What is the meaning of love??

The starting point of this paper is the question: “What is love?”, or, in other words, how can we understand or even define the concept of love? To clarify this question we have to approach the problem systematically. Love is no natural kind, nor is it a substance of an abstract kind. It seems to be an empirical phenomenon, since we encounter it almost every day. It is, however, not an empirical concept in the sense that we can empirically decide whether something is love or not. In everyday situations we use “love” in a great variety of meanings, but still, and maybe exactly because of that, we are not quite able to say what it exactly means. We say for instance: 1) “Romeo loves Juliet”; 2) “Odysseus loves Penelope”; 3) “Abraham loves his son Isaak”; 4) “Humbert loves Lolita”; 5) “Epicurus loves champagne and caviar”; 6) “Boudewijn Büch loves books”; 7) “William Wallace loves Scotland”; 8) “Jesus loves you”; 9) “This chemical loves water”; and finally 10)“Socrates loves wisdom”. In all these sentences, the sense in which “love” is used differs. Romeo’s love for Juliet is highly romantic, whereas Odysseus’ love for Penelope is an instance of matrimonial love, in which honor and obligation towards the spouse is prominent. Some other examples prove to be even more distinct from love as we would normally understand it. Loving your wife, for instance, means something quite different from loving your books, for whereas the former is love for a person, the latter relates to a set of non personal objects. But still, both occasions can be, arguably, interpreted as something like “the desire to be with it and care for it”, if we accept this as a provisional and rather intuitive definition of love. For a true bibliophile it is not unusual to have a deep emotional relationship with his or her books. And this feeling can become so strong that the love for other things – including relations to human loved ones – is neglected. In some cases, human loved ones may even become jealous of the other object of love. It may sound, of course, a bit odd to be jealous with a book.