Let’s go through the motions of love. There’s always something new to learn.
Love is not limited to romance—we love art and science, a mother loves her child, the devout love God. Yet romantic relationships often obscure love’s pure essence, tangled in personal histories, fleeting passions, and external circumstances. What we call love is sometimes anything but.
The subject is much vaster—Dante believed that love moves the sun and the other stars.
Drawing from Studies on Love (1940) by Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and trying to channel his voice, this piece unravels 6 Aspects of Love in Motion—lightning a spark of scientific fire on the matter.
For centuries, love was mistakenly grouped with desire, appetite, and even lust.
St. Thomas Aquinas, following Greek tradition, defined love as the desire for something good (concupiscibile circa bonum) and hate as the rejection of evil (concupiscibile circa malum). But this framework, which persisted until the eighteenth century, fails to capture love’s essence. Love is not simply an appetite; it is something far more profound and dynamic.
Desire moves toward possession—it seeks to draw an object into the self, to assimilate it. It is passive, centered on receiving, and vanishes upon fulfillment.
Once we obtain what we desire, the impulse that drove us toward it dissolves.
This distinction is crucial because love is the source of countless human experiences—desire, thought, volition, action—but none of these are love itself. They emerge from love, just as fruit grows from a tree, yet they do not define its nature.
We may want what we love, but we also desire things we do not love—pleasures, conveniences, fleeting gratifications. A wine connoisseur may desire a fine bottle without loving it, just as a drug addict may crave a substance he despises.
Love, unlike desire, never reaches a point of final satisfaction. It does not fade upon fulfillment because it does not seek to own—it seeks to give.
Love is the supreme movement by which a person steps beyond themselves toward another reality. It does not pull objects into the self; rather, it draws the self outward, toward something greater.
To love is not to claim, but to participate.
Throughout history, some of the keenest minds have sought to define love, often reducing it to desire or happiness. But neither fully captures its essence.
St. Augustine, in one of the most vivid formulations of his erotic temperament, moves beyond the idea of love as mere appetite:
Amor mens, pondus meum: illo feror, quocumque feror.
“My love is my weight; where it goes, I go.”
Here, love is no longer just a longing for possession—it is a gravitational force, drawing the lover irresistibly toward the beloved. Unlike desire, which pulls the object into the self, love pulls the self outward.
Spinoza, in contrast, attempted to root love in emotion, defining it as happiness combined with the awareness of its cause. But this view collapses under scrutiny. Love, at times, is the very opposite of happiness—it can be anguish, turmoil, even self-destruction.
The letters of Mariana Alcoforado, a 17th-century nun tormented by love, make this painfully clear: she thanks her unfaithful lover for the suffering he has caused her and recoils at the thought of returning to the serenity of life before she knew him. Love, for her, is not measured in moments of joy but in the intensity of pain endured.
The first letter ends:
“Goodbye; love me always and make me suffer still greater tortures.”
And two centuries later, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse:
“I love you as one ought to love: desperately.”
This paradox reveals something fundamental: love is not a passive state of pleasure but an active movement, a ceaseless propulsion outward. Love begins where desire ends: it is centrifugal, an exodus from the self. It does not settle in satisfaction but remains in motion, ever advancing toward the beloved.
This movement is not merely physical. Love is, at its core, a migration of the soul, a voluntary departure from inner stillness.
To be in love is not to possess but to be in transit, a perpetual going-toward.
Love and hate share a crucial trait: both are centrifugal, drawing the person outward toward the object.
Yet, while love moves on behalf of its object, hate moves against it. Love envelops, affirms, and vivifies, whereas hate scorches, negates, and corrodes.
A key distinction emerges in their effects: love fosters unity, transcending physical separation. Even when distant, a loved one remains present in symbolic communion—our cause becomes theirs, our being extends to include them. Hate, on the other hand, isolates, creating an unbridgeable abyss.
While both are active forces, love bridges and binds, while hate fractures and estranges.
Love is not a passive state like happiness or sadness. One is happy or sad, but one loves in an ongoing, intentional act. To love art, one must continuously affirm its worth. To love a country is to insist on its right to exist. This affirmation is not mere judgment but a vital participation—it is an act of creation, of giving life to what is loved.
To love is to refuse a universe without the beloved. It is a perpetual movement, a ceaseless vivification of what matters to us.
Hate, conversely, is a virtual assassination, an ongoing attempt to erase the hated object’s right to be.
In the end, love is an insistence on life, while hate is a shadow that seeks to extinguish.
At the core of every individual lies not merely opinions or experiences, but something far more fundamental: a unique system of preferences and aversions.
Before fully understanding a situation, we are already drawn toward or repelled by certain values. This gravitational pull of the heart—our innate acceptance and rejection mechanism—defines our true personality.
Because of this, one of the most revealing aspects of a person is their range of values. To truly understand someone, we must look beyond their words and actions, which can be feigned or socially influenced, and instead examine their deeper inclinations.
Yet, this inner core often remains concealed, even from ourselves. We live, to a large extent, in a kind of self-imposed performance—adopting roles, opinions, and temperaments that are not entirely our own.
Much of what we believe to be ours is in fact dust gathered from the social environment.
We assume identities that flatter us, often without realizing we are merely impersonating ourselves. But there are moments when the mask slips, and our fundamental nature is revealed. One such moment is love.
In choosing whom we love, we unknowingly expose the deepest structure of our being.
Love is an impulse that rises from the most profound depths of the self, carrying with it traces—like shells and seaweed from the ocean floor—of the unseen forces shaping our inner world. A keen observer can reconstruct a person’s true nature from these fragments.
This idea challenges conventional assumptions. When we see a seemingly refined woman enamored with an unremarkable man, we may assume an error or anomaly. But love, like anything delicate, can only be accurately observed up close. Either the man possesses unseen qualities, or the woman is not as exceptional as she appeared.
Love does not deceive—it merely unveils what was always there.
People instinctively resist the idea that their loves expose their deepest nature.
We prefer to be judged in controlled settings, like posing for a photograph, rather than being caught off guard. But this resistance itself confirms the idea—our spontaneous inclinations reveal more about us than any carefully curated image.
If we could fully impose our will upon our instincts, there would be no need to probe into hidden aspects of personality. But willpower can only suppress spontaneity temporarily. Over a lifetime, its influence is minimal. It may refine and perfect us within limits, but beyond those limits, it leads to falsification.
A person who constantly suppresses their true inclinations doesn’t become authentic but instinctively inclined to falseness. Some people are, quite literally, sincerely hypocritical.
Modern psychology supports that the will is not a creative force but a corrective one. It doesn’t generate impulses—it merely restrains or releases them. What we perceive as an act of will is often just the removal of an internal barrier, allowing an already existing inclination to unfold.
The great error of modern thought, inherited from Descartes, has been to believe that we live primarily through our conscious minds. In reality, consciousness is only a thin film over a vast, obscure depth of instincts, impulses, and inherited tendencies.
Reason and freedom exist, but they are not the foundation of human life—they are fleeting actors appearing on the stage of our awareness, while the true play unfolds in the shadows.
To understand a person, we must go beyond their words, actions, and even thoughts—these are merely the visible surface. The true self operates in the unseen depths. A psychologist must be a diver, plunging beneath the staged performances of identity.
Love is one such trap door to the real self.
A person may cultivate an image of refinement, but if she once loved a vain, shallow man obsessed with his tie and Rolls-Royce, she has unwittingly exposed something essential about herself—just as a man who longs for a trophy wife reveals a deep-seated inclination of his own.
Love bypasses pretension—it reveals.
Perhaps the only force more fundamental than love is what we might call metaphysical sentiment—our essential, primordial impression of the universe.
This deep-rooted orientation shapes our experience of reality, coloring all other thoughts, desires, and emotions. It is the foundation upon which our entire being rests, dictating not only how we love but also what we ultimately seek in life.
By observing someone in love, we glimpse the inner axis around which their existence turns. The real insight is not found in anecdotes about their life but in identifying the central wager they have placed upon it.
Consciously or not, we are all committed to a trajectory that precedes our rational deliberations. No matter how much we analyze our experiences, our hearts follow a preordained orbit—gravitating toward art, power, pleasure, or wealth with the unwavering pull of a celestial body.
Often, the surface of a person’s life runs against the grain of their deeper nature, creating unexpected disguises: the businessman who is, at heart, a sensualist; the writer whose true ambition lies in political power.
Love, in its unfiltered sincerity, exposes these subterranean truths, revealing the gravitational forces that guide us even when we believe we are steering ourselves.
«Love, then, in its very essence, is choice. And since it springs from the personal core—the spiritual depths—the selective principles which determine it are at the same time the most intimate and mysterious preferences which form our individual character».
— José Ortega y Gasset, Estudios sobre el amor, 1940
Fran Santiago
