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Hello, luv. You’re looking…rather complicated.

By JOHN CORNWELL [Brain] – Out of the proliferating stories, legends and mythologies of love come well established definitions and differences. C. S. Lewis’ celebrated literary history, Allegory of Love (1936) traced the early Western ideals of romantic love from the 13th century poem Roman de la Rose, with its notion of a knight’s choice of a single love object, as in the choice of a single rose in a garden of beautiful blooms. Lewis goes on to explore the difference between sacred and profane love: the Christian love of agape, with its self-sacrificial, non-judgemental ideal of universal respect, as opposed to the erotic romantic ideal of exclusive, self-interested possession. Yet, understandings of love and relationships alter with the wheel of history. How different Prof. Terry Eagleton’s secular version of agape, severed from its religious origins, as the capacity to allow others to flourish, expounded in his book The Meaning of Life (2007). How different again, from the romantic tradition traced by Lewis, is the version of romantic love promoted by sociologist Prof. Anthony Giddens.

In his notable essay Transformation of Intimacy (1993), he argues that modern notions of romantic love stem from the kinds of novels that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, eventually shaping the romantic themes of 20th century movies and TV soaps. These narratives, he maintains, brought external pressures to bear on the formation and maintenance of love bonds. With the breakdown of religion, however, feminism and the availability of contraception and easy divorce, romantic love—he maintains—has been shaped increasingly and narrowly by the emotions of the two people concerned. In the familiar parlance of the post-modern sociologist, Giddens asserts that lovers today behave as ‘flaneurs’, their commitment lasting as long as the feelings or the rewards. Hence commitment, Giddens notes, becomes a scarce virtue, yet we have gained by what he calls the ‘democratization’ of love. Such a view—‘love’ as a serendipitous individual emotion, uncomplicated by social, familial, imaginative, religious or cultural forces—may well make life simpler for neuroscientists seeking simple correlates by rounding up the usual hormonal suspects.

Yet for one highly cultural and literary scientist, the task of defining love and its probable brain correlates are by no means uncomplicated, reductive tasks. Semir Zeki’s courageous and carefully considered book Splendours and Miseries of the Brain starts out by accepting the existence of a repertoire of differences between notions of love.

Continued at Brain: A Journal of Neurology | More Chronicle & Notices.

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