Iconoclastic

I enjoyed your discourse on logic/emotion. I might respectfully disagree that love is an emotion. There is emotional love, there is conditional love, there is unconditional love, and there is detached love. Not all love is emotional. When love is personal, it may be emotional. When love is detached, it could be like my love for rivers in general, but no emotion attached to reading about a river drying up in Uganda. Emotion can be felt but not expressed with reason or logic, such as the case of a mentally ill person. Logic has to do with our basic survival skills. Any logic beyond survival is logic that is acquired or socially acceptable at the time and these kinds of logic change with the fabric of the human condition. Example: There was a time when it was not logical to fear a war going on in another continent because it did not affect you. Now it could be logical to fear a war going on accross the world because of the possible use of nuclear weapons which would affect us all. That would be an acquired logic. Often, emotions are based on irrational fears and therefore there is no logic to them at all. Therefore, one could say that although emotions are intense feelings, love is not always emotional and therefore not always intense. Love is also not always logical, especially when it is emotional. OK, I just lost myself, now what were we talking about?

Joe Shaw, your thoughts on love, emotion, and logic are perplexing. Unfortunately they're also laid out in a frustratingly jumbled WALLOFTEXT format, which makes any intelligent discourse impossible. Honestly your idea on the emotionality of love would have made for a fun debate, however I've reread your post multiple times, and can't find my way through the process.

It seems you are stumbling on an etymological quirk of the term "love" and may be confusing the seperate understandings of the term.

Do you really believe you "love" rivers? Do you love rivers the way i "love" the color blue? Do you believe this is some trivial difference between my love for the color blue, and my love for my romantic partner? This is an issue of contextual application of the term love. Many things bring us pleasure, or enjoyment and therefore we over-dramatize it's value to us by saying we love it. Might there be some who genuinely love rivers? I would say no. I don't believe that in any honest understanding of love can we allow it to be granted to an idea of form. Is it the water that you love? The wildlife? The association to the time you were younger and your grandfather took you fishing there? A river is an idea. To say you love rivers would be similar to saying one loves communism. While many have sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of communism, the point would be totally lost if you assumed their sacrifice was made for the idea, or even practice itself. This doesn't mean you don't love YOUR river. I'm sure there is a mixture of aesthetic, and relational attachment that bonds you to a particular river. However to NOT believe that this is emotional response would probably be wrong.

I am totally lost by your understanding of logic. First you use it to replace instinct (the whole survival rant), then there's some stuff about acquired/socially acceptable logic and whatnot. Your example alone is an example of emotional effect on logic (when I assume you were making a contradictory point). You see fear cannot be viewed as logical, nor illogical. Otherwise fear of foreign war resulting in a nuclear strike would have to be considered illogical. Now as a matter of rationality, yes, fearing a foreign war possibly leading to a nuclear strike would be rational. Therefore I assumed your argument to follow was more based upon the broader concept of rationality, rather than the more strict idea of logic. However I realised it was that you were in fact interchanging them, due to a weak understanding of logic. Especially when you attribute logic's relationship with the human condition. At that point you are most definitely referring to rationality. Logic would have to remain consistant regardless of human interaction (except possibly in some bizzaro metaphysical model, where possibly cause, action, and effect all have equal relational seperation, while at the same time having no relationship, however I doubt that was your point at all). Augustine, Aquinas, Plato, Kierkegaard, Dostevsky, Pythagoras, Wikipedia, a dictionary are any number of tools that would help you far more than anything i could say here.