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Can love exist without hope for something better for you or others? Would it be contentment, rather than love, otherwise?

  • How do you mean that: "without hope for something better for you or others?" like can love exist under duress and in situations without hope? Sure, love is potent enough to make you ignore immanent danger and certain doom. Or do you mean if a quest for improvement is part of love? No. Also it's not contentment in the sense of acceptance of the situation or a drug like high, you're just content. Even if you had nothing, but love you'd feel like you have everything you could wish for, nothing else that you need or want. Of course that's unfortunately just a feeling and doesn't last forever... – haxor789 Jan 19 '24 at 11:16
  • i think you understood the question, and your comment looks like a rhetorical try at answering it @haxor789 just answer it then. –  Jan 19 '24 at 12:35
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    I love my ex-wife but have no hope of a future with her. – Idiosyncratic Soul Jan 19 '24 at 16:14
  • i'm sorry to hear that @IdiosyncraticSoul you may not love her for much longer, then? –  Jan 19 '24 at 16:54
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    No, I'll always love her but moving on means letting go of the hope that we can "work it out". Love without hope. – Idiosyncratic Soul Jan 19 '24 at 17:03
  • you don't hope for anything better for her @IdiosyncraticSoul ? perhaps you want to move on but you don't want her to: which doesn't sound like love to me. sounds more like a vendetta –  Jan 19 '24 at 17:13
  • you have no right to use that word about someone you don't care about –  Jan 20 '24 at 01:24
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    From my point of view, Love and Hope are like the ends of a segment. If You consider one end of the segment is Love, then another will be Hope, and viceversa. Love and Hope is a pair always together. If You will try to split a segment in 2, You will have 2 segments with 2 ends: Love and Hope. Pair. –  Jan 20 '24 at 05:53
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    Love is constant joy thought of by a mind to be invoked externally by something certain directly or indirectly via resemblance, while hope is inconstant joy arising from something externally future or past in doubt from the thought of the same mind, ergo they don't have any containment relationship... – Double Knot Jan 20 '24 at 07:18
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    Yes, I "hope" thar my ex-wife is happy. But I also "hope" that you are happy and I don't love you. – Idiosyncratic Soul Jan 20 '24 at 18:22
  • but one would think that is less consuming for you @IdiosyncraticSoul ? –  Jan 20 '24 at 18:23

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Yes , love can exist without hope of something better for yourself or others. It depends on what you love. If you love an idea ,which is independent of people involved, then such a love can exist without any expectation for yourself or others.

For example, you may love the idea of cause and effect. Whenever you see an effect ,you end up searching for the cause. Whenever you see a cause, you end up searching for effect. A person truly in love with the idea of cause and effect will not have any other expectation.

SacrificialEquation
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  • i probably meant love for other people, not objects and ideas. i will pretend to find that chilling –  Jan 20 '24 at 14:42
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    The most simple examples of love we can see are Alphabets. Alphabets encompass the spark of emotions that generated all of other aggregations of sentiments in history of the humanity, creating new and new treasures of "emotions". Another simple example of love is 1+1 = 2. Look, 1 is to mean a truth, 3 also is to mean a truth, but this truth can degenerate in a falsity: 1+1 = 3. Each 1, 2, 3, is a truth, but not all combinations are accepted, in some circumstances. We could understand ad-hoc expression 1+1=3, as father+mother=family(father, mother, child), but this already is kind of fairy-tale –  Jan 20 '24 at 17:02
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Found another SEP article

we should pay attention to the value of the hoped-for ends (Kierkegaard [1847] 1995: 261). Eternal hope, on this account, “is never put to shame” (Kierkegaard [1847] 1995: 260, see also 263). Further, and in line with the Christian tradition, he argues that the value of hope depends on its relation to love: We hope for ourselves if and only if we hope for others, and only to the same degree. Love

is the middle term: without love, no hope for oneself; with love, hope for all others—and to the same degree one hopes for oneself, to the same degree one hopes for others, since to the same degree one is loving. (Kierkegaard [1847] 1995: 260)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hope

hope has intrinsic worth because it is constitutive of love towards others and towards oneself, which are intrinsically valuable activities. It is in virtue of mental imaging that hope is intimately connected to love, because spending mental energy in thinking about the well-being of another person is constitutive of loving her.

I would suppose that the role of hope is less clearly "thinking about", rather than thinking about the value of, the well being of someone. But perhaps that goes without saying.

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Rumi says:

"Desire only that of which you have no hope

Seek only that of which you have no clue

Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns"

For full poem see this answer: What is love actually?

I would say love emerges from biology, where it implicitly seeks ends. But the genre of tragedy frequently expresses how love is possible even in the absence of hope.

"Here, here will I remain With worms that are thy chambermaids: O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips, O you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death! Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide! Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark! Here’s to my love. O true apothecary, Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die."

dies

-Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet, Act 5 scene 3

I see it's power as exactly being that it doesn't require hope. So it's force over us can transcend hopelessness. As Rumi says, with love 'East and West arrive', it has the power to be the ordering principle to our lives that can transcend all others.

Arguably history's greatest poet of love Petrarch, spent his poetic life writing about Laura who he had only glimpsed, and refused to meet him, never mind marry him. This was a major influence on chivalric ideas of courtly love, detached from the attempt to possess or consummate a relationship with the object of desire and muse.

The authentic response to experience can stand as it's own testament, which can go beyond the limits of frustration to influence others, who's experiences chime:

"Then she opened up a book of poems and handed it to me Written by an Italian poet from the 13th century And every one of them words rang true And glowed like burning coals Pouring off of every page Like it was written in my soul, from me to you

Tangled up in blue"

-Bob Dylan

The person who has experienced hopelessness, must know that authentic living is a necessary bridge to moving beyond it, dropping our entanglements with things that do not truly matter to process what blocks a return to hope. In darkness love can light the heart when hope cannot.

CriglCragl
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  • i'm skeptical about that, outside literary depictions, as if they could not be ways of reframing hope as its lack, for the viewer or to synbolize its death etc. –  Jan 20 '24 at 22:14
  • @user66697: As I say, I think literary depictions gain their currency by ' chiming' with universal experiences. I see hope as a more rational calculation, & love as connecting with something beyond the self & selfishness. An aspiration which can go beyond a rational calculation of whether hope is appropriate. – CriglCragl Jan 20 '24 at 23:56
  • sure, but as i say, i am skeptical... –  Jan 20 '24 at 23:57
  • @user66697: Love is not an emotion for sceptics.... It connects more to the mystic, to rapture, to where 'intellect drowns'. To affirm existence is an an essentially non-rational thing. Not a calculation or a choice, but wilful, & a subjective state that can be independent of causes & conditions. – CriglCragl Jan 21 '24 at 00:04
  • sorry but you seem willfully ambiguous, which is a feature of mysticism, sure. for me, romeo's suicide is not out of love. ymmv –  Jan 21 '24 at 00:05
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    @user66697: There is a bias I think in Western thought, against considering the full scope of human experiences. But philosophy can go there. See 'Philosophers or philosophical traditions that reject symbolic reasoning' in https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/82360/philosophers-or-philosophical-traditions-that-reject-symbolic-reasoning/82366#82366 Romeo seeks love like the shipwrecked seek land. He knows it is his only option, & it is his only route to continuing to live. – CriglCragl Jan 21 '24 at 00:09
  • the view that romeo loved her so much to kill himself, that it is an amazing love story, and [his] suicide is a noble and loving act is just... well, you're talking mystic consciousness, but idt it works. i think you speak out of hate. do you? he found love in death only? –  Jan 21 '24 at 00:21
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    @user66697: With love Romeo could tolerate the intolerable. Without it he could not. Romeo is not of a mindset to accept the Montague-Capulet rift. He seeks the making of a better world, & meeting Juliet he knows a resonance with that. The deepest purpose of love is to begin a new world, in the image that the lovers hold of it. That is why their vision transcends hope, transcends what can be enacted. It is a commitment to the world created between lovers, which only needs them to be affirmed." It is the realm of purposes than transcend our own self, & connect to why life is worth living. – CriglCragl Jan 21 '24 at 00:46
  • ok well i don't remember much of the play, just disagreeing RE hope (and not the only one to do so, it seems)., dunno why it was closed –  Jan 21 '24 at 01:08
  • @user66697: "The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies." Love is no place for intellect. As Yeats says, it is no country for old men. It requires the confidence of an artist, who knows with certainty the meaning of what they made. I hope you come to know that. – CriglCragl Jan 21 '24 at 03:35
  • i have always neen suspicious of ppl who say you need these talents etc. to experience love –  Jan 21 '24 at 16:36
  • @user66697: Not a talent. More like: "A man's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play." -Nietzsche – CriglCragl Jan 21 '24 at 17:59
  • i disagree with most things you say, and i thinnk you misuse what you cite. anyway, all ppl are capable of love in some form, imho, but a few are unable to express that, and include myself in that. –  Jan 21 '24 at 18:18
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@Idiosyncratic Soul

I love my wife, but I have no hope she can be happy again

Assuming your wife hasn't been in a horrible accident, this suggests you do not care about your wife, yet you love her. I would argue that is impossible, unless we do not use others, in general, as means.

As to the horror of caring for another person you can do nothing for (my wife is paralysed from the neck down), I would suggest that you are at least left with the innocence of illusory moments of hope in mutual vulnerability etc..

Don't know why the question was closed. For me, love without hope and care is meaningless, but may well exist. Whether or not we devalue if for being meaningless might depend on what we value about love, the other person or ourselves.

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    Your post remembered me a poem: i have to live eternal life, and after die, to find, what's love. ☕ –  Jan 20 '24 at 05:57
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    that's a nice/fun poem. thanks @VitalieGhelbert –  Jan 20 '24 at 08:08
  • I do not know if You observed, You can click emojis to open link to article i wrote about "everything and nothing and neither so". Sharing as is, maybe it can be of help. Aloha, dear friend! –  Jan 20 '24 at 08:12
  • You have "good luck", because Your username has "666". When they say "the number of the beast" I am ironically saying "the number of ALL THE BEST". Be happy dear friend, all the best! You can see that 666 is also the sum of the squares of the first seven primes starting from 2 (because i do consider 1 is prime). Have fun! –  Jan 20 '24 at 08:16
  • 666 testing in Linux Terminal with Python https://i.stack.imgur.com/u7kRt.png –  Jan 20 '24 at 08:25
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    i thinkj it's a coincindence @VitalieGhelbert –  Jan 20 '24 at 14:42
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    Nice answer and not to nitpick but you misquoted me: "I love my ex-wife but have no hope of a future with her. " – Idiosyncratic Soul Jan 20 '24 at 18:19