously, people seek healing through their partner and try to achieve this healing by bonding with someone they sense might “hurt” them in similar ways to how they were hurt as children, in the hope that they can then convince their partners to finally love and accept them. Our conscious self is drawn to the positive qualities we yearn for, but our unconscious draws us to the qualities which remind us of how we were wounded the most (Page, 2012).
The explanations above offer us to see how humans are formed by their past. Even though they do attempt to consciously seek for what they want in reality from a partner, but unconsciously their wounds from the past guide them back to what they belong to – their unresolved childhood hurts – anyway. In the view of philosophy, this kind of perspective is called determinism, a paradigm that believes past events really do continue to exercise control over future ones (Rosenberg, 2012). Determinism argues that past events do so, not just because they have brought about the present state, but because no matter what the present state is like, future states could only have been brought about by a certain history (Rosenberg, 2012).
Another psychology theory called parental acceptance rejection theory (PARTheory) also thinks that the remembered childhood experiences of parental acceptance mediate or moderate the relation between perceived intimate-partner acceptance and the psychological adjustment of a person. Moreover, rejected children and adults are likely to seek, create, interpret, or perceive experiences, situations, and relationships in ways that are consistent with their distorted mental representations (Parmar & Rohner, 2005). From this explanations we can also see that the basic of how human actions are done is still their histories – which also shows that humans are always reflective – to be able to get the meaning of their life experiences and to fulfill their biologically based emotional needs. These needs include an emotional wish, desire, or yearning (whether consciously recognized or not) for comfort, support, care, concern, nurturance, and overall positive regard from people with whom they have affectional bonds of attachment (Parmar & Rohner, 2005).
By these arguments of what determinism brings related to loving as a human action, then comes another questions to ponder: do us human really that predictable? Will we always just follow (consciously or unconsciously) the patterns of what we have done in the past? Do these parts of determinism explanations about human actions indicate the absence of free will, specifically in choosing how and whom to love? Isn’t history itself has an ultimate goal which is freedom: liberating humans in order to make them able to expend their potentials? Or isn’t social science like psychology has a different goal from natural science, which is not limited only to make predictions about human actions, but moreover to improve human life by disclosing various meanings contained in their behavior?
If we look at the explanations above about loving, there is a part of causality which reveals that human actions can be done because they are performed by the nerve cells, or specifically these theories argues that it is our biologically based emotional needs which drive us to be attracted and to love someone; not the free will we have inside. Some people I know sometimes admit that it seems like they always discover the same emotional qualities as their previous partners, which lead them again to their past mistakes. They have no idea at all that their attractions are still towards the unconscious needs, and their choices are made driven by some unknown forces inside. These arguments seem to make us see that there are repeated patterns of human actions which constrain them to realize that they do have free will to help them choose which directions to take.
Another issue related to these phenomena is self-acceptance, and ironically, Page (2012) said that the less we accept who we really are, the more we'll be attracted to people who share a similar ambivalence toward us. The disappointments and failures that some people often met, made them learn to stop trusting. They would rather choose to tell themselves it’s hopeless, while they secretly long to be proven wrong at the same time. After too many rejections, people often decide to hide their truest selves and suggest themselves to put the “case closed” signs on the memories; but unfortunately, that almost never works (Page, 2012).
Social science, especially psychology, really has a part to reveal these deep meanings behind every human actions in order to finally improve human life. We as the scientists whom are directly involved in the field of psychology, are not only expected to be able to explain human actions or make human life better, but also do what philosophy called emancipation. The emancipation that critical theory aims at is a “free-speech” situation in which all participants will ultimately agree, owing to the absence of deforming and controlling forces that limit human reason from its proper function (Rosenberg, 2012). Social scientists or psychologists are needed to help people see that their disappointments and hurts in the past do not determine that their future will be the same. Thus, the function of psychological theories are not only to explain why those pain that children get will be brought up to their adulthood; but also what qualities (such as free will, strengths, hope towards love and life, etc.) human has inside themselves to help them cope, and how they can accept those pain, as well as learn to use those positive qualities to make their lives better.
My analysis is that indeed we human are always reflective as we tend to search or even construct meaning from every experience we have, but explaining loving as a human action only from the past rather than the possibilities that we can also try to have a better future, is rather reductionist. The intelligibility of human actions should also be seen as an attempt to change the past to embrace a better future, and that means humans have the ability to change. Humans do have free will and are more complex than just a product of what their past may bring. So, to see loving – or any other examples of behavior – as a human action, we need to have a holistic perspective to understand that humans are subjective as well as objective, and we need those two points of view most of the time.
Intellectual “binocularity” argues that to understand what sorts of beings we are, means to see ourselves as both free subjects and as determined objects, and to accept that we aren’t wired for seeing ourselves in both ways at once because it’s not easy to achieve (Parens, 2014). A kind of behavior like loving someone may make some people see monocularly a part of themselves that are formed by their past experiences, but what’s important is that using this point of view alone can lead us to pernicious mistakes of limiting ourselves and our positive qualities. We need to also look from another ‘monocular lense’, to appreciate ourselves more and realize that we are able to make choices freely. Just like how we try to see ourselves through this binocularity, seeing others as well as their actions through this concept will also help us understand them deeply and thoroughly.
Social science is now on its way towards more and more promising progress of making human life better. There are a lot of researches about love in psychology which have given considerable growth to the point where uniquely psychological perspective on love can be identified (Reis & Aron, 2008). As in social science it is also important to differ reasons from causes, the next psychological research are expected to help bring out new ideas of more empirical or mechanistic explanations while still keeping the true meaning which underlies human actions. However, there are still some areas of human behavior in psychology – or any other social science – that can’t be explained simply by mechanisms or experiments. Thus, paying attention to human differences, context and meanings should always be kept in mind by social scientists, while still being objective by giving theoretically valid and reliable explanations.
“..and in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make”.
Human is a complex being who creates and feels every meaning of life continuously. If we believe that we are able to make changes, then the universe will equally follow the rhymes we make. So whatever kinds of past or failures someone has, he or she is still has the right to make choices freely; to hope for a brighter day; to experience a ‘free will’ love.
Love [Def. 2]. (n.d.). Dictionary Reference. Retrieved on October 26, 2014, from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/love.
Page, K. (2012, May 13). How to develop your attraction to the right person. Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-love/201205/how-develop-your-attraction-the-right-person.
Parens, E. (2014, September 28). The benefits of ‘binocularity’. Retrieved from: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/the-benefits-of-binocularity/.
Parmar, P., & Rohner, R. P. (2005). Relations among perceived intimate partner acceptance, remembered parental acceptance, and psychological adjustment among young adults in India. Ethos, 33(3), 402-413. doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4497901.
Reis, H. T, & Aron, A. (2008). Love: what is it, why does it matter, and how does it operate? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(1), 80-86. doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40212231.
Rosenberg, A. (2012). Philosophy of social science (4th ed.). Colorado: Westview Press.
