- What is love?
Although she didn’t really write about it in particular detail, it’s clear if we look at the preponderance of her statements that to Rand, love is seen in its typical modern psychological meaning. Love is an emotion responding to what one values highly. It is feeling of enjoyment and pleasure resulting in the desire to gain, keep, achieve, possess, be in close proximity to, etc. what one values. When used in a verb form in ordinary language, such as “I love everything beautiful,” I think we can just interpret this as saying one values highly the thing in question and thus has the emotional response.
The clearest source we have for this is a brief paragraph in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology where Rand is applying her theory of concept-formation to various instances and expounding on it, she mentions of love as “an emotion proceeding from the evaluation of an existent as a positive value and as a source of pleasure” (ITOE 34.)
- Is love rational, what does that mean? (And also how does ethics effect love?)
If love is seen in the sense of an emotion responding to a high positive evaluation of something, then in this sense we can’t say that it is rational or irrational. Emotions are automatic responses to values, so they themselves are neither. But the value-judgments themselves can be appraised by reason, according to Rand, so in that sense, we can ask whether it is rational to love the thing in question, in other words, if it is actually beneficial for us to value the thing.
In terms of romantic love then, when we respond to the other person, we respond to being in that person’s presence, having contact with that person, and all their attributes and virtues or positive qualities and integrate these things into our own happiness. So in asking if this love is rational, we ask whether or not these qualities and attributes are actually of positive benefit to us. It is this way also that love is determined by values and even philosophic premises, and so becomes a topic for ethics.
- How does one fall in love?
This also would be a question more for psychology and not philosophy to answer. Rand doesn’t address the issue (at least not directly), but I think the general idea is that, starting early in life, one has a set of tastes and responses to traits one starts forming based on associations, and these experiences accumulate and mix together with various judgments about the way things are to form one’s emotional response to things. One can have conscious identification of these standards, or they can stay more subconscious and implicit. (Actually this kind of leads in to the next question.)
- What is “sense of life”?
According to Rand, since the need for some fundamental questions about life are inescapable, whether we realize it or not, all men have a basic philosophy of life. But not all men hold their values or ideas in conscious, verbal form, and don’t know the first thing about philosophy. Most people form their implicit views of “the basic nature of existence and man… subconsciously by means of an emotional generalization, by an identified unverbalized estimate of the value and meaning of their own existence.” This is not a explicit philosophy, but basically an emotionally integrated core attitude toward life and experiences with it. This she calls a “sense of life.” Rand is basically differentiating between the explicit, conscious views someone holds (a philosophy) and their subconscious, more deeply ingrained accumulated premises about life that guides their emotional reactions and ways they tend to integrate new experiences (sense of life.) Now, the two may be in line, or they may not; also, the two may be based on rational premises and values, or the may not. In Rand’s aesthetics, the concept plays a central role in the relation of art to cognitive function and emotion, since one’s sense of life is the basic way that one responds to art.
Cf. Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” “Art and Sense of Life,” “Art and Cognition” (in the revised edition.)
