"Why do we love? A philosophical inquiry"

"Why do you love me?

It's driving me crazy!"

"Why Do You Love Me?" - Garbage

As a school task, we had to watch this TED-Ed video and answer this worksheet related to it. Here are my answers:

1.- Attraction is natural, and so is the need to bond with other human beings in a variety of relationships, that can range from acquiantancement to deep connection. It comes as a rational consequence that a combination between attraction and bonding must be inherent as well.

When it comes to deeper reasons, or the reasons causing that attraction and that need to bond, the question gets more complicated. According to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, we humans are just containers for our genetic material and our life goal is to pass it to a future generation, making attraction and love ways to force us into our biological destiny. If that is so, as a transsexual person who has many friends among the LGBT community, I must say nature does quite a terrible job. I see love as more of an arbitrary thing that, if anything, used to have a biological function. With evolution, humans have separated pleasure from reproduction in a radical paradigmatical division, and we can simply have one without the other... and in the case of pleasure without reproduction, we usually do. And that is beautiful.

So, if I am to say, we love because we love. Human evolution is strange, and we simply do things just because we're like that, as a species or as individuals. Some need love, some don't, some bond with many, some don't bond, it's more of an arbitrary thing.

2.- Beautiful, intoxicating, heart-breaking and soul crushing.

3.- Plato, Schopenhauer, Russell, Buddha and Simone du Beauvoir.

4.-

Plato - "Love makes us whole, again."
Schopenhauer - "Love tricks us into having babies."
Russell - "Love is escape from out loneliness."
Buddha - "Love is a misleading affliction."
S. du Beauvoir - "Love lets us reach beyond ourselves."

5.-

"Dependance on another means boredom and power games." – S. du Beauvoir

"We succeed in perpetuating human species and perpetuating human tragedy." – Schopenhauer

"Quench our physical and psychological desires." – Russell

"It enriches our whole being together." – Russell

"Attachments are a great source of suffering." – Buddha

"Love is the longing to find a soulmate who makes us feel whole again." – Plato

"Love infuses our life with meaning." – S. du Beauvoir