A priori conceptions of love.

Recently, I took a literature class. The topic of the class: love and strife. Given the topic, it's not surprising that I've left the class with some interesting insights from various authors, and some original thoughts that I'm still hashing out. I'd like to talk about one of those here.

Kant, the philosophical father of transcendental idealism, says that we humans have an intuitive sense of certain aspects of reality that precede out conscious recognition of them. Specifically, he refers to space and time. He says that without an intuitive sense of space and time we would experience the world as if in malestrom. Experiences would come in short burst out of the order of time and space. That is, we would experience the world like that assuming we would know that we were “experiencing” anything at all. Why mention Kant’s conceptions of time and space? Here’s why: I’ve come to understand love as another prerequisite for the human experience. In the same way experiencing life would be like living in a kaleidoscope without a priori intuitive knowledge about space and time, so would our lives be confused (if not meaningless) without an intuitive sense of love. Relationships, how we understand others, and even our broader relationship with our world as a whole would be choppy and discombobulated.

Maybe it’s presumptuous of me to place love next to a priori intuitions of space and time as a metaphysical truth. However, I don’t think that I’m wrong. Love and strife stand as such basic archetypes to the human experience that I am lead to believe that they are not only derivatives of the human experience, but necessary prerequisites for it. 

For a class on love and strive I’ve learned more than I anticipated. In other ways, I feel like I haven’t really learned anything “new” at all. Like I said, love and strife are such fundamental elements of the human experience that it would be difficult to come into a class not intuitively knowing many key aspects. This class has felt more like discovery than learning per se, but even with that said I don’t think that the lessons end with my exit from the classroom. The lessons will continue on for a lifetime.