Is love part of nature or is it nurtured by culture? Is it part of the wiring of the human psyche or a seconda

Most writers on love quote with approval the seventeenth-century French thinker La Rochefoucauld. He asserted that people would not experience love if they did not hear love talked about. This aphorism raises a very interesting question: Is love essentially a social phenomenon that exists because we have ways of discussing it and stories to tell about it, in terms of its genesis, flow, and end? The first written expressions of love are found in ancient Egypt from 1300 to 1000 BCE. This may suggest that there is something in the emotion of love that is constant and unvarying, a human necessity. Yet, curiously, the anthropologist C.M. Bowra, when studying primitive song, was of the opinion that societies that live on hunting and gathering, rather than agriculture, have no love songs. Without outward expressions of love, can love be said to exist? Or does it represent a basic human need wherever human beings are found?





This is a topic for the 2007/2007 national humanitaries contest..

Is love part of nature or is it nurtured by culture? Is it part of the wiring of the human psyche or a seconda
Love is not strictly a human emotion. Animals experience and show love also.
Reply:Whether love is expressed in poetry or songs or behavior or not. Love is there within human nature. It is even in animal nature. Every culture may have different to express it. Further we enjoy and understand the things which are within us. Outer expressions only stimulate our inner instincts. If I do not have love instinct, I will not appreciate or understand a love song.
Reply:well love we can see come in many forms. Their is the human perception and the animality. You see mother animals insticively protecting their young. So its not just a human emotion. In fact its an animal emotion. Though lack of it can hinder what ur preception of it is.
Reply:Love depends on consciousness. Therefore love arose sometime after consciousness arose. Love is culturally significant. Therefore culture at least partially defines and reinforces love. Love can be universally expressed or interpersonally expressed, which implies that it is not necessarily a social construct.





I think love is intimately connected with empathy, which we now know to be hard wired in the brain. This may mean that love is also innate. One would have an easy time arguing for the evolutionary advantage of such a powerful emotion.