What Is Love? A Philosophical Inquiry at the Lower Red Lion (22nd July 2025)

Last night, ‘Philosophy at the Lower Red Lion’ explored What is Love? This was our fifth session at the Lower Red. Given it is a holiday period, there was a good turnout of 20 bodies, keen to dissect the question.  Below is an attempt to summarise the issues and our debate.

It is fair to say that few questions have haunted humanity as persistently as "What is love?" It inspires art, fuels religions, and drives both joy and suffering—yet it remains beautifully elusive. Is it a feeling? A choice? A biological imperative? A moral duty? Not surprisingly, because that is the nature of philosophy, no simple answers were revealed in our discussion, but we pondered over love’s profound complexity through competing and complementary lenses.

At its most visceral, love is something we feel —a surge of affection, a pang of longing, or the warmth of connection. Philosophers like Francis Bacon, David Hume and Bertrand Russell have centred emotion as the core of human experience, suggesting love defies pure rationality. Yet if love were merely a feeling, how could it endure beyond fleeting passion? This tension hints at something deeper: love as a ‘state of being’ that transcends momentary moods.

Plato saw physical love (Eros) as a ladder leading to the form of perfection in terms of wisdom and beauty – an idealised state to be sought after. Aristotle, ignoring Eros, argued that close friendship (Philia) was the purest form of love.

Later, Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas reframed love (caritas) as selfless devotion, a moral commitment to the good of others. Here, love becomes not just a passion but a sacred duty, demanding sacrifice and discipline, culminating in the unconditional transcendental love of deity.

Following the ‘Enlightenment’, a more rational analysis viewed love as mutual recognition (where there is a form of reciprocity) —a dance between self and other where both identities are affirmed: for example, Hegel thought  love is a statement: "You matter to me, not for what you provide, but for who you are."  Is love the foundation of our very sense of self? Without being truly ‘seen’ by another, can we ever fully exist?

Existentialists like Kierkegaard, Sartre and de Beauvoir rejected the idea of love as mere fate. Instead, they framed it as a ‘repeated choice’—an act of will and power that persists even when feelings waver.

Modern thinkers often find a crossover between philosophy and psychology. It is both an action and a state of mind that results in both fulfilment and loss. Erich Fromm, the German social psychologist, echoed this position, calling love an ‘art’ requiring practice: "Love isn’t something you find; it’s something you do." 

Alain de Botton, in an amusing talk in Sydney Opera House, laments how Romanticism turned love into a fantasy of perfection, demanding impossible standards which never contemplate the reality of what happens after the fictional, we live 'happily ever after’.

For the cynics and philosophers of the absurd, like Albert Camus, love is a rebellion against life’s meaninglessness. In a cosmos that is indifferent to the human condition, love is a leap of faith without guarantees, a commitment made despite uncertainty and mortality.

In conclusion, philosophically, love resists reduction. It is at once a feeling and a decision, a biological impulse and a transcendent ideal, a source of happiness and suffering. Perhaps the power of love lies in its paradoxes. Love both reveals and challenges us. It demands vulnerability and courage; it pulls us out of ourselves and yet defines us.