Does love require a kind of understanding? Does
understanding, at least in some cases, require a kind of love? Does one of the two acts or capabilities have moral, logical, or epistemic priority over the other?
Can there be understanding without
love, and love without understanding?
Do we have to understand (or be able
to show understanding toward) someone in order to be able to love them? Do we
have to love someone in order to be able to understand (or show understanding
toward) them?
Is understanding a ground of love,
and love a ground of understanding? Do we have to “love our enemies” in order
to understand them?
There may be a certain kind of
understanding that requires love of whomever or whatever we’re trying to
understand. There may also be a certain kind of love that requires or depends
on our presumed understanding of whomever or whatever we think we love.
There may also be a kind of
love of things that are beyond our complete understanding.
Suppose that instead of saying “I
believe, so that I may understand” (“Credo ut intelligam,” as Anselm affirmed)
or “I seek to understand, so that I may believe” ("Quaero intelligere ut
credam,” as he denied), we each were to say, “I love, so that I may
understand” or “I seek to understand, so that I may love”? What would then happen
to our perceptions of ourselves and one another?
There may be many kinds of love: parental,
filial, marital, brotherly, sisterly, neighborly, romantic, erotic, and sexual.
There may also be many kinds of understanding: analytic, synthetic, intellectual, emotional, empathetic, experiential, practical, and theoretical. An
“adequate” understanding of someone or something (however that “adequacy” may
be defined) may require more than one kind of understanding of that person or
thing.
There may also be various kinds of
self-love and self-understanding,
Can we truly love someone whom we
don’t at all understand? Can we truly love someone if we don’t actually know
who she is and who we’re actually in love with? Perhaps we can love
someone in spite of not always being able to understand them. Perhaps true love
requires that we love others unconditionally and without necessarily having to
understand all their thoughts, words, and actions.
It may be argued that love may sometimes be irrational or unexplainable; but can such an act or capacity properly
be called “love” (rather than “infatuation” or “obsession”) if it's utterly irrational?
Mustn’t we be able to think that we have at
least some partial or incomplete understanding of whomever or whatever we think we love?
Don’t we in some cases love someone for
the very reason that we understand them, or understand someone for the very
reason that we love them? How much of a role may understanding then play
in our falling in or out of love? And how much of our love for someone or
something may be determined by our own capacity for self-understanding?
Loving someone may require at least a willingness to try to understand them, even if we don't have the fully developed capacity to do so. The imperfectness of our love may then be revealed, at least in part, by the imperfectness of our understanding of them.
There may also be degrees of love
and understanding. If we love someone enough, perhaps that means we’ll be
able to sufficiently understand them.
Is there a
threshold level of love that’s necessary for our understanding of someone? Is
there a threshold level of understanding that’s necessary for our love of someone?
Perhaps we should try more often to
determine both the nature of our understanding of love and the nature of our
love of understanding. Perhaps we should also try more often to determine whether
we’re actually developing a greater understanding of the nature of love or whether
we’re merely falling in love with the idea of understanding it.
