Valentine's for Zarathustra

A student forwarded a message for me today. It goes something like, Everytime I see my mother prepare breakfast, etc. I know there is love. Whenever I see my cousin fetch her son from school, etc. thereby saying that love is not merely for sweethearts. Further, that this kind of love is the one being depicted during Valentine's Day.

Wherefore, I reply - in the manner of Hume -

Love is merely sophistry and illusion. It is an abstraction by commerce in order to sell flowers 500x more than their real value.

Oh no, it is a mere result of man's insistence to be completed, looking at the depths of his existence and yearning for his place in eternity. But let him define eternity and he does not have the words for it. He will perchance reply with St. Thomas, in the negative, as in the absence of before and after. But when we ask him, in eternity, there will be no motion then? He would say - forced by the existence of motion - there is. Our mind still thinks, and since Plato describes that as a sort of motion, then there is. But then, we ask, Plato is your authority? No, he would say. Augustine said something like that too. He has an imprimatur. And motion carries a before and after? Well yes. Hence, there is a before and after? Yes. Okay, so there is time then. Ah, well... let us start again.

Love is nothing but the impulses of the material brain. Wherefore, as a proof, people who were not loved when they were young, behaved more or less like a brigand. So, being good, loving another, though part of human nature, cannot be described apart from the materiality of man. And in the end, when this matter succumb to corruption, and all that is left is a cosmic egg in a big crunch, or a dead universe, then love does not remain.


"When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself and to confess that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe though they are not able, by their most diligent inquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations or to remove objections which may be raised against them."

- An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (David Hume)