For Monday: de Sousa, Love: A Very Short Introduction, Chapter One

For Monday's class, either answer TWO of the following in short responses, or answer ONE in a much longer response (but it should be more developed and show me that you're really pursuing the question). 

Q1: de Sousa points out that the Greeks had several different words for several different kinds of love, whereas we only have one, 'love.' And yet, when we talk about love, we most often refer to eros, rather than agape, or philia, etc. Why do you think this is? Is this one more important than the others? Or just more important to our culture?

Q2: This chapter also makes the bold claim that "love is not an emotion" (3). He calls it instead a "syndrome" or a condition. Do you agree with this? Why might it actually be difficult to zero in on the emotion of love? 

Q3: One of the most interesting passages in this chapter (indeed, I included it on the syllabus) occurs on page 8: "If love reflects the unique characteristics of the individuals involved, we should expect a virtually infinite diversity of emotions of human loves. What is puzzling is that the exquisite uniqueness of both lover and beloved seems to manifest itself in a surprisingly restricted number of stock scenarios." Why do you think this is? Is it because of cultural taboos and biases? Or is love ultimately a very limited condition governed by a strict sense of chemical responses? 

Q4: In a seemingly humorous paradox, de Sousa writes that "The common dogma that love is purest when not contaminated by sex has an equally plausible converse: we can be sure that sexual desire is pure only when it remains uncontaminated by love" (16). This seems to go against everything we see in romantic comedies and love poems today, so what is he getting at? How can sex with love be "impure" or "contaminated"?