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There are four kinds of love according to Greek philosophy. But I will confine my study to Eros the romantic love. Consider love in this article as romantic love.

1 Philial

2 Eros

3 Platonic

4 Agape

Before embarking upon love, it is imperative to shed light on it and keep it in perspective. When love appears beauty ensues. Either of them is in rather radical postmodern parlance nothing more than short time infatuation. Nevertheless, to me Love is only making fictitiously believe yourself that there is enormous significance inhering in somebody else who deserves to be endeared well. And all it once, there begins a cunning way of approaching and developing a sangam to think it is love – and that it is staggeringly potent and ubiquitous. But I think it is only a euphemistic pattern of working out things shortly pleasurable and decking it like it is the most hallow piece of practice ever.

For me it is something a more sophisticated way of marketing. The commodification of love weans love of its essentiality. It divests it from its caring and empathetic justifications. But regrettably, postmodern man does not love, he manages to cloak his inner anxiety with love. One may ask how that is possible? I may answer it rather somehow in this way that when a damsel embellishes herself with all modern brand of cosmetics for a sole reason and that is that more and more lads should buy into me, hook line and sinker and make me feel the sine qua non of their lives – shows clearly the core of the argument aforementioned. The American novelist Jonathan Franzen said: “Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. To love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of yourself.” He is nigh if not too nigh to what I am trying to understand that: love is other than love.

If one a little sincerely peruse upon this precise phenomenon can extract a rather meaningful result. For only looking glamorous in eyes of a stranger, that should be taken into account, how much time in addition to all money consumed in purchasing all kinds of grandiloquent materials is being wasted. If that really is worth it is another debate.

Now, nevertheless, an another argument might lurk pointing: but it is all what life is about; all these things make life worth living and love is the only idea that presupposes those all beauties which a human envisages to possess. My retort to that is: okay fine! But that – love – should not be envisaged as an ubiquitous practice that makes life jubilant and is substantially the nitty-gritty of life – of course there are many other things that make life enjoyable like sitting on a beach and gazing deeply the sea or a star-spangled night and so and so forth. Everything, if identified in a particular set of checks as alpha and omega of something, should be subject to tribulations of logic: what logic demands is making things more and more clear and feasible. And this precise idea that love is everything and without love within and out there is nothing: complicates many a thing unduly.

For me, it is something a more sophisticated way of marketing. The commodification of love weans love of its essentiality. It divests it from its caring and empathetic justifications. But regrettably, postmodern man does not love, he manages to cloak his inner anxiety with love

All said above are tentative texts produced to only make sense of things other way around. Moreover, the way contemporary generation – including me – are designing things in a certain style and benting on them like these are the final truths and we are always correct, it for me, is only a loose way of recognising things subjectively and imbibing them insidiously carrying unacknowledged repercussions.

Here then it is tremendously important to bring into discourse the idea why love – I may say the proverbial love of dash and dash – has been so much successful in gravitating so many people into its fold. However, I might have a small sliver of answer like idea on this idea that love is diffused in life so much powerfully for love provides everyone with ready-made pleasures to enjoy and after that liberating them from the monstrous burden of thinking: simply love is to dispense with thinking and embrace pleasure.

All said, love comes when something touches your heart. But what on earth touches your heart and beguile you to fall into the half-truth of love. That is beauty. Beauty is the touchstone of love. Now what is beauty? Let us dive into it philosophically. The great American historian, philosopher and writer Will Durant in his book pleasure of philosophy writes while interpreting aesthetics employing Spinoza’ ideas: ” A thing is beautiful, first of all, because it is desired. As we desire nothing because it is good, but call it good because we desire it; so we desire nothing because it is beautiful, but we consider it beautiful because we desire it.”

Desire precedes the adjective good. Because it is a thing desired by you is ipso facto good. To this idea, love becomes a very facile thing. Then, to love is to agree a contract upon certain caveats: it then becomes anything but love. Nevertheless, love comes, employing Spinoza here, when you desire something and because you desire it is good and loveable. But in effect there is no guarantee that it is beautiful and is secure to be loved. What Spinoza here is trying to reach at is: nothing is beautiful as such; it is beautiful because you behold it as such and if you burgeon a bit of jealousy about that object it then becomes undesirable therefore insecure to love it anymore.

Taking more from Durant, here one may ask what qualities a girl desire in a man and vice versa. Will Durant answers this pithily in a chapter called What is Beauty? ” Sublimity is related to beauty as male to female; its delight comes not from the desired loveliness of woman but from the admired strength of man. Woman is probably more susceptible to the sublime than man and man is more susceptible to beauty, keener to use it, more passionate in desiring it, more persistent in creating it.” Durant is of opinion that because women want security they are more prone to men not for his handsomeness but men for his sublime character and having a proverbial masculinity. Likewise, men is more prone to beauty in women as he is passionate and lascivious therefore he falls for beauty.

But what is Sublime and what is beautiful. Again let us employ another Irish philosopher Edmund Brule to understand this phenomenon. According to Edmund Burke The Beautiful is aesthetically gratifying and refined but, nonetheless, Sublime is powerful; it has the power to influence, to destroy, to galvanise and to do horrible things. There is also psychological effects of Sublime, the dual sensual qualities of fear and attraction. Beauty has positive pleasure but Sublime as Burke writes carries ” Negative pain”. When you are delighted that means you have removed the sublime object from your life and this delightedness is more intense, as Burke writes, than positive pleasure of beautiful.

Now it is pertinent to revolve around Slavoj i ek and his theory of love. However, from Greek philosophers to Modern theorists, everyone has written about love which is a basic human need. But, nonetheless, over the period of history, love has become much more than just love. Eminent and famed Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek writes: ” love, the erotic love, is a total catastrophe. It is a crazy illness. Love ruins your life. But I am very sad when I am not [in] love.” He illustrates in one of his interviews: a person when not in love is normal, basking in with friends, perhaps frolicking and drinking but suddenly he is on street and slips down by stepping on a banana peel. What happens next. A girl passing by appears and give a hand to help him steady up. He falls in love. His life takes a leap from physical to metaphysical. He is totally destroyed. Insofar as love is about to live and let live is fine and magnificent but when it jumps into the bandwagon of love to die and let other die it becomes a total catastrophe as Žižek mentions in some writings, particularly in interviews.

He further writes: ” There is nothing more dangerous, more lethal for the loved person than to be loved, as it were, for not what he or she is, but for fitting the ideal.” What Zizek here is predicating upon is that when we say we are in love, we are not in love rather that person whom we love only fits out fantasy. For Zizek love is ideology. Because I want to make whoopee with someone, caress her and enjoy life with her, I make approaches and trick, to beguile and promote a wishful idea upon someone else.

Then how to really love someone: parrying all these stratagems and shenanigans tricking us through ideological guises. How can I say I truly love someone and we are intrinsically in love? Here i ek affords us with a fine answer: “The one measure of true love is you can insult the other,” following his violent theme by making us believe when you are truly in love, you can do horrible things with her and nevertheless having a fantastic relationship.

All in all, the hallmark of post-modern man is confusion. He lives in complex doubts, uncertainties and insecurities. He is anxious to possess a person whom he thinks is in desperately love with. Love has become a strange phenomenon with post-modern man. He loves but does not know what it means to love. Meaning of love does not imply a definitive approach rather analysing it meticulously; studying love by diving deep into its innards and scrutinising what really is it that has taken us by storm. Postmodern and industrial world has bestowed the postmodern lover with a lot of tech-related gadgets and spaces to pursue love variously. The online dating, the blind dating so on and so forth. These all constitute a love which is hard to understand owing to its chameleon outlook. The online dating is the strangest thing happening now. Your beloved is hooked on the screen and is propelling you to more and more buy into her because she is love. But, it is, uncannily hilarious that love is online. i ek calls online dating a problematic “aspect of self-commodification or self-manipulation.”

In the similar wave, there is an array of love vocabulary which are absolutely amazing like to whogle means to look up person online; to woogle means ” to curry favour by posting flattering contents of one’s self online for future prospective searches.” There in website of bbc.co.uk in BBC learning English portal there is an astounding list of words and phrases related to modern pattern of love.

This is just awesome. This seems to be a cryptic and Einsteinian theory of relativity. In effect these all are the product of capitalism to make love nothing more than an abstract way of commodifying thus manipulating surreptitiously. But, all the same, love still is essential and gratifying for all of us in one way or other. As once Dostoevsky in his baggy novel The Idiot said: only beauty can save the world. He, needless to say, meant it for love. This was a philosophical study of modern love and I am really a classical moralist who really thinks love is important for us despite these all-demonising things.

The writer is a student, based in Turbat.
He Tweets at @shahabakram6 and can be reached at shahabakram0852@gmail.com