195 29 Love. Culturally Specific or Universal? What is love? Can it be defned? Is it a universal senti- ment everywhere similar, or is it declined by various cultures in specifc historically shaped forms? Does it have a history? Shall it be specifed by complementary adjectives like in the notions of ‘romantic’ , ‘passionate’ or ‘erotic’ love? Is love an instinct and a part of our ‘na- ture’ , or is it educated and belongs to the domain of culture? While the question of the balance between nature and nurture is a classic one in the study of emo- tions, the notion of love is specifc with regard to the unusually large number of issues that it covers. As ob- serves the psychologist James Averill, in the broadest sense, love refers to the principle(s) by which people organise their relationships with one an- other. [...] love relationships can be conceived of as ex- tending to members of the larger community, to ab- stract entities (honour, justice), and to the world order, however conceived (nature, God). Major theories of love, then, tend to be associated with theories of socie- ty in general. (1985, 90–91) It is as such that the issue of love has haunted the Euro- pean thought and politics since at least the Enlighten- ment period and made its way to other continents when they were confronted with the European coloni- alism of the time. In this sense, while the question of whether the ‘love’ sentiment in itself has a history re- mains a controversial issue, there is little doubt that the discourses concerning love and concerning what love is have one – or rather several – histories, and can be analysed as parts of various intellectual traditions. ‘Love’ is a hazy concept. In Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921), Sigmund Freud observed dass die Sprache mit dem Wort ›Liebe‹ in seinen viel- fältigen Anwendungen eine durchaus berechtigte Zu- sammenfassung geschaffen hat und dass wir nichts Besseres tun können, als dieselbe auch unseren wis- senschaftlichen Erörterungen und Darstellungen zu- grunde zu legen. (Freud 1921, 14) In a comparable way, I will suggest here that the hazi- ness of the notion of love is actually what makes it im- portant and useful. In this typology, I will examine it as it encompasses a great variety of meanings, rather than restrain it to one single dimension. I will empha- sise the heuristic dimensions of this bold, and some- what vague, notion, and examine it from three succes- sive, very diferent, questions: 1) What is love?; 2) What is love for?; 3) Is love universal? 29.1 What is Love? Taken in its largest sense, love is a sentiment of pleasing attraction or attachment for a person or an object. Te domains it covers are almost unlimited: it is possible to declare oneself as loving ice-cream, parties, ones’ own parents, or Paris. Even if these forms of love can be con- sidered as being very diferent, they all emphasise the existence of a special bond between the person saying it and the loved object. In all cases, and even if the con- cerned relationships remain in the domain of the virtu- al or the platonic, the link mentioned when speaking of love is always understood as actually existing. To give an example, it is only possible to love the taste of a fruit that we have already eaten and have an experience of. In- deed, it is entirely plausible to love the idea of this taste, as described by others, or the shape and colours of the concerned fruit, as seen on pictures. But it is impossible to love its taste itself without having any experience of it. Love is a tangible relationship between the lover and the thing loved, an emotional attachment from the frst to- ward the second. Tat is to say that love works through human emotions. However, that does not mean that love is one single emotion in itself. Rather, it is a com- plex system of emotions, which may exist under various assemblages and confgurations in diferent locations and times. From the idea according to which love is “a com- motion of the soul caused by a movement of the spir- its, a commotion that impels the soul to join itself de volonté to objects that appear to be agreeable to it” of Descartes’ Passions de l’âme (2017, 22), to Stendhal’s metaphors of love as a ‘crystallization’ (see Stendhal 1980; as well Tennov 1979), the history of thought is not lacking in attempts to give physiological explana- tions to the background of the amorous urge, the love feeling and passion. Te biological anthropologist Helen Fisher defnes romantic love as a universal and physiological function of our bodies, based on “genet- ically fxed instinctual mechanisms designed to dic- tate reproductive behaviour”. She sees this instinct as having taken the form, for the human species, of emotions evolved specifically to motivate individuals of reproductive age to become attracted and attached 29 Love. Culturally Specific or Universal? J.B. Metzler © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature, 2019 H. Kappelhoff/J.-H. Bakels/H. Lehmann/C. Schmitt (Hg.), Emotionen, https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-476-05353-4_29 In Kappelhoff, Hermann, Jan-Hendrik Bakels, Hauke Lehmann and Christina Schmitt (dir.). 2019. Emotionen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Berlin: J. B. Metzler Verlag: 195-199.