Abstract
This chapter looks at how love has been conceptualized through the ages, from philosophy and mythology to the contemporary science of love. In semiotic terms, love forms an opposition with sex, whereby one entails the other in some meaningful way. Most of the ancient mythic stories dealt expressively with this oppositional dynamic, implying that it was directive of human destiny and thus part of the human condition. In the ancient myths the dichotomy between love and sex was imagined in terms of gods and goddesses, such as Aphrodite and Eros. This reveals that from the dawn of history, this opposition has always been felt to be an emotional tug within us between the sacred and the profane. It also reveals that the interaction among love, sex, gender, courtship practices, and marriage is forged through meaning-making structures that are involved in uniting the two parts of the love-sex dichotomy. Notions of love result from the shared experiences of people in different areas of the world and in different eras of time. This chapter delves into these notions by discussing famous stories of love from antiquity and the medieval period, when idealizations became common in poetry and prose. The overall theme of the chapter is that love is a powerful motivator of human actions that cannot be explained in empirical scientific ways. As the ancient and medieval stories of love strongly suggest, the extent to which we will go to achieve romance is extraordinary.
Love is everything it’s cracked up to be.
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
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Danesi, M. (2019). Conceptualizing Love. In: The Semiotics of Love. Semiotics and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18111-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18111-6_1
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