Love, of course, there
[" what we mean by love?]
By José Antonio Marina
For Aristotle, "love was willing the good of someone." Stendhal distinguish between passionate love, love, pleasure, love, physical love of vanity. Rilke believed two solitudes that love is shared. Proust said that love is a bad luck. After two centuries, love remains a not-know-what?
Love, of course, does not exist. There is a large range of feelings that we label with the word love, which is about to become a mistake. This lexical confusion makes us spend many bad shots, because we make decisions of vital importance to our lives through a bizarre procedure. Often experience a feeling confused, you name with the word love and, by magic, the word gives an apparent clarity to what we feel and, incidentally, introduces our feelings in a web of cultural meanings they impose, require, or expect us to love a number of features and effects that did not even suspect anything.
seem more sensible to wait and see what comes out of our feeling to know whether it was love and what love, or some other feeling was related.
I just read in a newspaper the following sentence: "The obligation to have sex by threatening her with a knife." Proust believed that love is a bad luck. Rilke defined as two solitudes shared. Is there any way of knowing what we mean by love? We tend to define that vague feeling by adding a qualification: maternal love, nature, homeland, money, art. Is there something common between all these feelings? Is there a feeling that people can go to the living things?
In my high school philosophy courses tend to spend a class to study the criteria of whether one is in love. I do it before talking about philosophy of science, one of whose major themes is that of the criteria of truth. How do you know that a proposition genuine scientific? In everyday life we \u200b\u200balso use the criteria of truth every day, and I find it interesting that my students learn the use of tiny, humble Franciscan definitive knowledge. Knowing what happens in my life and my street is more important than knowing what happens in the heart of Venus (the planet).
How do you know you love something or someone? The first answer is, possibly, the desire tells me what is the object of my love. Love is a tendency to possession. The difficulty is knowing what constitutes possession. Respect of articles is no problem: have is the ability to use or destroy something. Not appear that this meaning serves to clarify what love means, but we will discuss other more subtle ways or hold cruellest. For example, the relationship between sexual possession and cruelty that occurs in sadistic practices shows how they can complicate and alter feelings.
While love and desire can be directed at people, animals or things, I will refer only to love in the strict sense, a feeling which is its complexity and fullness when addressing humans. One of the features that we will discover is that the feeling of love can occur in different levels, and therefore having only one word, it will always be misleading if not we need some way. Stendhal distinguished several types of love: love, passion, love, pleasure, love, physical love and vanity. Our analysis will be different because, for now, we are trying to answer just one question: how do we know that we love someone.
The ancient Greeks distinguished the love and desire for love and a friendship. They called one another and philia eros. When Eros was referring to people, was seen as sexual desire. Just loved the erotically I wanted, not the person desired. This, in any case, "responded to love" and, to put it, the Greeks used the word anterao. Love was unidirectional.
The other lexical family expresses love of love or friendship. Be distinguished from the erotic, though sometimes, to join them later. In Trojan Women, Euripides says, referring to when Menelaus regains Helen, "No lover (erastes) that is not love (philia) of forever." Plato in the Lysis, denies that she loves (Erai) is not affected (method philein). In the Euthydemus, the phíloi, the ones an Adonis, are those who are directing their desires: erastai.
Eros appears as "madness" is an irrational force. The man feels enslaved, is a mania, a madness sent by Aphrodite and Eros. One of the dark forces that come to man from a mysterious and distant, and is embodied in love, like other follies are embodied in the warrior, the poet, the prophet, the shaman. Sappho invokes the goddess' braiding of deceit "and asked:" Do not enslave, lady, my heart with anguish and sorrow. " The admiration and love causes fear. Shows weakness because he can not control extraneous forces that overtake him. Why is forgiven more easily than women. There is a Greek misogyny, a fear of feminine seduction, which appears in the myth of Danaides and the Amazons. Marriage is the therapeutic invented Greek society against this domain of eros on women and, through them, over men.
This company separated the pleasure of marriage, which had no entourage, no attention to individual feelings. These were for the glycosides and efebos. They said that marriage was invented by the mythical king Athens, Cecrops, who instituted to prevent the free sex and so they could meet the parents and children. Would, therefore, against female promiscuity and against the danger posed to men, according to the concept in vogue, the women's emotional instability, his erratic and irrational. In marriage, sex becomes "work" (ergon), it stops being "game" or "fun" (pauignia, térpsis).
In Athens, as we find in classical times a situation in which the eroticism, and love in general terms, was only practically outside of marriage. Medieval philosophers, who thought a lot about these issues, distinguished three stages in the experience of love: love, desire and fruition. Ie the elements organized differently than they did the Greeks and, in my opinion, more circumspect.
For the present, including all the loving process within the human dynamics in the field appetitive trend. Love was for them the sight of a good perception of the attractiveness of a thing or person. Was this contemplation the awakening desire, which is the dynamic aspect of love. Only the lack of documentation of what has prevented them from current psychologists recognize these philosophers a clear history of his theory. The perception of love is the equivalent of cognitive appraisal that they have to admit, quite rightly, as an antecedent of emotional experiences.
The experience of a good era for these philosophers to an earlier movement, the need or tendency, "and the beginning of another new movement: the desire. This could make the wish not only in sexual love, but of all other loves, it is evident that each type Love awakens a kind of desire, that need not be possessive. The love of mother to child is a desire to care, collaborating with his happiness to see you happy, the desire aroused by the friendship, as Aristotle said, is to talk, share things, have fun together. Each of these desires is the way they met, what they called the Scholastic philosophers fruition.
So soon we used to relate the love with desire if you do not need the kind of desire to which we refer, and when the process is situated. So we have to find a criterion to complete it. There is no love without some kind of desire, but it is arbitrary to say that any desire can be considered love. Sartre's case confirms what I said. Love does involve a kind of desire that becomes an impossible love. Sartre says love like capture the conscience of another. There is therefore a desire for possession or power. But the notion of ownership, which he so often says love can not be first. The lover does not desire to possess the beloved as it has one thing that would be a brutal version of the possession as the consummation of any material desire. He does not want either a full surrender of PLC, but it demands a special type of ownership: you have a freedom and liberty. Neither is satisfied with a love that was given as pure loyalty to an oath. The lover asks the oath and the oath once irritated.
Sartre puts his dialectic ability to describe this love, showing its utter impossibility. Based on the desire of possession, only reached a jealous uneasiness as the hero of Proust that installs his mistress at home, to be so free of anxiety. However, care is constantly gnawed by anxieties because Albertina Marcel escapes, even when the need continually at his side, in total dependence on material. You can never completely possess an awareness of others. Marcel truce only knows when Albertine is asleep. A great poem by Vicente Aleixandre tells the same:
Beautiful is the kingdom of love,
but sad too.
Because the heart of the lover
sad at times of loneliness,
when his side faces ones eyes
that inaccessible land on light clouds.
the poem's conclusion is pessimistic: "Everything conspires against the continued existence of flame relentlessly impossible." The same conclusion must necessarily reach Sartre.
***
continue my interrogation. What other symptoms recognizes the reader who wants a person? There are, you doubt, of special interest to her, in the case of being in love is very evident. Ortega said that the crush is, for now, a phenomenon of attention. When attention is longer or more often than usual on an object speak of mania. "I think the infatuation is a phenomenon of attention, an abnormal state of it, which in normal man produces. At its initiation is not more than that: stopped abnormally attention on another person. If this knows how to use their privileged position and that cleverly draws attention otherwise occur with unremitting mechanism. "
remind the reader that one of the most fundamental and basic feelings is precisely the interest, and have called attentional awareness to our first connection with the goodies. Ortega says what is true, but is still not sufficiently clear criteria. Our attention can be absorbed by all types of obsessions, worries, fantasies and dizziness that can certainly be confused with love but only signify the deep involvement of the subject in an event.
Maria Eugenia, the niece of Don Nepomuceno Carlos de Cardenas, was educated in a convent in Extremadura, near the bay of Portugal. Among the pupils had run a manuscript copy of a passionate love letters, censored, written by Marian Alcoforado such, almost adolescent Portuguese nun that, mid-seventeenth century, is violently in love a young French officer, Noël Boston, arrived in Portugal with the troops of Louis XIV. It was an unhappy love, because the French officer, after seducing the girl, returned to his country, which never returned.
In one of his letters, told how he had started it all: "From that vantage point I saw you go, with winds that grabbed me, and it was the day I started to feel the first effects of my unreasonable passion. I thought you wanted to please me, even though I had known. I figured noticed me, distinguishing among other partners. I figured that you passed, I saw you and wanted to admire your skill and panache to make prancing horse. I was scared If you make him hard exercises. Anyway, I was interested in the least, all your steps, all your actions. I no longer felt that you were indifferent and participated in were doing. Ay! Tired know what followed these beginnings. "
Mariana Alcoforado The same consideration what happened: "I am finished with the contention of your attentions, bewitched me with your kindnesses, I gave up with your oaths, I let myself be carried away by your words." Now that you know the cruel outcome of their love, is accused because "I find worthy of my love before I say you loved me, showed me a passion, I was dazzled, I grabbed my violent inclination. No me take care of any value without trying to know if you had done something extraordinary for me. "
Maria Eugenia had felt the same sudden interest when he saw his uncle in the port of Havana. She saw him climb the gangway of the boat, just dock, followed by several servants very Slick. He saw the captain approached respectfully greeted and checked for a few brief comments that among them was a business relationship. Perhaps issues of piracy, he thought. There were too many emotions conspired: the turquoise sea, the heat, the skin shiny black slaves, the glaring light, the euphoria of having arrived, the white linen jacket he wore his uncle, freedom, the distance. The New World word for word.
Then, during the trip from the car that had pulled by horses in black who knew brought from Spain in a boat that was on the verge of sinking, he was riding his side throughout the trip. Now, months later, drunk on love and tropics, wondered if she would be able to do some extraordinary things for his uncle, as the Portuguese nun. His temperament had little to do with Alcoforado Mariana, whom was a certain passion for suffering. At the boarding school had argued violently with their peers the final sentence of the first letter of the nun: "Love me, and do more with your poor suffering Mariana." To her, this resignation, he admired both her companions, it seemed an absurdity sickly and almost a sin. "I'm not willing to show my love to suffer, quite the contrary", it said without understanding very well what he said.
There is a very expressive English phrase: "I have sucked the brains', which is used in situations that deal with love, as seduction or any of its forms, but can not be confused with it . Even me, I learned the love in the boleros, hearing that "love is a nameless something a man obsessed by a woman," I find it credible. We must therefore conclude that there is an interest in the inordinate love the love object, but not all inordinate interest is love.
The importance of this intensification of interest gives rise to many illusions of love, because the feeling is interested in something that releases tension from the tedium, a prize that everyone responds almost jubilant. We are willing to give our hearts to any situation or person to step up our lives.
What is this escalation? It is a good and complicated question. Life is an intense brightening things, the emergence of clear values, well defined, absorbing in all situations. And euphoria, flight time, the lightness, the neglect of small annoyances and bumps of everyday life. The intensity has not why be nice, in a survey conducted after the Second World War, respondents recognized that in wartime had an intensity that, once passed, awakened in them a certain melancholy.
The call of the adventure is the promise of an intensification of life. It also enhances Russian roulette, the assault on banks, the stock market game and much more. Love seeks an intense experience, but not all experience is intense love.
***
If the desire is not sufficient criterion, neither the interest nor the intensity, where do I continue looking for the reader? My students tend to look always at the same site and say you want a person where the absence or remoteness causes sadness. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this approach is precarious. You may feel a great nostalgia for the same whose presence we disliked.
"Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!", And begins Marcel Proust The fugitive. For hundreds of pages told us that he no longer loved Albertine, who only stand for the trouble caused him. "It makes a time, analyzing it, believed that this separation without having seen was exactly what I wanted, and comparing the poor pleasures that Albertine offered me with the wonderful wishes that I could do, had arrived, very subtle, to the conclusion that he did not want seeing her again, they no longer loved her. But those words - "Mademoiselle Albertine has gone" - had just hurt me with a pain so great that it could, he thought, stand it long. "
For Proust is the pain of absence that reveals the depth of feeling. This is true, but what is not is less clear is what feelings are concerned. Because it can be the demise of a habit, altering the mores, the wounded vanity, the loss of a possession, a vague sense of insecurity, no doubt components of love but can also accompany other emotions, including hatred. There's torturer a bond with his victim, which he does not want to lose because in that relationship cruel, in that contramor, in that love black, his life is justified or exalted his lust for power. We conclude that the sadness for the absence is a characteristic of love, but not all motivated by the absence sadness is love. Apparently, the criteria we found are more secure in what they deny that what they say. We have to keep looking.
***
The following approach seems definitive: I feel that I love a person for the joy I feel when it is present. This was the definition given Spinoza's love: "Love is a joy accompanied by the idea of \u200b\u200ban external cause." Now we seem to have hit the mark with the key. If joy is the experience of my projects and will end by loving this person is to realize that she is the realization of my goals, that is essential to achieve my desires. So has an important role in the life of the lover, is its culmination.
only thing that keeps me calm is that someone as sharp as Kant put love in quite the opposite. Love is not sentiment that binds me to those that are essential for my purposes, but I love a person when their purposes become important to me. In Spinoza's concept of love is still a role for the I, self-esteem, which needs to be clarified because sometimes coexists with very little loving feelings.
A sadist may feel a great joy to subdue his victim. Perhaps inevitably be recognized under its influence and it is possible to meet all other criteria for love-interest, intensity, sorrow for his absence, pleased by his presence, but the satisfaction comes from the suffering of another person. And that can only be called love if we are willing to confuse its meaning forever.
There is an effect of love deeper than joy. I mean that fully express a bit vague with topical phrases such as "gives meaning to my life," "justify my existence ' and so on. I leave it to Sartre that count.
For Sartre's relationship with the Other appears in his eyes, and looked threatening, especially. The neighbor looks at me and as such holds the secret of my being. Know what I am. Thus, the deeper meaning of my being is beyond me, trapped in an absence: my neighbor has the edge. This start, which reduces love to the love of ontological shame leads to a dead end, because at the ability of others to override my own being can only take two positions: to turn against his neighbor, for, in my turn, make depend on my eyes, or attempt assimilate their freedom. This solution is loving. Love is gonna get rid of shame, fear, absurdity, that relationship is always conflictual relationship with others.
So great transmutation occurs, the great calm. "Instead of feeling like before being loved, worried by the unjustified and unjustifiable extrusion was our existence, instead of feeling more, we feel now that this existence is recovered and dear to the smallest detail by an absolute freedom conditions which at the same time that we ourselves with our own freedom. Such is the depth of joy love, when that joy exists, feel justified to exist. "
For Sartre, this beautiful picture is a mirage, and the reason he gives is very curious. For the love of another person must have our being, must remain subjective uncomplicated, like a divine eye from distance justifies us lovingly. But behold, this being a lover, if he truly loves, wants to be, in turn, loved. And this, Sartre, seemed contradictory. "I demand that the other loves me and I put in work around for my project, but if the other loves me radically disappointed by love itself, I founded my be required privileged target remaining as pure subjectivity in front of me, and since I love, I experienced as object and sinks in its objectivity in front of my subjectivity. "
suspect that Sartre was an impostor.
***
All the feelings that I have spoken to do with love, but overlook the most striking and innovative, which makes a change radical in the dynamic of our affection. See a huge offset, unjustified, we must consider a original and fundamental phenomenon, since it can not be derived from another. The fact is that the loved one begins to be valued for itself, regardless of the impact it has on the lover. It is because, as Spinoza said, the lover sees in the other person because of his joy or happiness. It is something more: wants, needs, aims at the happiness of another person.
Ortega said his eloquence more elaborate: "Now glimpse of what that activity, such as industriousness, of course, suspected in the hate and love, unlike emotions passive as joy or sadness, the love, however, expansion comes at the visual to the object and engages in a task invisible, but divine and the most actuosa that fits: deals in asserting its goal. Think about what you love art or country: it is like no hesitation the right that exists, it is as recognized and confirmed in every moment that they are worthy to exist. To hate is to feel irritated by their mere existence. Love a thing to be committed there, not admit, as a dependent, the possibility of a universe where that object is absent. "
novelty has appeared sentimental than can be derived from any other feeling. As Aristotle said, "Love is wanting the best for someone." This is the ultimate test of love, which is distinct from the others. The other, in one way or another, benefited the subject, while the love-object is now the beneficiary. There are thus two different directions of love, one that begins in the need of the subject, which brings up the loved and valued, and other valuables in the stands with a high degree of autonomy, which appears, however, only feeling. It is, therefore, a feeling that gives great freedom.
love Both directions are given in childhood. The child needs his mother, is happy with her presence, came to their defense, want to be protected by their affection. The love of mother to child is different. No one can say in the strictest sense you need it, want it because it gives her happiness, but what is most characteristic of that love, fundamental movement, wants precisely the happiness of the child.
Researchers who study empathy have shown that the detachment of love gradually appears in the child's life. Hoffman has distinguished several stages in this development. A few days of life, the child feels discomfort when experiencing discomfort infected other child. It appears that the child feels his own discomfort, not the other. Then begins to feel more sympathy decentered prosocial, which will make them interested in the welfare of another person. It is this phenomenon that will further promote or enhance education, bringing together a number of other feelings that affirm the values \u200b\u200bof the object energy. For example, admiration, or the aesthetic experience seem very little subjective feelings, as the role goes to the excellence of the thing itself. In speaking of the aesthetic experience we tend to see it as a mere contemplation of the beautiful object, and so is in awe. In the love relationship also appears the final independence of the values \u200b\u200bof respect of feeling loved. The lover sees the beloved clarity the reasons for his love. So experience your love like a hopeless fate.
Each of the levels I have outlined-loving desire, the pain of absence, joy in the possession, asserting the existence of others and the need for their happiness can called, no doubt, love, knowing that only the last level, which integrates the other, reaches the entire experience. It is an integrative experience and therefore very complex.
When your loved one reaches the astonishing autonomy, there appears another characteristic of love that Sartre also told, albeit biased. Whoever emerges from that feeling is a being endowed with a very special quality. The subject wants to be loved by that person. But only after reaching agreement on their own feelings, their autonomy. The man just wants to be loved by that person free, independent, valuable in itself. Surge and contradictory character of feeling: love, among other things, means wanting to be loved. If we substitute the phrase "similar to those made in mathematics, appears a curious phenomenon. Take care not to lose the reader in the words.
We have been to "love = want to be loved." If we substitute the word, is that "love = want the other wants to be loved by me." If you still did another substitution, we must "love = want the other wants me to want the one I love." So we can reach an endless circle of love solicitations. The feeling gets in an endless game of parallel mirrors, which Sartre considered as evidence of failure, but can also be interpreted as evidence of durability.
In El laberinto sentimental, Anagram.
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