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TimB replied to the topic Is Attention a form of love? in the forum General Discussion 5 years, 3 months ago
No, no, no. “Attention” is not an emotion. (Again, how do you come up with these sites? Amazing.) I am attending to your posts, but my only emotion was a mild amusement at some dorky site kicking you off of their discussion boards.
LOVE IS NOT ATTENTION.
Attending to someone and they attending to you are definitely factors involved in sometimes eliciting the emotion of love. But the acts of attending are not the emotion itself. (Even tho they can signify the potential or actual emergence of that emotion.)
Similar thing, of course, with hate. (Although with hate there would have been a lot of aversive elements involved.)
Let’s say that a KKK member back in the 1930’s hated any black person. Now when he got his buddies together and said “Let’s go hang and burn that N_gg_r!” he was being motivated by the emotion “hate”. But he was not yet paying attention to the black person that he was about to help torture and murder. So in this anecdote, the victim was getting actual “attention” at the point he was caught, beaten, tied up, spit upon, degraded verbally to the extent possible, perhaps peed on, and eventually put in the hanging position with the noose around his neck, then doused with flammable liquid, and set on fire to the whoops and cheers all around, as the corpse-to-be flails and completes the hanging process. All of that was attention. The actual diverse acts of attention WERE what we would call “hateful” but the hate simply gave motivation to them becoming actualized.
Anyway, neither love nor hate are a form of attention. They are each an emotion.



