Topics - Romantic Love

- Romantic love is a sort of passion, isn't it?

- Is it? My teenage neighbor has a lot of passion towards the film-actress Julie Christie. He saw her playing in “Dr. Zhivago,” and now his heart is full of her.

- That’s not what I meant. This film is old, and Julie Christie must be an old lady by now. Your teenager neighbor loves his own imagination, not her. You can’t truly love somebody you don’t know!

- The woman next-door knows her husband very well. And she uses this knowledge to humiliate him. She laughs at the poems that he writes. She calls him “stupid” in front of others. Still, she is passionate about him. At night, I can sometimes hear their wild love-making.

- No, no, that’s a distorted love too. Passion and knowledge without mutual respect is not true love.

- There is a young couple living across the street. Every evening I see them sitting quietly on their porch together. Sometimes they hold hands. Sometimes she reads to him a few sentences from her magazine, and he listens and smiles. Then they drink their tea in silence, listening to the birds, or looking at the plants in their garden.

- Lovely! This sounds to me like real love!

- Probably. But it’s so peaceful and routine – without excitement, without much passion.

- Alright, I get your point. But if romantic love is not necessarily a passion, then what is it?

Romantic love restores our unity

Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and poet during a period when Russian philosophy emerged as separate both from literature and from European philosophy. He was born in Moscow to an educated family, his father being an important historian. After rejecting religion as a teenager, he returned to it as a young man, and his later philosophical work often contains religious themes. He studied philosophy at the University of Moscow, and then taught philosophy there and at St. Petersburg University. He was a good friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, wrote on a variety of philosophical topics, never married, and died in poverty at the age of 47.
 

The following text is adapted from Solovyov’s short book The Meaning of Love (1894). The book is in line with his idea that life is fragmented and full of tensions, but that its goal is to integrate itself and unite with Divine reality. Here Solovyov argues that love, especially romantic love (which he calls “sexual love”), is aimed at achieving such integration. Normally we are egoists, regarding our own self as the center of our separate world. Romantic love calls us to go beyond our separateness, and integrate our life with the life of another. Since this integration preserves our individuality, it is the highest expression of our individual being, and at the same time it expresses the integration of humanity within itself and with the Divine Being.
 

From Chapter 2

      A human being, by being this individual and not another individual, may become All only by abolishing in his consciousness the internal boundary which separates him from another human being. “This one” may become the “All” only together with others. Only together with others can an individual realize his absolute significance, and become an inseparable and irreplaceable part of the universal whole, an independent living original organ of the absolute life. True individuality is a certain specific image of the unity-of-the-all, a certain specific means of receiving into oneself everything that is other. A human being, when he asserts himself as separate from all that is other, denies his own meaningful existence, deprives himself of the true content of life, and reduces his individuality to an empty form.
[…]

There is only one power which can undermine egoism at the root, and in fact undermines it, namely love, and mainly sexual love. […] By recognizing through love the truth of another, not abstractly but concretely, and by transferring through our actions the center of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance. This absolute significance consists in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves but also in another.

From Chapter 3
         The meaning and worth of love is that it forces us to acknowledge, with all our being, the absolute central significance of another person, which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own self. Love is important not as one among other feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the center of our personal lives. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but mainly of sexual love. Sexual love is distinguished from other kinds of love by its greater intensity, its greater engrossment, and by the possibility of a more complete mutuality. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one.
[…]
The task of love is to justify in action what at first is given only in feeling. It demands such a union of two finite natures that would create out of them one absolute ideal personality. […] Obviously, a true human in the fullness of his ideal personality cannot be just male or just female, but must be the higher unity of both. The immediate task of love is to realize this unity, to create the true human being as a free unity of the male and female principles, while preserving their formal individualization after overcoming their essential separateness and divergence.
[…]
The physical union of two individuals does not possess any specific relation to love. It can exist without love, and love can exist without it. It is necessary for love not as an independent goal, but only as its final realization. If this realization is made as the goal itself, prior to the ideal concern of love, it ruins the love. Every kind of external act or fact in itself is nothing. Love is something only thanks to its meaning as the restoration of the unity or integrity of the human personality, as the creation of an absolute individuality. […]
       The feeling of love in itself is only an impulse, but it suggests to us that we can and should restore the integrity of the human being. […] In the feeling of love, according to its basic meaning, we assert the absolute significance of another individuality, and by doing so we assert also the absolute significance of our own individuality.

Falling in love is an attention deficit

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was an influential Spanish philosopher. His philosophy, which unites existentialist, phenomenological, and pragmatist themes, attempts to relate to life as it is lived, instead of remote abstract ideas. He taught at the University of Madrid and elsewhere, and was briefly a parliament member. He left Spain at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and went to exile in Argentina and then Portugal. He returned to Spain in 1948, where he founded the Institute of Humanities.
 

Ortega contributed many essays to the newspaper El Sol, and some of them were later collected into books. Seven essays on the topic of love were collected and published in 1939 under the title On Love: Aspects of a single theme. For Ortega, love and falling in love are two very different things. Love is a complex and rich psychological phenomenon, while falling in love is an inferior, mechanical state of mind. The following passages are taken from two different essays from his book, the first is about love, while the second about falling in love.
 

FROM THE ESSAY “FEATURES OF LOVE”
[First characteristic of love:] At its inception, love certainly resembles desire, because its object, whether person or thing, excites it. The soul feels agitated, delicately wounded in one spot by a stimulus produced by the object. Such a stimulus has, then, a centripetal direction: It comes to us from the object. But the act of love does not begin until after that excitement, or rather, incitement. Love bursts out of the opening that the object’s incisive arrow has created and actively goes toward the object: It moves hence, in the opposite direction from all incitement and desire. It goes from the lover to the beloved – from me to the other – in a centrifugal direction. This characteristic of finding oneself psychologically in movement, en route toward an object and continually on the march from our inner being toward another, is essential to love and hate. We shall soon see how the two differ. 

[…]

[Second Characteristic of love:] You cannot go to the God that you love with the legs of your body, and yet loving Him means going toward Him. In loving we abandon the tranquility and permanence within ourselves, and virtually migrate toward the object. And this constant state of migration is what it is to be in love.
[…]
[Third characteristic of love:] Acts of thought or will are, you must have noticed, instantaneous. […] If I understand a statement, I understand it suddenly and instantaneously. On the other hand, love is prolonged in time: one does not love in series of sudden moments or disjointed instants which are ignited and die like a spark of a magnet, but one loves the beloved with continuity. This introduces a new note in the sentiment which we are analyzing: love is a flow, a stream of spiritual matter, a fluid which flows continually like a fountain. We could say, in searching for metaphoric expression to crystalize and qualify intuitively the character of that to which I now refer, that love is not an explosion, but a continued emanation, a psychic radiation which proceeds from the lover to the beloved. It is not a single discharge, but a current.

[...] We have noticed three features, or traits, that characterize love: It is centrifugal, it is a virtual going toward the object, and it is continuous and fluid.

FROM THE ESSAY “LOVE IN STENDHAL”

I believe that “falling in love” is a phenomenon of attention, but of an abnormal state of attention which occurs in a normal person.
       The initial stage of “falling in love” reveals this. In society, many men and women encounter each other. The attention of each man or woman shifts indifferently from one representative of the opposite sex to another. […] One day, however, this equal division of attention stops. The woman’s attention seems to rest upon one of those men, and soon she needs an effort to push him out of her thoughts, to shift her attention toward other things. One man stands out at a closer distance to the woman’s attention.
       “Falling in love,” at first, is no more than this: attention abnormally fixed on another person. […] The woman will begin to feel unable to ignore the privileged man. Other people and things will gradually disappear from her consciousness. Whatever she seems to be doing, her attention will gravitate by its own force toward that man. And, vice versa, it will require from her a great effort to pull her attention away from that direction for one moment and orient it toward life’s obligations.
       It is not a question of an enrichment of our mental lives. On the contrary. There is a progressive elimination of the things which previously absorbed us. Consciousness contracts and is occupied by only one object. The attention remains paralyzed: It does not advance from one thing to another. It is fixed and rigid, the prisoner of one person alone. “Divine mania,” Plato said.
       Nevertheless, the person in love has the impression that his consciousness is very rich. His reduced world is more concentrated. All his psychic forces are focused on one single point, and this gives him a false impression of greater intensity to his existence.
       At the same time, this exclusiveness of attention endows the favored object with outstanding qualities. The point is not that we imagine the beloved to have non-existent perfections. Rather, by concentrating our attention on an object, consciousness sees it as having an incomparable force of reality. The object exists for us at every moment. It is always present, next to us, more real than anything else.
[…]
Once begun, the process of falling in love continues with hopeless monotony. In other words, all those who fall in love, fall in love the same way – the clever person and the fool, the youth and the old person, the bourgeois and the artist. This confirms its mechanical nature.

Woman’s way of loving

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, and political activist, and was one of the first women to study at the Sorbonne. During her studies she met Jean-Paul Sartre, and the two became life-long friends, intellectual companions, as well as lovers who maintained an open erotic relationship, sometimes in trio with a third woman. She wrote many novels and essays, and was also involved in the French women’s liberation movement. She died of pneumonia at the age of 78, and was buried next to Sartre in Paris.
 

The following text is adapted from de Beauvoir’s famous book The Second Sex (1949). In this book she argues that woman has always been regarded as an Other: Man is viewed as the “norm,” the default human being, while woman is defined relative to him, as “different,” as a deviation from man.
        According to the existential philosophy of De Beauvoir and Sartre, an individual is a subject who is free to “transcend” himself or herself, in other words to go beyond the facts (biological or other) and determine goals, values, self-understandings, meanings. Woman, no less than man, is a free subject capable of self-determination, or transcendence, but society pressures her to enter the role of an object without transcendence of her own. Society tells her, already from childhood, that she is inferior to man, it denies from her equal economic freedom, it subjects her to maternal slavery, etc. She is therefore raised not as a self-determining subject, but as an addendum to man, who needs man for her salvation.
        As a result, de Beauvoir argues, woman’s way of loving is also different.
 

FROM CHAPTER 23: THE WOMAN IN LOVE

The word “love” does not have the same meaning for both sexes, and this is one reason for the serious misunderstanding that divides them.
[…]
Men, in their most violent ecstasies, never abandon themselves completely. Even on their knees before their mistress, they still want to possess her. In the very passion of their lives they remain autonomous subjects; the beloved woman is, for them, only one value among others. They wish to integrate her into their existence, and not to spend their existence entirely on her. For woman, on the contrary, to love is to give up everything for the benefit of a master. […]

       This difference between men’s and women’s love has nothing to do with laws of nature. It is the difference in their situation that is reflected in their different conceptions of love. The individual who is a subject, who is himself, if he has the courageous inclination towards transcendence, tries to deal with the world; he is ambitious, he acts. But an inessential creature cannot sense the absolute at the heart of her subjectivity; a being doomed to immanence cannot find self-realization in actions. She is shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined from childhood to belong to the male, accustomed to seeing the man as a superior being whom she cannot possibly equal. And if she has not repressed her claim to be human, she will dream of transcending herself toward one of these superior beings, of uniting herself with the autonomous subject. There is no other way for her than to loose herself, body and soul, in the person who represented for her the absolute, the essential. Since she is anyway doomed to dependence, she will prefer to serve a god rather than obey tyrants – parents, husband or protector. She chooses to enslave herself so eagerly, that it will seem to her the expression of her liberty. […] She will humble herself to nothingness before him. Love becomes for her a religion.

[…]
The supreme happiness of the woman in love is to be recognized by the loved man as a part of himself. When he says “we,” she is associated and identified with him, she shares his prestige and reigns with him over the rest of the world. […] She feels elevated to a place at the right side of God. It doesn’t matter that she is only in the second place, as long as she has HER place, forever, in a wonderfully ordered world. As long as she loves and is loved by him, and is necessary to him, she feels that she is fully justified: she knows peace and happiness.
[…]
A fallen god is not a man; he is a fraud. The lover has no other alternative than to prove that he really is this adored king – or to confess that he is a fake. If he is no longer adored, he must be trampled on. Because of the glory with which she has given to her beloved, the woman in love forbids him any weakness. She is disappointed and annoyed if he does not match the image which she has put on him. If he gets tired or careless, if he gets hungry or thirsty at the wrong time, if he makes a mistake or contradicts himself, she asserts that he is “not himself” and she complains about it.
[…]
Authentic love should be based on the mutual recognition of two free beings. The lovers would then experience themselves both as a self and as other. Neither of them would give up transcendence, neither would be mutilated. Together they would determine values and aims in the world.
[…]
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to lower herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, like for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents the curse that lies heavily on the woman who is confined to the feminine universe, a woman mutilated, insufficient to herself.

The impossible desire to merge with the beloved

Tullia d'Aragona (1510–1556) was an Italian poet and philosopher. Like her mother, she was a courtesan (a court lady, companion of powerful persons), and was lucky to be born during a limited period of time when courtesans were given relative economic and social freedom. (Later in her life, Italian society became more conservative.) As a child, she was educated in the classical humanities by a Cardinal who was probably her biological father, and she demonstrated special intellectual gifts and interests. As a young woman she became successful as a poet and writer, and was in touch with important intellectuals and poets, some of whom were her lovers. She later turned her house into a philosophical academy. Not much is known about her last years, but it appears that her health was gradually declining until her death.
 

The following passages are adapted from Aragona’s book Dialogues on the Infinity of Love (1547), a book that became popular in her time. In the 16th century, there was much philosophical interest in love, and Aragona was part of this trend. Most of the book is a dialogue between Aragona and Benedetto Varchi, who in real life was a famous intellectual from Florence, and was also her friend and supporter. The dialogue is probably fictional, although some scholars believe that it is based on a real conversation.
       Aragona and Varchi are discussing here whether love is “infinite” – in other words, whether love is a desire that aims at a specific goal, so that it ends once the lovers achieve what they desire. Aragona suggests that although love has a goal, this is an impossible goal, and therefore it is never satisfied. In order to make this point, Aragona distinguishes between two kinds of love: “vulgar” love in which the lover seeks satisfaction, and “honest” love in which the lover has the impossible desire to merge with the beloved, both spiritually and bodily, and become one.
 
TULLIA: The desires of people in love are infinite, and they can never rest after achieving something. This is because after getting it, they long for something else, and something else again, and something more after that. And so it goes on, one thing after the other. They cannot be satisfied, as Boccaccio tells about himself in the introduction to his Decameron. This is why people who are in love can be crying one minute and laughing the next. They can even laugh and cry at the same time. This phenomenon is amazing and quite impossible for normal mortals! Lovers have both hope and fear. They feel great heat and excessive cold at the same time. They want and they reject in equal measure, constantly grasping things but holding nothing. They can see without eyes. They have no ears but they can hear. They shout without a tongue, they fly without moving. They are alive while dying. They say and do the many strange things that the poets write about.
[…]
VARCHI: So finally you have concluded that love is infinite, so that one cannot love within limits, since lovers always have new desires, and they are never satisfied with what they get without longing for something more. Isn’t that so?

 
TULLIA: Perfectly true.

VARCHI: Now, against this conclusion I argue thus: […] If all those who reach their purpose stop searching for it, it necessarily follows that all lovers who attain their aim become satisfied, and they no longer love.

TULLIA: That is undeniable.

VARCHI: Therefore, love has an end, and it is therefore possible to love within limits. So the conclusion you reached earlier was incorrect.

TULLIA: No, I drew that conclusion correctly […] The word “love” is polyvalent, and can stand for several kinds of loving. And you didn’t ask me which kind I meant.

VARCHI: Ah, Signora Tullia! You have got me there!

TULLIA: […] Let me say that love is of two types. We shall call the first “vulgar” or “dishonest” love, the other “honest,” in other words virtuous. Dishonest love – which is found only in vulgar or low-minded individuals (whose soul is low and despicable, who lack virtue or refinement, whether they are from noble or insignificant families) is generated by a desire to enjoy the loved object, as it is with common animals. They simply want to obtain pleasure, and to give birth to someone who resembles themselves, without any further thought or concern. Those who are moved by this desire, and who love in this way, once they reach their goal and satisfy their longing, no longer love. […] Of course, I was not considering this type of love.

VARCHI: I certainly believe you, because I know that your noble heart would never stoop so low to even think of talking about such low matters. But please go on.

TULLIA: Honest love, which is characteristic of noble people (people who have refined and virtuous tendencies, whether they are rich or poor) is not generated by desire, like the other love, but by reason. Its main goal is to transform oneself into the object of one’s love, with a desire that the loved one would be converted into oneself, so that the two lovers may become one. […] And this transformation can only take place on a spiritual level. So in this kind of love, the main part is played by the “spiritual” senses, those of seeing and hearing, and above all the imagination, since it is closest to the spiritual. But in fact, the lovers also desire to achieve a bodily union, in addition to a spiritual one, in order to reach a total identification with the beloved. And since this bodily unity can never be achieved – because it is impossible for physical bodies to merge into one another, the lovers will never satisfy their desire. Therefore, love is not limited, as I concluded earlier. […]

VARCHI: Everything you said has pleased me highly and filled me with ineffable sweetness.

PHILOSOPHIES AS VOICES OF HUMAN REALITY

by Ran Lahav

Why do we publish on Agora four different philosophies of love, four different philosophies of the self, four different philosophies of meaning? Why not choose only the best philosophy and explain it in detail?

One might object that it is impossible to decide which philosophy is the best, which one is more correct or accurate. But if so, if we can’t tell how accurate a philosophy is, then what is it good for? Doesn’t philosophy become a mere subjective opinion? Who cares what Epicurus believed two thousand years ago if we cannot assess its correctness?

This question assumes that philosophical views are THEORIES. A theory is a “map” of reality. It says: “That’s how things are!” If we assume that philosophies are theories, then there is no reason why they should interest us. Since it is impossible to decide which of them is accurate or inaccurate, which is correct or incorrect, then we cannot take them seriously.

I suggest that we, as philosophical practitioners, should not think about philosophies as theories. Plato’s or Solovyov’s philosophy of love is important to us not because it is “accurate” or “correct.” Indeed, if we want to make philosophy relevant to life, then we don’t need a THEORY about love. Maria the bus-driver doesn’t care about the universal principles of love, but about her own particular love, about her personal hopes and frustrations. A philosophy can be relevant to her only if it helps her INTERACT with life, CONVERSE with life, RESONATE with life, LISTEN to it, QUESTION it, COMMUNICATE with it.

Notice that these are auditory metaphors, not visual ones. They are taken from the world of voices and conversations, not from the world of maps and representations. And this suggests that we should abandon the visual metaphor of “maps” of reality. Maps of reality – in other words, theories – are too rigid and final, too general and impersonal, too one-sided and non-dialogical. In philosophical practice we don’t need final declarations. We need, rather, ideas to interact with.

Let us, then, treat philosophy not as pictures of reality, not as theories, but as “voices” of reality, or of life. Life “speaks” to us, and in us, through the writings of good thinkers, and through our own thoughts and conversations. In other words, life evokes various meanings, if we know how to “listen” to it, to interpret it, to make sense of it, and to ask it questions.

Life speaks to us in many voices. Some voices of life may be more profound than others, or richer, or more inspiring or coherent, but none of them is the “correct” voice. A philosophy is not a theory. This is why different historical philosophies are relevant to me. Each of them can be part of my dialogue with life, perhaps at different stages of the dialogue, perhaps in different periods and circumstances.

Conversing with life is not easy. Most people have little to say about basic life-issues such as meaning or love. The great philosophies of the past offer us a rich language – concepts, principles, distinctions, connections – for listening to the voices of human reality and responding to them.

This is why we, philosophical practitioners, must be familiar with the philosophical treasures of the past, so that we can facilitate a dialogue between a person and human reality. We don’t need to be experts in Plato or Kant like an academic philosopher, but we must know many basic ideas, many raw materials. After all, we cannot invent the dialogue with life by ourselves, as if nothing happened before us. We cannot limit our thinking to common sense. For a deep dialogue with reality, we must be nourished by the rich historical tradition. This is why people need philosophical practitioners, to help them deepen their life and elevate it.

HOW CAN PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE ADDRESS LOVE?

by  Carmen Zavala

 In the Phaedrus, Plato lets Socrates tell us that love is a “divine mania” for the values that we yearn for. These values are personified in the beloved, and this is why we seek to be close to him/her as much as possible. Ortega refers to this as an attention deficit, because “there is a progressive elimination in our minds of the things which previously absorbed us.” Ortega’s assumption is that these things used to make our life richer.

Another possible interpretation is that when we fall in love, we “reset” our consciousness,and through concrete actions we question the things we normally do and our way of doing them. We return to our dearest yearnings and enjoy the values we hold consciously or unconsciously. This happens when we focus all our thoughts and senses on the beloved.

To the eyes of others, we may appear incoherent and confused. We may even seem to be self-destructive. This attitude can be analyzed in a counseling session.

From this perspective, this “madness” of love could be an opportunity to question our life, and to analyze what we really yearn for and whether it is possible to change the course of our life towards the hidden yearnings that nurture our spirit. These questionings do not necessarily happen at the level of language. They happen at the level of image-associations, of images from the past and images from day-dreaming, among others. It is at this level that we make most of our main decisions in life.

Here comes the question for philosophy: How should philosophy and philosophical practice address this important realm of thought? We often can win a discussion through good arguments, and this can may give us confidence in our vision of things. Nevertheless, in most cases our victory does not change (“convince”) the others, in the sense of making them change their concrete attitude and actions. Sometimes they do seem to change their attitude because of good arguments, but in most cases, empathy or dislike towards the person presenting the arguments seems to play a great role in whether or not the arguments are accepted. Here again, the decision might be based primarily on image-association, and only secondarily on the expressed arguments. In the previous century, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl took up this issue and proposed an investigation of these important realms of thought.

Why have mainstream philosophers abandoned this project? How can philosophical practice address these aspects of intentionality (yearnings) and image-associations, which belong to a realm of thought that is prior to language, and how can these pre-linguistic aspects be communicated through language? Is it possible to give new answers and to open new questions for philosophy, by leaving behind the prison of language, as well as those philosophies of the past that are based on the idea that our thought depends on the particular language that we speak?  

C