Love is a Choice

1 Lissette Conty April 16, 16 Senior Research Love is a Choice In this paper I am going to explore the idea that love is a choice. Not only is love a choice, but it is also an extremely important choice that affects your everyday life. This is an existentialist perspective where we will use existentialism to look at love as a choice in itself. Also we will look at the opposing view where we may think that love may or may not be something that we have control over like parental love. In this paper I look at many thoughts first I will start with existentialism. This will set the framework for my paper because the point that I am trying to get across is that love in itself is a choice. I also talk about bad faith because sometimes as humans we don’t like to take responsibility for our actions. Sometimes we feel that the world is against us when usually it is usually us fighting against ourselves. For example people who stay in horrible relationships, despite being unhappy. I also go over Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, and L.A. Paul’s transformative experience because the concepts play pivotal roles in our love choices. L.A. Paul’s transformative experience and the leap of faith are two things that we don’t realize are at play when we make these love decisions. We take these chances sometimes in loving a person and in this choice you can't know the outcome. We as people can't see what will happen tomorrow or a week from tomorrow so we also don’t know how our choices will turn out. I also go over the opposing view of parent child familial love, in that section I plan to stress that love in all cases is a choice. I take this angle because I feel that there is 2 no way that you can claim that love is a choice in itself when in romantic situations, and then do the complete opposite for family love. I feel that all love is a choice, and though my paper focuses more on romantic love I feel that it is important to understand that all love is a choice including familial love. In the section, What Love Looks Like, I go over what I think love looks like and how I think it operates. I quote Irene McMullen’s work I feel that the way she talks about love is special and she puts into words what love actually is, which is helping the person you love become their ideal self. This fits into love in so many ways because when you love someone you always want the best for them, you do your best to help them reach their goals, so the section is about how love works and the little things you do in love, without realizing that it is you who is actively choosing to do these things. In the sections, being in debt of love, love believes all things, and love hopes all things are where I analyze Kierkegaard’s works of love and relate them to today. I try to understand what he is saying and relate it to experiences that I’ve seen. I also of course relate all his ideas back to choice as well. I end my paper with the ideas of love, fear, choice, the leap of faith and they are all connected. Also in analyzing Kierkegaard’s talks about love, looking past the instances that he talks about religious love. Kierkegaard talks about what love is while always talking about how it’s a choice. I want to state that love is a choice in all love choices and in all love cases. In this paper the love I want to focus on is romantic love, the love between a person and another or others, the idea of love as a personal choice, but I also take a broader view when talking about my alternative viewpoint. 3 Existentialism In this section I will go over the basics of existentialism, starting with the five basic themes and relating them to love. “The Five Themes of Existentialism “Existence precedes essence. What you are (your essence) is the result of your choices (your existence) rather than the reverse. Essence is not destiny. You are what you make yourself to be.” (Flynn pg.8). You create the your love. Loves existence isn’t determined by essence because it’s essence comes after the fact. It’s the idea that you are in control of your love experience, like when you’re driving and have control over a vehicle for example. The car can decide where to take you, you decide where you want to go. “Time is of the essence. We are fundamentally time-bound beings. Unlike measurable, ‘clock’ time, lived time is qualitative: the ‘not yet’, and the ‘already’, and the ‘present’ differ among themselves in meaning and value.” (Flynn pg.8). The idea that time is of the essence is like how we have to make love choices because we as people are finite. “Humanism. Existentialism is a person-centered philosophy. Though not anti-science, it focuses on the human identity and meaning amidst the social and economic pressures of mass society for superficiality and conformity.” (Flynn pg.8). Humanism focuses on human identity, and love has a similar role in our lives. Choosing to love has a way of turning us into the people that we want to become. Loving and being in love has this way of making itself part of your identity, for example when you post your relationship on social media. You are no longer single, part of your identity becomes your relationship. 4 “Freedom/responsibility. Existentialism is a philosophy of freedom. Its basis is the fact that we can stand back from our lives and reflect on what we have been doing. In this sense, we are always ‘more’ than ourselves. But we are as responsible as we are free.” (Flynn pg.8). Freedom and responsibility relate to love because you are responsible for your own love, you can make it great you can make it horrible. You have a freedom to choose who you love, and what happens after is you’re responsible for. A better way to explain this is like the movie Troy where Paris falls in love with Helen and then a war breaks out. “Ethical considerations are paramount. Though each existentialist understands the ethical as with ‘freedom’, in his or her own way, the underlying concern is to invite us to examine the authenticity of our personal lives and our society” (Flynn pg.8). in love we look at the nature of its authenticity. We as people do this a lot we test love, especially in the beginning stages of love when we in fact are wondering if we are in love. Another way to look at this is when we invite a person into our live, maybe an aspect that they haven’t seen about you like meeting your significant others parents for the first time. Choices manifest themselves in many ways like when we ask for advice, Sartre talks about an instance when someone came to him for advice and then in turn he told them that in seeking him for advice they already had an idea of what they wanted to do. “But if you consult a priest, for instance, it’s you who has chosen him, and you already know in your heart, more or less, what advice he is likely to give. In other words, to choose one’s adviser is only another way to commit oneself.” (Sartre Pg. 33). This is like when you go to someone for advice, like your mom you kind of have and idea of what it is that she is going to tell you. This in itself shows that choices are present even when we 5 don’t think that they are. I can attest to this because every time I ask my older sister for advice I don’t follow her advice, I do whatever I wanted to do in the first place. Even in the act of not choosing you are in fact still choosing. “I can always choose, but I must also realize that, if I decide not to choose, that still constitutes a choice” (Sartre pg.44). Existentialists believe that, “Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.”(Sartre pg. 37). You are the one that can make your future, and we, as people are projects that are on going and ever changing. We fall in and out of love; we make decisions with purpose and some without. It is the choices that define us, we as people aren’t born all knowing we learn through experience. Existentialism is the concept in philosophy that allows for human error, in an understanding way. Also in this paper I refer to the ‘bad faith’. Bad faith is something that Sartre talks about in his existentialist works. Bad faith is the idea of living a lie, living a lie in the sense that someone can call you out on your actions. “Any man who fabricates some deterministic theory is operating in bad faith.” (Sartre pr. 47). Someone who lives in bad faith is someone who refuses to take responsibility for his or her actions. Like Pam in the first two seasons of the Office where she refuses to believe that she is in love with Jim. Another example might be like a cruel king that believes that he is merciful. Someone might be tempted to wonder why not live in bad faith, “‘What if we want to be in bad faith?’ I would reply, ‘There is no reason why you should not be, but I declare that you are, and that strictly consistent attitude alone demonstrates good faith.’” (Sartre Pg. 48). Sartre believes that no one should or would actually want to live in bad 6 faith. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you that you’re living in bad faith in order to realize it. It’s the idea that no one should want to live a lie, like with the example of Pam and Jim from the Office, Pam regretted not admitting how she felt for Jim earlier. Leap of Faith and Transformative Experience Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is “What Kierkegaard is talking about expresses what one might call a ‘conversion’ experience, where the decisive move is not purely intellectual but a matter of feeling (what Kierkegaard calls ‘passion’) as well. Such is the nature of the so-called ‘blind leap’ of faith that catapults one into the religious sphere of existence, […] but it applies equally to other fundamental ‘turnings’ in a person’s life, from a basic change in one’s political convictions to falling in love.” (Flynn pg. 11-12). Flynn articulates what a leap of faith is perfectly. I like when he talks about the non-rational aspect of a leap of faith. The leap of faith is just what it’s called; it's taking a chance. In love we take so many chances we can't possibly know the outcome, not just the outcome but there’s also the point where we may not know who it is that we’re in love with but we take that existential leap one where we just are hoping for the best. The leap of faith is a choice, it’s like a metaphorical crossroads where you can either turn back or take a chance. Then there is a Transformative Experience, there are two ways that an experience can be transformative, personally transformative, and epistemically transformative. “Experiences […] have two ways of being transformative. They can be epistemically transformative, giving you new information in virtue of your experience. And they can be personally transformative experiences, changing how you experience being who you are. 7 “ (L.A. Paul pg. 17). A transformative experience is both together. Love is capable of being both it is just determinant on how serious you take the love experience because each one is different. Transformative experiences are like leaps of faith, just in a different way. L.A. Paul highlights an events rather than a passion as Kierkegaard does. L.A. Paul focuses on moments that will add up to a transformative experience like having a baby, or getting married but a myriad of things can equal a transformative experience. The two are synonymous except for the fact that L.A. Paul tries to use specific moments to articulate a transformative experience but I feel that it generalizes a transformative experience. I don’t see Kierkegaard doing the same. When he focuses on faith, which is the part that isn’t rational he feels that you need faith in order to kind of get the full experience. I think that they’re both getting at the same argument just in different ways Kierkegaard focusing on big moments where the end isn’t always plausible, where L.A. Paul focuses on specific moments and chances. Opposing View to my Argument My alternate view is the parent and child love dynamic. In this relationship between parent and child love doesn’t necessarily feel like a choice, it also isn’t perceived as a choice. When we think about the parent and child love dynamic we just have this innate perception that we just love our parent or child. In reality though this love too is a choice. A parent chooses to love their child, just as a child chooses to love or not love a parent. “Further support for the no-reasons view comes from parental love. It seems that parents just love their children. They love their children in the absence of a 8 shared history of value. And they love their children who have few good properties other than potential and cuteness. The only plausible justification for parental love is that ‘he’s mine’. Some think that this amounts to a justification. But it looks like a mere explanation. If this fails as a justification, then it suggests that some forms of love, namely parental love, are not justifiable. The crucial question, as we noted earlier, is whether romantic love is similar.” (Smuts pg. 523). Smuts talks about the concept of shared history, being necessary to love a child. He talks about how what really happens when asked why someone loves their child they say something like “he’s mine”. So this is what makes it a choice, you are choosing to love your child because he or she is yours. With this idea of loving something because it comes from you makes the choice to love easier. Being a parent or a child doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to love your parent or child. This choice although harder to make than who to fall in love with is still a choice. Some examples that explain this are, the mother that doesn’t love their child because they aren’t the right sex. In some cultures if a daughter is born instead of a boy they are cast aside and aren’t treated as well as a wanted child. To love or not love your child is a choice, this isn’t to say by any means that its okay to not love a child but it is a choice. Another example is when a child loves their parent even when their parent, isn’t a morally good person. Some children have parents that have drug problems and make bad choices and a child may choose to hate their parent for this, or they may choose to love them beyond their issues. We can’t simply allow this idea that we must love our parents and our children dictate our lives. It is understandable that under societal norms this is what is done, but 9 there are special cases. There are times when acts are unforgivable, or people are unforgivable and you make a choice to love or not love that person anymore. This is not to say that the decision to love or not love is easy but it is a choice. Smut’s argument talks about a shared history, but this shared history isn’t always a necessity but the shared history does help the child decide. This idea that as a child you must love your parent it’s like the idea that existence precedes essence. As though we are born loving, and loved. Yet there are ideas that support the contrary. Its like when a parent chooses to love a child, we can't simply say that we have no choice in the matter because that would be living in what Sartre calls bad faith. What Love looks Like In this section I talk about what I think love looks like, “Genuine love fosters a responsible stance toward the human condition because rather than hiding from their lack of identity, both parties promise to help each other face this condition together.” (McMullen 109). Loving someone takes a lot of effort, and time but even in that you’re making that solid decision to put in that effort and make that time. If you don’t make those decisions then the feelings don’t come. If the feelings don’t come then you haven’t made the right choices to get there, “Genuine love is a call to the other person’s inner potential to be himself—a self I have put myself in the service of evoking. In genuine love the other person sees me in light of my ideal self and helps me in my striving to become it. Love promotes and nurtures the struggle to become a more perfect version of oneself, and it does so by sharing in both the 10 values that one is striving to instantiate and the daily work involved in that striving.” (McMullen 108). When you are in love you make love choices. Yet some decisions don’t seem like a choice, when you’re in love. When you’re in love it just seems like you’re doing things, like moving somewhere for someone because when you love someone you want to be anywhere that they are. So when faced with the option of moving somewhere to be with them it doesn’t even seem like a choice, it seems like something that needs to be done in order to maintain the relationship. Another example might be like when someone asks you why it is that you are in love. This is a complex question, in this you are faced with examining why you are in love. The first thing you do when faced with such a question is most likely start naming intrinsic qualities that stand out. In naming these qualities you are defending the choice you have made. This like when we get in trouble as kids and someone asks why you did something. What they are really asking is for you to defend the choice you made, which is what most people and children who get in trouble attempt to do. So the answer to the question of why or how you fell in love is a form of defense for the choice that you have made. This is why some people might not think of love as an active choice; because you’re doing something that seems completely natural. When faced with the question of why you love someone the answer is never because I wanted to, or that’s my choice, but because you love him or her. This is a type of natural choice. It is hidden and seems natural so much so that we have turned love into this mysterious concept. In love you don’t always have to share in the values with someone, and sometimes you don’t but you’ve made the active choice to love this person. When I say a 11 natural choice I mean it in an instinctive way, you act without thinking. It all becomes somewhat habitual; an example of this is like kissing your partner every night before bed. You don’t think about it, you just do it. The idea is that you do without a second thought. Love apart from sometimes having moments where choices seem natural, has moments where the choice aspect is blatant. I’ve actually seen this in many ways; one was when a Catholic woman fell in love with a Jehovah’s Witness. This may not seem like a big choice, but to these people their faith was extremely important. In the scheme of religion these two have a lot of differences. Yet these two managed to get beyond that. They don’t see eye to eye in their religious views but they made that conscious decision to be together anyways. This says that choices matter and sometimes those choices don’t relate to your history. This coincides with Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, because in this relationship at least both of these people are taking risks. In order for this man to marry this catholic woman he had to go through this period where no one is allowed to talk to him, simply because what he did was frowned upon. This woman couldn’t remarry in the Catholic Church obviously because since she was divorced (and you aren’t supposed to get divorced). These people still made this conscious choice to be together and love each other despite all the obstacles that were in their paths. This is what makes love a choice, most people wouldn’t go through all the trouble if they didn’t love someone or didn’t care for them. Going back to McMullen’s point love is a choice to help someone become his or her ideal self. Sometimes we lose sight of that because we look for deeper reasons to do things. As person I know how easy it is to complicate things, we look for deeper reasons than just allowing choice to be the answer. We try to turn love into some idea that we 12 want to decipher, when it is as simple as choosing a person everyday. Choosing a person and helping them reach their ideal self, and them choosing to do the same for you. Being In Debt of Love When Kierkegaard talks about being in this debt of love he talks about how when you truly love someone you crave to be in debt to him or her. What he means is somewhat like a personal I owe you. The idea of being in debt of love is like a positive outlook on credit card debt, except for being in debt of love is way better than credit card debt. When in credit card debt you get constant calls from bill collectors and they seem to call you more than your real love calls (this is probably because current love is now based in social media and text). He talks about love in the infinite sense he gives this example of this arrow that just keeps going pressing infinitely on. The infinitude of love coincides with the infinitude of debt. As long as you are in debt and keep on wanting to be in debt you are in the scheme of infinite love. Yet although love is infinite and this “arrow” keeps on going there are things that can stop it. The first thing that Kierkegaard mentions is comparison. He talks about comparison, and simply in the way he talks about it you can see that it is obviously quite horrible. “Comparison is like the neighbor’s swampy ground; even if your house is not built upon it, it sinks just the same. Comparison is like the hidden worm, which consumes in secret and does not die, at least not before it has taken the life out of love. Comparison is a loathsome rash which has turned in and is eating at the marrow. Watch out, therefore, for comparison in your love!” (Kierkegaard pg. 181). 13 So comparison is a murderous force that puts a halt to love and is the way out of debt. When you’re in debt and wanting to be more in debt that is a symbol that your love is growing. Now lets talk about the debt, when I started reading I believed that the debt he speaks of were little acts of kindness. Like bringing the person you love breakfast in bed or something in that way. Yet his love is something far more complex, it’s non-calculating, so if you are trying to figure it out you somehow are already getting it wrong. So in this sense I’m somewhat convinced that this debt is a state of mind, like we choose someone and then we get these ideas. Ideas like always wanting them around and always wanting them to need us. I like when he talks about the person that tries to figure it out, because it seems that the logical person has already done something wrong. “To calculate with an infinite magnitude is impossible for calculation means to precisely to utilize finite categories,” (Kierkegaard 174). I think he’s saying that yes, you choose who, but that there’s something afterward that just happens and that the love is infinite so in trying to calculate it you are not getting at what love really is. I truly wonder what Carrie Jenkins would say to this point? Since her point is to find the metaphysical aspect that is love, like the idea that a date or even marriage can equal love. When Kierkegaard is simply saying that you can’t calculate something that is infinite, and if you can't calculate it is it possible to categorize it the way that she does in a list? In response to him I think that she would agree that love has the possibility to be infinite because her argument is one that you can love more than one person. At least this 14 is what her paper Modal Monogamy is about, but she also has things that she list are things that somewhat show that someone is in love. The list that she has in place are things that you do when you’re in “love” and some things are like going out on dates and getting married, but her list aren’t really deep. Her lists are composed of ideas that are taken as societal norms. So I believe that Kierkegaard wouldn’t like her argument, but I think that she would like his about being in debt in love. Love Builds up In order for love to build up we must start with the foundation. The foundation of love is presupposing love. When he says presupposing and when I use it in this paper I believe that he means that we must assume that it (love) is already present. This is the foundation that lays bare that we build upon, if we don’t presuppose then we are guessing and probably wondering if they love us back and so on. In order to get to the loving in feel that Kierkegaard is building this idea of presupposition, and although with this idea it may seem that he is referring to love as one-sided but that isn’t true at all and I will address that issue in the next section. So in presupposing love, you have this idea of love. He talks about mutual love briefly but he talks a lot about presupposing. In presupposing you’re just making this claim that there is love here and then you keep going. It goes hand in hand with the idea of calculation, which can’t be done. Like this whole idea that if you’re thinking and wondering if love is there, you’re already doing it wrong. The right way is this idea of presupposition. Which makes sense, because if you think about it when you love someone. Yes the simple fact if they love you is very important, but should that hold you back from loving them? 15 I think that Kierkegaard would say no to this. I believe this because in the idea of presupposing love you’re taking this leap of faith; you’re taking a chance. “The lover presupposes that love is in the other persons heart, and by this very presupposition he builds up in him from the ground up, insofar as love he presupposes it present as the ground.” (Kierkegaard pg. 206). I think what Kierkegaard is saying that if you love someone, the only way to go about it is to have faith in it all. Frankly there is no way of truly knowing what will come about, you just have to do it and then see. That point leads me to another philosopher L.A. Paul. She talks about how there are experiences that need to be had, that change you and not only do they change you but you can’t really know how they will turn out. Such experiences that L.A. Paul talks about are having a child, getting married (for more than a year), and so on. “In cases of transformative choice is that, given the way the decision is naturally framed, you lack the ability to rationally determine the subjective values of the relevant outcomes, both because you cannot assign them at the outset and because the experience will change you in ways unknown.” (L.A. Paul pg. 33). This here talks about how when you go to make certain choices you can't know the out come and what impact it will have on you and rational choice making cannot essentially help you. I relate the idea to Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, because as L.A. Paul does she comes to her transformative choices quite rationally, then she goes and makes the decision. Yes she may refer to someone who has experience in the matter, for example in her talk about having a child for the first time you can talk to someone and ask them what its like. Yet the experience can’t be exactly the same for you, because you are two different people. Your children will be vastly different, the process might be harder, and 16 it may even be considerably easier. So what then? All that’s left is chance, a sort of leap of faith that must be taken. You take decision, knowing what you want but not knowing the outcome. Love believes all things When Kierkegaard talks about love believing all things he addresses the issues of trust, mistrust, knowledge, and deception. “The lover chooses to believe all things, that is, he reveals his love.” (Kierkegaard pg. 216). This quote here refers to the lover makes this choice. I can understand this because when someone is in love they choose to believe whatever their lover says. Of course this statement is true, because it is in fact a choice to believe someone, but there is also this sort of faith in it as well. When you trust someone, or love him or her you you’re giving the other person the benefit of the doubt. I do appreciate how Kierkegaard addresses knowledge, like his idea that knowledge is pure and that having knowledge. "Love is the very, opposite of mistrust, and yet it is initiated in the same knowledge. In knowledge the two are, so to speak, not distinguished from each other (in the ultimate understanding knowledge is indifferent); only in conclusion and decision in faith (to believe all things, to believe nothing), are they directly opposite to one another. When love believes all things, it is not at all in the same sense as frivolity, inexperience, simplicity, which believes all things on the grounds of naïveté and ignorance. No, above all, love knows better than anyone else everything that mistrust knows, yet without being mistrustful; love knows what experience knows, but it also knows that what men call experience is really a mixture of mistrust and love.” (Kierkegaard pg. 216). This quote here addresses knowledge, as something that has no part in love 17 because it is indifferent. Not just that but he talks about love believing in all things, and not in the frivolous sense, and not in inexperience. When he talks about this it makes me think about how you can't just believe all things and say that, that in itself is love. Towards the end of the quote he talks about experience and how experience knows that love is this mixture of mistrust and love. I wonder why he says this, because later in the reading he talks about mistrusting and when you live in mistrust you live this half-life. I do understand that once you’ve already loved before you know what not to do. Yet then you’re putting your past in the way of your future. Or is that maybe you use the mistrust as a meter to judge on future matters? Love Hopes all things In this section I go over how love hopes all things. Kierkegaard takes a very broad view at this; his view isn’t solely on romantic love though he does make some mention of it. “But to hope all things in love is the opposite of despairingly hoping nothing at all, either for oneself or for others. To hope all things or, which is the same, to hope always. At first glance it might seem as if to hope all things were something which could be done once for all,” (Kierkegaard pg. 233). Kierkegaard talks about hoping all things in love, because in hoping all things in love you open up yourself to the possibilities of love. It seems like he is talking about always looking for the good within someone. In love we always look for the good, when you love someone you look past their flaws. I relate what he is saying to love because it makes sense when you think about seeing the good when you’re in love; it’s a natural idea. When you love someone you look past the their shortcomings. Kierkegaard though takes this idea and says that we should apply it to everyone he felt that to be a true lover you had to feel this way about 18 everyone. In love we have to have a positive outlook. What love that has a negative outlook lasted? Love is a choice. Hoping in love is also a choice. There are many choices in life but these moments of hope and love cross your path, it is a serious moment. These are the moments that as adults and we will look back upon, and either cherish or regret, these are the moments that we will grow from. I love how Kierkegaard places the importance on hope, in hoping all things you open yourself up to possibility and possibilities are like little moments that turn into pivotal life moments. The person who hopes like the person who loves is never deceived. He talks about how hope and when looked at by older generations they relate it to youthfulness, this idea that you have more hope when you are younger. “Experience speaks admonishingly about hope, as if it were only youthfulness, as if this were what it is to hope, like dancing, some youthful something for which adults have neither liking nor lightness. To be sure, to hope certainly means to make oneself light by the help of the eternal; hope depends on the possibility of the good.” (Kierkegaard pg. 235). In this quote he is talking about how hope is seen as something that young people have, but he’s saying that this is a misconception of the word, a misconception of the concept. Hope does have a lot in common with youthfulness; this is because when we are young we are more open to possibilities and hope. This is prevalent in a lot of younger people, when you’re young you give people more chances; you fall in love more than once. If you talk to an older person they don’t hope to fall in love all over again, they think they’re too old, and they have already given up that hope. When you open yourself up to hope you also open yourself up to possibility. 19 “Everyone who lives without possibility is in despair; he breaks with the eternal; he arbitrarily closes off possibility and without the assent of eternity makes an end where the end is not, instead of doing as one who takes dictation and continually keeps his pencil ready for the next words so that he does not presume to put down a period meaninglessly before meaning is complete or rebelliously throw the pencil away.” (Kierkegaard pg. 236). In order to have possibility you need hope, so if there is no hope you close yourself off to possibility. I relate this to love because when you lose hope in love, you close yourself off to possibility and the only way that a person with no hope can find love is if a person who loves all and hopes all comes upon them. Yet then this idea would become the plot of a romantic comedy like 500 Days of Summer where a man full of love and hope falls for a girl who simply has no hope due to her upbringing. So since choosing to hope is choosing to open yourself to possibility, and when you’re opening yourself to possibility you are opening yourself to love possibilities and love choices. Fear/Choice/Love and leap of faith All things considered love is a choice, but other things come into play when you love. In love you have all the things that come before and after the fact, and fear is one of those things. Can you imagine being in love, and having your heart-broken? This factor plays a role in our decision-making. If allowed fear can consume our hope and keep us from making choices that may alter our lives for the good. Kierkegaard talks about this when he explains how love hopes all things. He talks about how out of possibility comes the chance for fear. Fear consumes us in many ways it can ruin a relationship, like when someone fears commitment or doesn’t have a positive outlook on their love future. 20 In love there is a choice, and we must acknowledge this to move forward in life and in love. If we allow the world to take control then it is like letting go of the steering wheel when we drive, and unless you have an autopilot feature and drive a tesla you are just setting yourself up for disaster. In loving someone if we take out choice then leave it up to destiny that in an existentialist view is something that you don’t want to do. A choice is making a decision; in love sometimes decisions are hard sometimes you have to make choices like walking away from something that isn’t good anymore. Like someone who doesn’t treat you the way you feel you should be treated. I wonder if it is because of the weight-baring consequences that people don’t want to own up to their love decisions. In love there is a leap of faith that must be taken, it is a leap of faith because you can't figure the outcome. You can’t possibly know if this love will be phenomenal or trivial until you have taken that leap. Conclusion In essence I started this project last semester at Stetson and ended up confused. At the end of my research I didn’t know if love was a feeling, or a mixture of feelings and the ability to choose rationally. Then I came back this semester and decided to expand on my past research. The concept of love has always been something that interested me, for many reasons. The main reason for my interest was that I was in love but my relationship at the time wasn’t reflecting it. At the time I felt that if I could figure out what love was I would be able to decipher it get to the root of my problems in love and fix them. I never did come to a clear conclusion about why my relationship was so horrible at the time but I figured out what was keeping me there. What was keeping me there was, I was actively choosing to stay and I stayed even when a lot of people told me I shouldn’t have. It 21 wasn’t until I read Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre that love started to make sense. Kierkegaard opened my eyes to love; his way of looking at love although at times it took a religious turn it was a deep love. I felt like I could relate to a lot of the concepts that he talked about like when love hopes all and being in debt of love. Heidegger opened me up to existentialism, we read him during department seminar and when reading him existentialism made sense. Sartre with Existentialism is a Humanism opened me up to the idea of choice; I wouldn’t have been able to put the pieces together without first reading Heidegger. Overall in writing this paper I learned a lot, especially where I stand on the topic of love. I also learned that I like existentialist philosophy because it is person centered philosophy that allows you to make choices. Love is a choice, and in all sections I analyze choice in a different way, in my opposing view I argue that familial love is a choice, we can choose to love our children and our parents. Granted to not love a child or a parent isn’t the easiest thing to do, but some people have their reasons and that is why we can’t deny that there is choice. In the section titled What Love Looks Like, I tired to go into the choices we make when we are in love and the things that we try to do. I wanted it to come across in a way that made love seem like it wasn’t a choice. Only to then point out that even the things that don’t seem like choices actually are choices. Like Irene McMullen’s point of helping the person you love become their ideal self, that’s a choice. Also in my last section fear, choice, and the leap of faith I wanted to talk about how fear is a big deal and how it plays a big role in our decision-making process. Fear is something that can pull us away from goals and dreams. Yet fear is like not choosing, and 22 Sartre talks about this in Existentialism is a Humanism, where even not choosing is still in fact a choice. Not deciding something based on fear is just like deciding not to choose. I closed off the section about the leap of faith and love because it is an essential point, yes love is a choice but what happens after you make that choice can sometimes be something different from what you expected. You can’t see the future and you can’t foresee what kind of changes love is going to bring to your life. Love is a choice to say otherwise would be to denounce responsibility for our own actions. If love were simply an emotion than we would feel it in waves, like we do with anger or happiness. Love is more constant than an emotion, and tends to usually have more of a grip on us than emotions do. Love itself causes emotion. “Therefore the last, the most blessed, the absolutely convincing evidence of love remains; love itself, which is known and recognized by the love of another” (Kierkegaard pg. 33). 23 Works Cited Flynn, Thomas R. Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. John, Eileen. "Love And The Need For Comprehension." Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal For The Philosophy Of Mind And Action 16.3 (2013): 285-297. Philosopher's Index. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. Kierkegaard, Søren, Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Works of Love. New York: Harper, 1962. Print. Mcmullin, Irene. "Love And Entitlement: Sartre And Beauvoir On The Nature Of Jealousy." Hypatia: A Journal Of Feminist Philosophy 26.1 (2011): 102-122. Philosopher's Index. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. Sartre, Jean-Paul, John Kulka, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, Annie Cohen-Solal, Carol Macomber, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism Is a Humanism = (L'Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme) ; Including, a Commentary on The Stranger (Explication De L'Étranger). N.p.: Yale UP, 2007. Print. Smuts, Aaron. "Normative Reasons For Love, Part I." Philosophy Compass 9.8 (2014): 507-517. Philosopher's Index. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. Smuts, Aaron. "Normative Reasons For Love, Part II." Philosophy Compass 9.8 (2014): 518-526. Philosopher's Index. Web. 1 Dec. 2015.