Love

I've always wondered about something. One of Nietzsche's saying is that things we do out of "love" are beyond good and evil...but just what did he mean? It's a little difficult, because it looks, to this untrained eye, that the word that Nietzsche used, "liebe," could mean a number of things that we typically think of as "love." That, of course, led me to think...well, what did the philosophers have to say, and thanks to what I consider bad interpretation of the most famous book in Western literature most everyone knows about the common Koine words for love: agapé, phileo, and eros.

Why do I say "bad interpretation"? Well, because most interpretations have become what we think the author means, based upon our theology, rather than what we know of other literature at the time. Now, to someone into Comparative Literature, or pretty much Comparative anything knows that's not how it's done.

So, what do the words mean? Well, first of all, eros isn't limited to sex...it does mean sex, but it's more sensual and less limited than that. I call it love that is "object" oriented. Second, is phileo -- which isn't really friendship, it's the love that's loyal...like the love you might feel for your country or other group, what I call "us" oriented, as in us-vs-them. So that leaves agapé...which is what the Greeks used for everything else...and is what I call "you" oriented (more on that later).

What little there is written about familial love uses agape...and the whole idea that the gods, or God, "loves" people was pretty much a foreign concept. That's not to say that there weren't times that the gods loved people (wink, wink)...after all, that's how many of the Greek heroes, like Hercules, were born.

Of course that doesn't even address the concept of romantic love...which is a pretty modern concept. The idea that there is another love that somehow encompasses the sensual and loyal and everything else is strange, and definitely not Biblical.

Now, back to the you-love. By that I mean that it is, in a sense, selfless...or what we would typically refer to as selfless. It's not really selfless...because the idea that you perceive an "other" implies that there is something that perceives "other" as different...and that's what we usually call "self". There simply must a self in order for there to be acts that we refer to as "selfless". Of course what we mean is that those acts de-emphasize the needs/hopes/desires of the "self" in favor of another. It's also important to note that one can be "selfless" in relation to country or group...but I would argue that ultimately what we are really referring to in that case is a greater degree of loyalty.

So, where does that leave me, or Nietzsche rather? Pretty much back where we started. Given that Nietzsche was a philologist, I think if he'd meant a more sensual love he would have used desire, and had he meant loyalty he would have used brotherhood. I think what he truly meant is you-love (or agape, if you wish)...of course there's nothing in the aphorism that tells me that. For the ultimate interpretation, I must go back to Nietzsche...a man who saw the ability to really show mercy to be superhuman. (I won't go into a discussion of Nietzsche's superman other than to say that Stan Lee found him in Wolverine.)

So, are the things that we do out of love really beyond good and evil? I think so, especially for Nietzsche. Of course he would probably disagree with us about whether or not something was truly done "out of love".