Agape

According to Webster's Online Dictionary

Literature
Agape (3 syl.) A love-feast. The early Christians held a love-feast before or after communion, when contributions were made for the poor. These feasts became a scandal, and were condemned at the Council of Carthage, 397. (Greek, agape, love.). Source: Brewer's Dictionary.


From Philosophy of the Abstract

Love is a strange thing.

Love is usually defined as a strong positive emotion of affection or pleasure. It is commonly expressed towards family and friends, and towards objects and ideas. It can even refer to loving yourself and impersonal love or loving the world. It could even mean “40 love!” when you are playing tennis with a friend. However, love is often referred to as the love between two individuals or interpersonal love.

In English, the word 'love', which is derived from Germanic forms of the Sanskrit lubh (desire), is broadly defined, and thus generates problems of definition and meaning. However, the word is resolved to some degree by the Greek terms, eros , philia , and agape . The term eros is used to refer to the passionate, intense desire for something and is often classified as lust or sexual desire. In contrast to the lusting form of eros , philia involves a fondness and appreciation of the other. Aristotle defines philia as “generally motivated by reciprocity”, which means that you love someone because they love you. Agape is basically the blending of the two eros and philia, and it generally translates to “thoughtful love”. Agape was usually used by Christians to refer to the self-sacrificing love of God for humanity, which they were committed to reciprocating and practicing towards God and among one another. Thus eros , philia , and agape help define the nature of love.



From Philosophy of Love

Agape refers to the paternal love of God for man and for man for God but is extended to include a brotherly love for all humanity. (The Hebrew ahev has a slightly wider semantic range than agape). Agape arguably draws on elements from both eros and philia in that it seeks a perfect kind of love that is at once a fondness, a transcending of the particular, and a passion without the necessity of reciprocity. The concept is expanded on in the Judaic-Christian tradition of loving God: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (Deuteronomy 6:5) and loving "thy neighbour as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18). The love of God requires absolute devotion that is reminiscent of Plato's love of Beauty (and Christian translators of Plato such as St Augustine employed the connections), which involves an erotic passion, awe, and desire that transcends earthly cares and obstacles. Aquinas, on the other hand, picked up on the Aristotelian theories of friendship and love to proclaim God as the most rational being and hence the most deserving of one's love, respect, and considerations.

The universalist command to "love thy neighbor as thyself" refers the subject to those surrounding him, whom he should love unilaterally if necessary. The command employs the logic of mutual reciprocity, and hints at an Aristotelian basis that the subject should love himself in some appropriate manner: for awkward results would ensue if he loved himself in a particularly inappropriate, perverted manner! (Philosophers can debate the nature of 'self-love' implied in this-from the Aristotelian notion that self-love is necessary for any kind of inter-personal love, to the condemnation of egoism and the impoverished examples that pride and self-glorification from which to base one's love of another. St Augustine relinquishes the debate--he claims that no command is needed for a man to love himself (De bono viduitatis, xxi.) Analogous to the logic of "it is better to give than to receive", the universalism of agape requires an initial invocation from someone: in a reversal of the Aristotelian position, the onus for the Christian is on the morally superior to extend love to others. Nonetheless, the command also entails an egalitarian love-hence the Christian code to "love thy enemies" (Matthew 5:44-45). Such love transcends any perfectionist or aristocratic notions that some are (or should be) more loveable than others. Agape finds echoes in the ethics of Kant and Kierkegaard, who assert the moral importance of giving impartial respect or love to another person qua human being in the abstract.

However, loving one's neighbor impartially (James 2:9) invokes serious ethical concerns, especially if the neighbor ostensibly does not warrant love. Debate thus begins on what elements of a neighbor's conduct should be included in agape, and which should be excluded. Early Christians asked whether the principle applied only to disciples of Christ or to all. The impartialists won the debate asserting that the neighbor's humanity provides the primary condition of being loved; nonetheless his actions may require a second order of criticisms, for the logic of brotherly love implies that it is a moral improvement on brotherly hate. For metaphysical dualists, loving the soul rather than the neighbor's body or deeds provides a useful escape clause-or in turn the justification for penalizing the other's body for sin and moral transgressions, while releasing the proper object of love-the soul-from its secular torments. For Christian pacifists, "turning the other cheek" to aggression and violence implies a hope that the aggressor will eventually learn to comprehend the higher values of peace, forgiveness, and a love for humanity.

The universalism of agape runs counter to the partialism of Aristotle and poses a variety of ethical implications. Aquinas admits a partialism in love towards those we are related while maintaining that we should be charitable to all, whereas others such as Kierkegaard insist on impartiality. Recently, LaFallotte has noted that to love those one is partial towards is not necessarily a negation of the impartiality principle, for impartialism could admit loving those closer to one as an impartial principle, and, employing Aristotle's conception of self-love, iterates that loving others requires an intimacy that can only be gained from being partially intimate ("Personal Relations", Blackwell Companion to Ethics). Others would claim that the concept of universal love, of loving all equally, is not only impracticable, but logically empty-Aristotle, for example, argues: "One cannot be a friend to many people in the sense of having friendship of the perfect type with them, just as one cannot be in love with many people at once (for love is a sort of excess of feeling, and it is the nature of such only to be felt towards one person)" (NE, VIII.6).


From the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 5

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you


From Martin Luther King's Philosophy on Nonviolent Resistance

Nonviolent Resistance Rests on the Power of Love
King's sixth point was central to the method of nonviolent resistance. He believed the importance of nonviolence rested in the fact that it prevented physical violence and the "internal violence of spirit." Bitterness and hate were absent from the resisters mind, and replaced with love.

Agape Love is a Redemptive Love

However, the kind of love King was talking about, was not the affectionate type, but instead the type that meant "understanding, redeeming good will for all men." He further explained that in the Greek New Testament there were three words for love and each had a different meaning. Eros was romantic love and philia was a reciprocal love. Neither of these two types of love were the kind that King advanced. Agape, which was not a passive love, was the kind of redemptive love he referred to. According to King, "It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.”


From Love

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one's self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love.[16]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

    Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.


From Emma Goldman's Marriage and Love

If motherhood is the highest fulfillment of woman's nature, what other protection does it need, save love and freedom?  Marriage but defiles, outrages, and corrupts her fulfillment.  Does it not say to woman, Only when you follow me shall you bring forth life?  Does it not condemn her to the block, does it not degrade and shame her if she refuses to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself?  Does not marriage only sanction motherhood, even though conceived in hatred, in compulsion?  Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion, does it not place a crown of thorns upon an innocent head and carve in letters of blood the hideous epithet, Bastard?  Were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love.

Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?

Free love?  As if love is anything but free!  Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.  Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love.  Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love.  Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love.  High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by.  And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color.  Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.  Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.  In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely.  All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root. If, however, the soil is sterile, how can marriage make it bear fruit?  It is like the last desperate struggle of fleeting life against death.

Love needs no protection; it is its own protection.  So long as love begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want of affection.  I know this to be true.  I know women who became mothers in freedom by the men they loved.  Few children in wedlock enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is capable of bestowing.

The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey.  Who would fight wars?  Who would create wealth?  Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children?  The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest.  The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine,--and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex awakening of woman.  But in vain these frantic efforts to maintain a state of bondage.  In vain, too, the edicts of the Church, the mad attacks of rulers, in vain even the arm of the law.  Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who have neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of poverty and slavery.  Instead she desires fewer and better children, begotten and reared in love and through free choice; not by compulsion, as marriage imposes.  Our pseudo-moralists have yet to learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in freedom has awakened in the breast of woman.  Rather would she forego forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death.  And if she does become a mother, it is to give to the child the deepest and best her being can yield.  To grow with the child is her motto; she knows that in that manner alone can she help build true manhood and womanhood.


From Eagleton on agape

'We need a term somewhere between the intensity of 'love' and the rather cooler 'friendship', and the fact that we lack one is probably significant. Love is no respecter of persons. It is remorselessly abstract, ready to attend to the needs of any old body. In this, it is quite indifferent to cultural difference. It is not indifferent to difference in the sense that it is blind to the specific needs of people. If it was, it would not be attending to them at all. But it is quite indifferent as to whose specific needs it attends to. This is one way in which it differs from friendship, which is all about particularity. Friends are irreplaceable, but those we must love are not. ...'


From A Little Philosophy on Love: an interview with Jacob Needleman

You have a section called "Love and Agitation" in your book where you write, "On the one hand, we are troubled when someone we love or who works with us is not torn up by his or her feelings about us or about what we care for. On the other hand, we are touched by the power of great men and women to radiate an inner collectedness in situations that would bring most people to panic or excesses of zeal." Why do we expect our loved ones to have the same emotional overreactiveness that we are feeling as being a sign of their love for us?

It is part of the illusion of our time -- the deep, hypnotic illusion that we live under -- that to care for anything is to be obsessed. We know ourselves that we have moments of very deep caring that are very quiet and calm but full of love. We have not been helped to realize that obsessive desire or craving is not really care for another person. It's more neurotic based on our own ego.

That obsessive craving is something that's definitely fueled by our society.

Absolutely. And also in the way that our stories and movies portray people who care for anything--they are always obsessed by it. If you are working in an office and you really care about your job and you're doing it calmly and quietly, your boss is going to say, "What's wrong with you? You don't care about your work!" You have to pretend to be like that to show that you really care!

You talk about ethics as being something that springs from love.

When you really feel love, the things that you have been taught you should do are things you wish to do without pushing yourself, without forcing it. When I really feel care for another person's life, I don't have to force myself to do what needs to be done. I don't feel it's a big sacrifice to go against my wishes and help the other person. You could say in those rare moments that you wish to do what you ought to do--that is, duty and desire fuse. This is very rare. But in those moments, you really do know the meaning of ethics. And then you realize that these ethical rules are meant for people who feel love. Since we don't feel love all the time, we take them as obligations which is okay as long as we realize that we are obeying these ethical rules because they spring from people who have had greater consciousness. They are like scripts from more conscious people and we obey them because we have nothing better to put in their place.