Philosophical views about Love

People, all through history, have often well thought-out phenomena like "love at first sight" or "instant friendships" to be the effect of an unmanageable force of attraction or affinity. One of the first to theorize in this way was the Greek philosopher Empedocles, who in the 4th century BC argued for the existence of two forces, love (philia) and strife (neikos), which were hardened to account for the causes of motion in the universe. These two forces were believed to intermingle with the classical elements, i.e., earth, water, air, and fire, in such a way that love served as the binding power involving the different parts of life harmoniously together.

Bertrand Russell explains love as a state of "absolute value", as different to relative value. Thomas Jay Oord describes love as acting intentionally, in sympathetic reply to others (including God), to promote largely well-being. Oord means for his meaning to be adequate for religion, philosophy, and the sciences. Robert A. Heinlein, one of the nearly all prolific science fiction writers of the 20th century, defined love in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land as the point of emotional connection which leads to the pleasure of a new being essential to one's individual well being. This description ignores the ideas of religion and science and in its place focuses on the meaning of love as it relates to the person. Also, an ancient proverb says that love is a high type of tolerance. This view is one that numerous philosophers and scholars have researched, and is broadly accepted.