Sexual desire to hide real motives?
All along, philosophy and love have been considered opposed to each other. Although love brings joy, it cannot resist the despair of the world. Cupid, the goddess of love, seems innocent, but in fact has a bad heart, hiding a bow and arrow under his wings that can kill people.
Like the other gods, Cupid, the goddess of love, became an ancient laughing stock and was buried forever. In this battle against love, it was ultimately the pessimistic tradition of French moralists that triumphed.
In the dreary romanticism, the real **, scheming and willpower are deeply obscured. Therefore, even an hour or two of love thinking will be considered worthless.
When people talk about the most important theme in life - love, they are surprised to find that it has become almost a deserted place that no one cares about, and is thrown to the nihilistic ** family in the relationship between the sexes, the sociologist who studies the new "love confusion", or the religious fanatic who deceives it.
No one really wants to delve into the philosophical perspectives of love to the point that we are almost more likely to explore the deep meaning of love in the popular ** than in the work of contemporary thinkers.
As early as 1818, in his book The World as Will and Appearance, Schopenhauer was amazed at this unique presence in human life. We may wonder why philosophers have not taken this seriously until now, or that it is almost a piece of raw material that has never been processed.
Of course, such a statement is an exaggeration. The argument is even self-ironic when the irascible German philosopher disparages Plato's ideas to a Greek homosexual affair.
But it does point to a real mystery. The real contradiction is that the philosophy born in Greece from the question of love, like the goddess Venus born from a shell in Botticelli's painting, seems to deny her origins.
Socrates, an advocate of love, once stated in "Drinking" that he knew nothing about anything other than "** topic", and such an inspiring declaration had little follow-up effect.
It wasn't until Kierkegaard's advent that love was once again seen as a way of understanding existence. For most people, love is a prerequisite for happiness and an enduring theme in literature and drama, while philosophers talk about love as if they were walking into a cage of beasts that devour people alive.
In this regard, we can try to give various explanations. Philosophers, perhaps fearing that people would become delirious in love, cautiously talked about this unusual, even willingly grieved passion.
The philosopher Lucretius in the first century BC, inspired by ancient Greek ethics, pointed out the blind spots and even chaotic places that philosophy should think about but ignored.
As the Epicurean maxim goes, "Philosophical lectures on the disease of the soul are all hollow." It is well known that modern schools of philosophy more or less ignore the distress of a "happy life".
In short, in the face of love, or any other similar passion, we still see the same thinking of the ancient Greeks: in the face of this uncontrollable force, it is better to stay at home carefully.
Maybe it's because love seems to be contrary to all reason. Undoubtedly, this is another reason why philosophy has been skeptical of love for hundreds of years.
Love is abandoned in the dark emotional zone of pompous and artificial, and is divided into the psychological chaos zone that the sun of reason can never reach, and cannot simply become an "object" of study for philosophers, but at best a topic for the pastime of literati and.
Thus, philosophers who contemplate hard labor approach love with an inherently male contempt that attacks anyone who opposes their masculine views.
Such a cliché may seem ridiculous, but it's easy to understand. Never forget that philosophical lectures on love have always been conducted by men. No one can predict the future, and we don't take it with chance, because it still is today.
With the exception of Arendt and Beauvoir, two female thinkers – who never declared their philosophy pure – the voices left in this book can only come from the other half of the human community.
But then again, it's not surprising. Although love has become a topic outside of philosophy, this conclusion still seems to steal the argument and deserves to be questioned again, or even overturned.
One of the great contemporary philosophers who seldom thinks seriously about love is Alain Badiou, who, on the contrary, defines love as a "process of producing truth."
It turns out that love is a unique experience that takes place between two people, stems from a special encounter and then becomes possible through a "declaration of love". Does this mean that philosophers don't know enough about love?
Apparently not, this is precisely the theme of this book, which aims to earn philosophers their rightful place in the realm of love. Almost all philosophers have explicitly spoken about love, both with deep melancholy and passionate blood, and their understanding of love, about eternal fantasies, painful tribulations, and the ways we aspire to master to overcome suffering, are worthy of our deep thought.
In addition, there is an opinion that poets and writers have not presented the truth about love, which is both arbitrary and narrow. For example, Shodello de Laclos, author of "Dangerous Liaisons", is Carl von Clausewitz in the field of love studies, alongside Rousseau.
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is one such masterpiece, depicting the tragedy of the fall in the most detailed way, while sublimating passionate love into eternal beauty.
In addition, Proust was also a unique phenomenological expert on love jealousy and disillusionment, and he deeply believed in Schopenhauer, the master of fantasy destruction. What's even more surprising is that some philosophers are themselves famous lovers.
For example, Rousseau's The New Eloise was the first bestseller in history and caused a sensation at the time; Kierkegaard, best known as the author of "Diary of a Person"; Beauvoir's "Female Guest" reveals more profoundly the moral ethos of Paris's Saint-Germain-des-Prés district.
It would be ridiculous to think that philosophers are on the same page on love. For example, Schopenhauer's absolute self-restraint and Rousseau's pursuit of the sublimation of love have nothing in common.
Two very different currents of thought coexist, representing the two iconic words of "love" of Plato and Lucretius. Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary that if one wants to study "this material that has little to do with philosophy," one should consider Plato's point of view in the Epiphany, in which he discussed metaphysical love with Alcibiades and Agathon.
And those philosophers who were less concerned with emotions chose the camp of Lucretius, who discussed love as a naturalist. Thus, two fundamentally opposing views form two axes of thought.
Plato tried to find the inevitable equivalent in the pain of love in exchange for the excitement and immortality that love brings. Lucretius advocates self-liberating in unbridled ** to avoid the dangers of stable love.
One side is the white magic of love, and the other is its black magic. One side believes that the experience of love should be aimed at eternity, and the other side believes that there is an irresistible ** in love, which will only lead to disaster and must be eliminated.
But no philosopher can simply belong to one of these two colors. They're all articulating their main colors in their own way. Some people believe that love is vulgar and boring and disillusionmentary, and this view seems to be confirmed in the views of the German philosopher Theodore Adorno, who died in 1969.
He believes that people will no longer be able to see the door of the seventh heaven open when flirting with close friends. He writes that with the development of reductionism in modern social science, physical love and spiritual love are strictly distinguished.
One is the pleasure of the organs, and the other is the coat of emotion. This kind of ** mechanizes the fun of love, twists passion into traps, and gives the most important part of love a fatal blow.
The former prodigal son is now "an emotionally savvy man who practices his religion in the name of health and sports, even in his sexual life." Love then becomes a purely physiological transaction, a "liquid transaction", as Paul Valéry puts it.
Perhaps that's why people have come to believe in the supremacy of "sexuality", which is a pleasurable activity, full of fun, and free from any practical interests.
The philosophy of love is an area waiting to be rediscovered, even in urgent need of protection. We need to resist the ubiquitous nihilism and liberate sexuality from the pathological definition of the **, because nihilism has become a destructive**.
At the same time, we need to solve a strategic problem, that is, the logic of love thinking is contrary to the superficial rationality of the emotional market. In this emotional market, every trader is bound to elementals and only pursues individualism, which makes love seem irresponsible and violent in the eyes of the world.
From the point of view of gender differences, we may find a new and more appropriate view that women and men in the battlefield cannot be what each other is.
All the people and things related to love reveal the root of the problem, and we need to understand who we are in order to love others. Love comes in many forms, from short-lived willfulness to enduring tenderness, and philosophers have not escaped the influence of these loves.
However, the question of whether a writer's personal life can justify or explain his ideas is controversial. Regardless of the point of view, it makes perfect sense that philosophers are writing about love with their lives and feelings.
Philosophers sometimes say ignorant things about love, but that doesn't stop us from thanking them, as they may offer ways to alleviate the pain of love.