system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Do we love the feeling of being in love?

I read this somewhere a couple of years back.
I don't exactly remember it but it was something to the effect of, we like the feeling of being in love so much that we trick ourselves into thinking we love the person.
Is this ever heard in philosophy?
gpt
Nietzsche writes literally that in Beyond Good and Evil (sect 175), and in this light, he is very close to 17th century French moralists. However, the oldest example of someone who tricks himself into thinking he is in love is doubtlessly Alicibiades in Plato's Symposium. Indeed, he thinks Socrates is going to provide him with the knowledge he lacks, but Socrates tries to make him understand that he is not going to give him knowledge and he has to do that for himself. This is in keeping with the Platonist idea of there being a process through which you should first love the beautiful bodies, then the beautiful minds and end up loving the Beautiful itself, i.e. the essence of Beauty, and ideas. Socrates is presented as a Silenus, that is a statue that looks awful on the outside but beautiful on the inside. He is the great trickster. Nietzsche would probably call him a polytropos (think of something like Machiavelli's fox).

In this light, we love the feeling of being in love because it diverts us from caring about ourselves, which we do not want to do (something Pascal famously analyzed as "divertissement"). In both cases, love is both a help if not a necessary means and an obstacle on the path towards self-knowledge.