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I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
I previously shared some of my thoughts on love in general here. The most relevant bit is this:
Transactions are a reality; love is an absurdity, if not an outright impossibility. Love has value only and precisely because it is absurd.
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year). This is not at all to say that people shouldn't love; it is only to say that it should be done self-consciously rather than than unconsciously.
It has long since penetrated popular consciousness that "justice" is an open and apophatic concept. Any assertion that such and such an act is "just" can be met with "ah, but what is justice? Whose justice? Is that really justice?" I am simply opening the possibility of a similar discourse on love. At least as far back as Plato's Symposium, it has been recognized that love is not (just) an emotion but a discursive concept which can and should be subject to critique (critique not in the sense of "mere" criticism, or dismissal, or negation -- but rather critique in the sense of a coming to self-consciousness, a laying bare of the groundwork and the conditions of possibility). To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
One can feel and experience many things; but whether and how these feelings can be mapped to concepts should not be decided too hastily.
Pinging @Stellula, as it may be relevant to their interests.
Can you name a type of human interaction that is not "transactional" in some way? If I talk to a stranger, is that not in some sense transactional? When I catch some random family's baby staring at me in the grocery store and begin making silly faces to try to get them to laugh, is that not clearly "transactional"? When I have lunch together with a friend, is that not transactional in some sense?
You seem to be claiming that there's the set of human interactions, and then a subset of transactional human interactions, and then a sub-subset of purely transactional human interactions. But if in fact all human interaction is transactional, and then a subset is purely transactional, then the "transactional" label adds nothing meaningful to the term "interaction", and the joint in reality is the "purely", the compartmentalization and formalization of an interaction, and with it the exclusion and severing of other possible connections and relations and interactions. We "transact" because we wish for more interaction with someone, and the "more" is open-ended. We "purely transact" with someone because we want a specific interaction and no more. These two modes of transaction are notably distinct.
Perhaps, if we confine ourselves to abstractions, though I'm skeptical that this is actually an accurate description at the object level.
I would not agree with this formulation, so far as I understand the argument; it seems to be a false dichotomy emerging excessive abstraction. The dichotomy is drawn between the instrumental "I love them for the characteristics they possess" and the arbitrary "I love them for for some ineffable, arbitrary themness", but there is a third option: "I love them because I have loved them." In this, the instrumental emerges from and utterly overtakes the arbitrary, while being inextricable from it.
Put a grain of sand into an oyster and wait, and the result often enough is a pearl. Pearls do not form without the grain of sand, but pearls are not themselves reducible to grains of sand. They are an accretion, a composite, of which the sand is a foundation but of which the foundation is far, far less than what is built upon it, like an inverted pyramid. One might describe them better as an investment.
My relationship with my wife began in a quite arbitrary fashion; having been acquaintances for a few years, we spent some time together at a church event and hit it off over a common love for movies, books and video games. On the other hand, this arbitrariness was only possible from an explicitly-instrumental foundation: we found each other because we were both actively looking for a sane, stable, committed Christian of the opposite sex to build a family with, and also there was some amount of behind-the-scenes matchmaking from mutual friends nudging things along.
The love we share now does not rest significantly on our common love for movies, books and video games. Nor is it based solely the instrumental desire for marriage and a family; we no longer want marriage in the abstract, we want this marriage, and our love were persist even if we were unable to have children. What it rests on is nearly a decade of choices made and actions taken out of love for one another: in-jokes, acts of kindness, acts of service, shared hardship, shared joy, shared knowledge, and so on and on. Further, these have accrued because neither of us acted as though these were "purely transactional", nor did transactionality enter the calculus in any significant way; we do the things we do because each of us perceive that such acts will please and support the other. I want my wife to be happy and to have a good life, and she wants the same for me, and the longer these objectives guide our actions the more solid and substantial our love grows, and the less we recognize a good apart from the good found in each other.
This appears to me to be sophistry through a retreat to arbitrary abstraction.
What does that definition mistakenly contain that we might better remove? What does that definition lack that we might wish to add? It tells us that love is a terminal value, and it defines that love is and is not. In what way is any of this "unsayable"?
I share this impatience, because such people are generally not describing Love but infatuation.
Just so. But equally, to claim that we do not know love when we have practiced it as an intentional way of life is sophistry. Certainly not all questions have answers, but just as certainly some questions do have answers, and this is one of them. Why ask questions if you don't want answers?
I'm not blowing you off; I just don't have the time in the day to keep responding to everyone for now. I may take some select points here and respond to them in a future top level post.
Please do, I am frequently compelled to do the same and understand completely.
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I, along with perhaps billions of other people will tell you that they are in love with their wives/husbands and children, and that yes it is subconscious.
Your frustration with this is because you haven’t personally experienced it. You should reevaluate your belief that you are experiencing a wider range, more intense set of emotions than most people, because you apparently have no experience with the emotion that much of the world feels most intensely, and you apparently do not feel at all.
As to your question: the harm that people like Aella have done to society is to convince people of the incorrect, unhealthy, anti social framework of understanding that you are presenting here.
Yes, love is real, yes it is healthy to love your wife and children, and no this is not all transactional. You, nor Aella, nor the red pill people, nor the pickup artist people before them, nor any of the other people of that persuasion have discovered something unique insight into human emotion. Aella et al have figured out an exploit in the human psyche that enriches them, at your expense and the expense of the rest of their customers.
You continue to misinterpret my claims.
Love, if it exists, is a miracle. But did I ever say, at any point in this conversation, that you shouldn't believe in miracles? I've said no such thing.
Regardless of what claims you think I'm making, this would not constitute a legitimate criticism of any of them.
You could almost say that it's the business of philosophical reflection to produce claims (or, plausible sounding arguments for claims, at any rate) that almost everyone rejects. It has variously been claimed by different parties in the history of philosophy that cars and buildings and animals are not real, that conscious experience is not real, that 1+1 does not equal 2, that there exist sentences which can be both true and false at the same time. Almost all humans reject these claims; but this is not taken to be any major impediment. Truth is not subject to democratic rule. The philosopher simply carries on with his business; he is well aware that other people will think he is in the grip of some kind of psychosis. When the propositions of "common sense" are finally subjected to long-overdue critique, the results will unavoidably be counterintuitive.
I mean, you will certainly believe that some people are incorrect and unhealthy and anti-social, but we still all have to try to get along, y'know? Tomorrow it could be you who's getting called incorrect and anti-social.
I don't agree with the TRP/PUA people at all! I've done a terrible job of explaining my positions if that's what you took away from it.
I'm less familiar with Aella, but I'd probably find points of significant disagreement with her as well.
This was your original claim;
Elaborate on this. I have never traded resources or services for sex.
Sex (or, to generalize and be more precise, "access to a woman's body" - this includes sexual contact in general and childbearing in particular) is important to men. To the point that it's a necessary component of romantic relationships. Not the only component, but a necessary one. I know this from my own experience of being a man, from my experience of having male friends, from the fact that dating advice (TRP, PUA, etc) and dating apps are a multi-million dollar industry with a mostly male clientele, and just in general, from everything that's ever happened to me in my life. Sex is what men are seeking.
Female bodies are more valuable than male bodies. Women are acutely aware of how in-demand their bodies are. She knows that merely being granted access to your body is not adequate compensation for her granting you access to her body. So she typically wants something else from you as well. Thus the very generalized heading of "goods and services". (To be clear, relatively abstract things like "personality" and "companionship" could also be considered "goods and services").
This does not cover every possible configuration of human interactions. I was careful to qualify that this is only a typical and average type of exchange.
As I have said, you really need to reevaluate the claim that you are "2 sigma" beyond the depth and breadth of emotions that most people are experiencing.
My wife does not "grant me access to her body", sex is an act of mutual participation, and a physical manifestation of the love that we have for one another.
What you are describing is sex with a prostitute; a simulacra of sex inside of a loving relationship. It is the Polynesian cargo cultists constructing bamboo control towers and runways hoping to summon back the western airplanes, but without an understanding of what they were doing.
In the analogy, Aella and her compatriots have noticed the cargo cultists and started selling them bamboo. They have realized that there are men who recognize the aesthetics of a loving relationship, and that they can simulate this and charge for it.
I'm always open to evaluating new evidence to the contrary. But this claim of mine has been confirmed time and again in my experience. In particular, I'm quite confident that I'm more of a doe-eyed hopeless romantic than you are.
It appears I have been largely unsuccessful in communicating my views on love. I would recommend reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling if you want to understand my views on love better.
The book describes the dialectical stages of the development of Abraham's faith when he is asked by God to sacrifice Isaac. We begin at "mere" faith, a mere unreflective belief -- his mode of relation to his faith is unmediated immediacy, because this faith has not yet been subjected to critical inquiry. We proceed through doubt, despair, and resignation, until finally arriving at a faith that is identical to the faith we started with, and yet somehow not the same at all. He's back exactly where he started, and yet everything is different. His faith is now a mediated immediacy, mediated by the preceding dialectical development; he no longer believes in spite of the absurd, he believes because it is absurd to believe, the absurd is his reason for believing.
In brief: there is no such thing as authentic love until you have realized the impossibility of love.
Love is impossible. But its impossibility is what makes it beautiful. If it weren't impossible, it would have no value.
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