Love is a universal concept related to affinity, with different interpretations depending on the point of view taken (personal, philosophic, artistic, religious, scientific). In the Western World, love is considered an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. In some religious contexts, love is not just a virtue, but the basis for all being, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels. Love may also be described as actions towards others (or oneself) based on compassion. Or as actions towards others based on affection.
In English, the word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" can also refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros (cf. Greek words for love), to the emotional closeness of familial love, or to the platonic love that defines friendship, to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.
Humanistic psychology sets healthy self-esteem, understood as unconditional self-respect and self-confidence (and interpretable in certain context as self-love), as an essential requirement for every healthy interpersonal relationship, including interpersonal love.
Buddhism sets attachment and desire as negative emotions that release anger and cause suffering; love and ego are incompatible. In the buddhist philosophy, true love is compassionate love. This conception is diametrically opposed to the conception of capitalism, which promotes the so called inherent selfishness of the human being, and on which it's supported. For pure altruism (unconditional love for one's neighbor), there is nothing to trade with; social relationships are not competitive, but collaborative: one seeks others' well-being and others seek one's; that's also the philosophy of human relationships preached by Jesus Christ ("love your neighbor as yourself"). Pure altruism is also Gottfried Leibniz's conception of love; he states that "to love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another".
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari consider that capitalism produces a perversion of the natural concept of love, by placing the human being as a part of a production machine, and thus destructing the concepts of body and soul.Ayn Rand, on the other side, states that selfishness is in essence a noble feeling (one should be responsible for his own happiness, and it's impossible to love other people unless you love yourself).Nathaniel Branden stresses the importance to be aware of the difference between healthy self-esteem and narcisism, this latter understood as self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement, and characteristic of an unhealthy self-esteem.
Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.
Science defines what could be understood as love as an evolved state of the survival instinct, primarily used to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species through reproduction.
