Is the only way we are able to love the way we have been loved?
In other words: Do we learn how to love? What is the relation between giving love and receiving love? (regardless of the definition of love, type of love, etc; the accent being on the way we express or understand love and the relation between love reception and love expression)
The empiricist in me tells me that the answer to your question is no.
I love my wife in a way that I've never loved another person before. She loves me in a way that is very different to the way I love her because we're very different people.
I can safely say that the way I love my wife has nothing to do with previous experience per se; it's not an amalgam of other forms of love I've experienced or even seen in a movie; it's something new. It's also something different to the way I experience the love from my wife.
As a mathematician, I still believe that Formalism and a static universe are the simplest way to define the universe, and my arguments against free will have caused more than a few heated arguments in this forum already. But as an empiricist, I know that my love for my wife is given freely and experienced as something new to my existence.
Is part of that emotion? Sure, and by extension some of it ties to biological function. Is some of it experience? Definitely, and that means that with the larger range of life's experience at my time in life, I have a greater understanding of (and appreciation for) both my imperfections, and those of my wife. That makes me love her even more.
All I can say is that from my personal experience, what I feel and how I express it is different to anything I've experienced in my own life and that has to mean that love is capable of being unique and outside the amalgam of experience that one has prior to engaging in that love.
That this is still possible when one has a larger foundation of knowledge and experience to rely upon only makes that sensation of love even richer.
To conclude, I think it's actually backwards; I think our love for others is what expands our capacity to understand the experience of others loving us. We learn to appreciate how they love us more deeply because the love we feel gives us context for their actions that facilitates our capacity to understand it on a deeper level than is possible if we're incapable of love.
In that sense, perhaps love is the mysterious injection of non-determinism that physicists and mathematicians have been searching for all this time...
'Love' is a many-ways ambiguous term; and Conifold is right to doubt if there is a common meaning. But I assume you have in mind romantic love or the love we find in friendship - not for instance the love of our country (1914 and all that) or lustful obsession.
I should have thought one of the characteristics of most human beings is that they can reflect on past experience and not simply be determined by it, and another is that they have imagination. We can see that no matter how things have been in the past, they are not fixed that way; and that we can enter into a relationship with another person with an imaginative sense of new possibilities this time round.
CS Lewis wrote a book, 'Surprised by Joy'. He had never known a deep love for a woman but then Joy Davidman came into his life, a divorcee with children, and he came to love both a woman and her children, novel elements in his experience.
The past may be closed but the future is open.
There are two questions:
(1) Do we learn how to love?
No. Moral Foundation Theory, the chemistry of sexual attraction and the presence of belief in children show that what we need to love in various contexts (morality, sexuality and spirituality) we have from birth prior to any cultural influence. We do not learn how to love although culture may successfully try to influence how we express love naturally.
These are controversial positions. Those in the opposition view humanity as “rational”. They view gender as “socially constructed”. They view childhood belief as “parental indoctrination”.
If you step back from the controversies about whether love comes from nature or nurture and observe that people from all cultures seem to be able to love although they do it somewhat differently, it makes sense that culture plays a secondary role when it comes to love. We are born with a moral foundation. We are born male and female with specific sexual preferences. We are born believers. We are born lovers.
(2) Is the way we love deterministic?
No. Ironically two of these explanations from nature rather than nurture, Moral Foundation Theory and the chemistry of sexual attraction, set up situations where we are forced to make choices between competing values.
There are at least five inconsistent moral foundations in Moral Foundation Theory. Some of them favor individual rights. Some of them favor rejecting those very individual rights to support group loyalty. The moral challenge for the individual is to balance these conflicting foundations, that is, choose what the right thing is to do in current circumstances.
In the chemistry between us there are two opposing situations as well. There is pleasure encouraging us to engage in sexual activity with multiple partners. There is also the pain of breaking the pair-bond with a single partner. This again leaves individuals in situations where they must make choices.
From the perspective of determinism, these explanations are problematic on two counts. First, they are not complete explanations of what human beings will do. There is plenty of room for individual choice. Second, they force the individual to make choices. If our free will, or our ability to make a choice, is a delusion, as some determinists believe, it cannot be simply a cultural delusion. It would have to be a delusion at the level of our species, if such a concept of delusion is even meaningful. What is more likely is the belief in determinism is itself a cultural delusion.
