Society

Has society affected the ways we deal with our real-life relationships? Have portrayal of love relationships in movies, dramas and fairytales ruined love relationships for us?

“In comparison to the romantic climaxes we see on the screen or read about in books, our romances might seem mundane, and we may come to realize that our partner is just an ordinary human and not a fairy-tale protagonist. Many of us jump to the conclusion that our partners must be to blame for the discrepancies between what ought to be and what really is and believe that a new partner could change it all, could be “the one”, without, however, realizing that the same pattern will repeat itself over and over again.” from the article listed below.

Full article below from http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/barbara-kuchler–2/8648-love-and-the-modern-society:


As technology and literacy rates increases all over the country, people are getting married later or shuns marriage due to the rising costs for preparation of wedding banquet, etc. A particular problem that arises in Japan is also the rise of technology. With technology advancement, female humanoids are able to be created to look and act like a normal human. Being able to create humanoids equates to the possibility of creating an ideal “female”, which might/is one of the reasons why Japan is facing aging population because they are turning to technology for their partners.

Article from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2067327/Japan-heads-extinction-survey-reveals-young-people-shunning-marriage.html#ixzz4ImgNc26h 


The type of Love Our Society needs

Many of us have different definitions of, and experiences with love. We all grew up in different households with different families under different circumstances. But I think we can all agree that love is a positive emotion felt deeply for someone you care about.

More specifically:

  1. A profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
  2. A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.
  3. Sexual passion or desire.

Not only is love being undervalued in our society, it is being pushed down our list of priorities. It is being passed over for ideologies, for possessions, for financial success – yes, all things worth pursuing, but ultimately meaningless if we don’t have anyone to share them with.

The thing about love is, it is one of the very few things that all of us share, regardless of where we are from, what we do or don’t believe in, or any other circumstances. It binds us together as human beings and is something that every last one of us craves. We just all have different ways of showing it.

But, in order to accept this type of love from anyone else, we first need to have it for ourselves. I don’t mean the cliche, social media-esque self love that is reliant on likes and comments of photos of us. Real self-love is the recognition of our worth, our value, and what we deserve. Only after we recognize that will we develop the ability to set our standards and accept nothing less.

Once we do, though, we can go a step beyond receiving this love into something even better: Being able to give it. The realization that the best kind of happiness is when you are happy because you’ve made someone else happy. The type of love that makes you care less about where you are and what you have – and more about who you’re with.

The type of love that this generation is missing only comes from building real connections with real people. Social media is fantastic and none of you would be reading this article if it didn’t exist, but so many of us are so concerned with projecting a happy life online, that we forget to actually work on building one.

If we want to feel the love that makes life worthwhile, we have to come out from behind the computer screens and smartphones and really experience each other. To separate our normal habits of perpetual replacement of items that become obsolete and clothing that goes out of style, from the way we treat each other. To stop thinking of each other as replaceable and to understand that a world of unique experiences and insights resides in each one of us.

To truly love someone is to see them as an asset in your life. To understand how they make you, and all of your experiences, better. To link your emotions to theirs. To share in their sadness and to lend them your strength during their hard times.

When you love someone – when you really love someone, it’s not a matter of convenience. It’s not only something you do when times are good, it is the very foundation of staying together when times are not as good. When they are bad. When life is tough. That’s when you pull those you love closer, not push them away. It’s the cornerstone of your willingness to fix something you might feel is broken instead of just throwing it away.

That’s the type of love this society is missing. The type that serves as a base. As a foundation. As a starting point for a life together. And we need more of it.

Article above from: https://jamesmsama.com/2015/03/10/the-type-of-love-our-society-needs/


In Japan, there’s a new structure to how marriage life is. They termed it “Sotsukon” which means “Graduation in marriage”.

Sotsukon refers to married couples who come together to decide to stay apart and away from each other to pursue their ambitions. It is more common in elderly couples whom decides that they have dreams that they still want to pursue, but are not looking at separation or divorce. Below shows a chart of wives’ concerns.

160430090638-sotsukon-chart-exlarge-169

Full article from http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/03/asia/sotsukon-couples-living-apart-together-in-japan/index.html?sr=fbcnni051416sotsukon-couples-living-apart-together-in-japan0400AMVODtopLink&linkId=24425536

 

Political

Everybody’s public life is full of emotions. Being able to understand how emotionality works is often an urgent challenge for the sciences and the humanities. As without such understanding, the comprehension of public speech patterns and action are limited generally. Without such comprehension, conflicts can arise easily. Thus, in the political world, cultivating public emotions is a norm in some societies. Cultivating public emotions refers to the society trying to instill emotion they deemed important to us since young, which is similar to our society where the value ‘Respect’ has been instilled in us since young.

Karen Shook (2013) states that, “it has often been assumed that only oppressive societies benefit from cultivating public emotions”, in which she disagrees by further arguing that orators, such as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, understood that in order to overcome unacceptable inequalities, there is a need to reach out and to inspire strong emotions. Political leaders have often deemed the public emotion, ‘Respect’, as the only critical public emotion necessary for a “good” society. But is respect alone sufficient? Martha Nussbaum argues that respect alone is insufficient, because it is cold and too inactive to overcome what she sees as humanity’s tendency towards exploitation. Respect itself is also not grounded in human dignity enough to overcome inequality. She further argues that in order to guard against division and hierarchy, it is important to cultivate “appropriate sentiments of sympathy and love.”

Article from https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/political-emotions-why-love-matters-for-justice-by-martha-nussbaum/2008725.article below:

There is unease in some public debate about acknowledging a pride in society’s core values. However, a pride in the value a society places upon the core tenet of freedom of speech is not inherently illiberal, providing that society protects the right to the freedom of speech of peaceful dissenters.

Love not only makes the world go round but, according to Nussbaum, is also at the heart of all of the essential emotions that sustain a decent society. Her definition of love as “intense attachment to things outside the control of our will” serves her argument well, although it is arguably too narrow, as love can also attach itself to that within our will. She argues that public emotions have two facets: the institutional and the motivational. Although her book addresses the latter, she accepts that the two are oars that need to work together.

Nussbaum distinguishes eudaemonism from egoism. Although both appraise the universe from a personal perspective, eudaemonism recognises that all people have intrinsic value, even though those who provoke the strongest emotions ought to come within what she describes as our “circle of concern”. The goal then is to be able to move abstract principles and people who are distant to us into that circle of concern, so that their fate becomes necessary to our own sense of personal well-being.

The arts are one such pathway. Walt Whitman’s public poetry and Rabindranath Tagore’s poetic religion of man succeed because their support for the concept of political emotion draws on the history and culture of their own countries. The values are universal but the means are country specific.

Architecture also helps to create a public emotion of support. During the time I was working in South Africa, it was evident that the windows of public buildings became smaller as apartheid intensified and the state’s distance from the majority of the population increased. Once states become democratic, the change is visible: architecture in post-Franco Spain and post-apartheid South Africa, for example, released a creative energy using glass to help support the political emotions of transparency and connectedness.

Political love, as Nussbaum conceives of it, is not the sum total of love, and leaves space for citizens to have private relationships and love for particular causes. Nor does her imagined public culture create a hierarchy of religions, because she argues that it is the rule of law that will keep bias in check. Yet, as she acknowledges, liberal political philosophy has commented little on the importance of cultivating appropriate emotions. John Locke did not investigate the psychological origins of intolerance. Although Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason argues that universal human nature has tendencies to abuse other people (his “radical evil”), Kant believed that the liberal state was limited in its ability to combat radical evil because of the cost to what we would now term civil and political human rights.

To argue for public emotions, Nussbaum has to distance herself from those philosophers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Auguste Comte, who argued for an emotional homogeneity without creating sufficient space for peaceful dissent. Mozart, John Stuart Mill and Tagore all, however, created metaphors for a political love that was much closer to the essence of the human spirit. She treats operas such as Pierre Beaumarchais’ revolutionary Marriage of Figaro as equally valid texts to those of Rousseau, Johann Herder and later Mills and Tagore, and part of the same conversation, although she acknowledges that it is currently insufficiently inclusive.

Because hatred of self is so often projected outwardly on to the vulnerability of others, the cultivation of a compassionate public psychology is key, and Nussbaum enquires how modern democracies may attempt something analogous to the salutary value of Greek tragedies and comedies. To cite a more recent example, Whitman’s vision of social justice required the forging of a healthier relationship with all our bodies, thereby counteracting the tendency, which Nussbaum argues all human beings share, towards submissiveness to peer pressure and authority. Invitation, not coercion, is the aim. Oppressive regimes that have tried to impose their views through art rarely endure and generally produce poor art.

It was John Rawls, in his 1993 work Political Liberalism, who constructed the passageway through which Nussbaum enters. Rawls argued for the need to develop something that constitutes a “reasonable moral psychology”. Nussbaum, who once taught a University of Chicago course on rights, race and gender that was also taught by a certain former senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, picks up this gauntlet. Without such an exploration there is the risk that the landscapes of emotion will be occupied only by illiberal forces, and that fundamental liberal values will be regarded as Milquetoast and boring. This is a trend that is arguably already developing, and visible in the popularity of radio “shock jocks” in the US and the attacks on cherished human rights in the UK. It is this very reversibility of societies’ capacity for tolerance and justice that makes her book so timely.

However, to launch such an enquiry without a normative framework could lead to the opposite result to the one intended. The normative framework Nussbaum selects is that of equal respect for persons, equal liberties of speech, association and conscience, and fundamental social and economic entitlements. It is in essence the set of international human rights norms accepted by the global community. But Nussbaum does not go on to describe these as fundamental human rights; given that human rights laws have become part of the core values of a “good” society in the 21st century, this would have strengthened her argument.

Nussbaum writes clothed in the heaviest of chain-mail armour, although this is not meant as a criticism. In the first chapter she seeks to answer anticipated criticisms to her arguments before even developing them. Although her subject is in essence the harnessing of passion, her style, perhaps of necessity, is more clinical, and allows passion to issue only from the pens of the poets and the quills of the composers.

Political Emotions is an important work, and Nussbaum has created valuable space for love and human imperfection to be weighed more heavily in the search for justice.

Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy of Love refers to the attempt in trying to explain what is love in the fields of social philosophy and ethics.

Love is an emotion that we are constantly seeking for an explanation. Despite us not knowing what it really is, it is the most potent emotion a human being can experience. It can either inspire greatness in a lover or make one act like a fool. It can be the greatest feeling in the world, but when it does not work out, it can turns out to be utterly devastating.

The word ‘love’ can be used as an expression of affection towards someone or it can also be used as an expression to express pleasure, for example, ‘I love ice cream’. Love is also able to express a human virtue that is based on compassion, affection and kindness. This is a state of being, which has nothing to do, with anything or anybody other than our own self. It is the purest form of love.

There are 7 Greek terms used to define the different states of love since ancient times. They are:

Storge: Natural affection, it is the love that one share with their family.

Philia: It is the love that one has for friends.

Eros: Sexual and erotic desire kind of love, it can be either positively or negatively.

Agape: This is the unconditional love, also known as divine love.

Ludus: It is a playful love that is associated with flirting or childish love.

Pragma: It refers to long-standing love, a love normally found in married couples.

Philautia: The love of the self. It can be either positively or negatively.

Each state of love refers to different kind of feelings. Therefore, the love one feels for his/her partner is not the same as the love one has for the mother. Love for one’s partner can and will changes in time too. Humans are also built in a way that we feel different emotions for different situations and people.