Don’t dismiss the intellectual dimension of love

Kenneth Leong
3 min readMay 3, 2021

Is “unconditional love” possible? There is no consensus on this matter. But “unconditional love” sounds too good to be true. Do we have to be a saint in order to love others unconditionally? Do we have to be enlightened?

In this article, I want to debunk certain myths and misconceptions about love. First, to love is not the same as to like. It is possible to dislike someone’s behavior and still love him/her. Second, love is not simply an emotion because deep understanding is required.

Love is not possible without understanding, wisdom and insight. Thich Nhat Hanh said, “To understand is to love.” In other words, truly understanding someone is a sufficient condition for loving someone. But to love someone is not a sufficient condition for understanding someone. If you love someone but you don’t have a good understanding of that person(what his/her personality type is, why s/he behaves in a certain way, what his/her aspirations and fears are), this may be the beginning of a troubling relationship.

Despite the mass media’s portrayal, love is not a romantic feeling. It is not an emotion. But love is not an act of will either — since you cannot force yourself to love someone, at least not for long. This is Erich Fromm’s mistake when he wrote his famous book, “The Art of Loving.” I can’t emphasize enough this often-overlooked dimension of love, which is intellectual in nature.

  1. Psychology: The knowledge of general psychology and an intellectual understanding of someone’s personality type can help you love someone even though that person behaves badly or can’t meet your expectations at times.
  2. The unreality of the “self”: A solid understanding of the Buddhist teaching of Anatta (no self) also makes unconditional love possible. Very often, we are upset by a person’s behavior because we imagine that the person is selfish or is intending to harm us. But Buddha taught that the “self”(an entity that is unchanging, unified, and not dependent on various conditions and factors) does not exist. It is just fiction, albeit one which may be useful for social purposes. The belief in the existence of the self may be called “conventional truth” in Buddhism. Can you imagine writing a contract or making a will if we don’t have the useful fiction of a self? But the reality is that there is no permanent entity. We change all the time. There is no unified entity either. Instead of thinking that we have a unified self, it is more helpful to visualize ourselves as an aggregate of many selves, each pulling us into different directions. The 2015 movie, Inside Out, is a good portrayal of this psychological reality.

It becomes easier to love and to forgive when we realize that our intuitive notion of a person does not exist. It cannot stand the scrutiny of either modern science or Dharma. Thus, we learn to really love by letting go of this antiquated notion of self. We detach ourselves from a stubborn old myth, become liberated from its prison, and activate our ability to love.

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Kenneth Leong

Author, Zen teacher, scientific mystic, professor, photographer, philosopher, social commentator, socially engaged human