(This post is dedicated to Eric and Sarit, who are getting married this weekend, and to my husband and myself, who are celebrating 10 years of marriage today!)
This past week, Ronald de Sousa (Toronto) was delivering a series of lectures on the philosophy of love at Leiden University. The material presented corresponds to the building blocks of the monograph on love he is currently working on. As is well known, Ronnie has made decisive contributions to the philosophy of emotions, in particular in his books The Rationality of Emotions (1987, MIT) and Emotional Truth (2011, OUP). He is now focusing specifically on romantic love – that many-splendored thing – combining elements from philosophy, literature and the neuroscience of love; so there are many reasons to look forward to the end-result, given that this plural, integrative perspective seems to be exactly what is required to make sense of such a rich and complex topic.
Due to other commitments, I could only attend one of the four lectures he delivered; but as many of the points he raised connect nicely with some of my previous posts here at NewAPPS, I figured I might as well write a post on the lecture. The overall thesis of the lecture is that most of our mainstream conceptions of love are ultimately ideologies of the pernicious kind. Ronnie started with the mother of all love ideologies: Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium. According to the myth, human beings used to be somewhat round creatures with eight limbs and two faces, and came in three kinds: male, female and androgynous (which allows the myth to offer an account of sexual orientation as well). They were then chopped in two by a furious Zeus, and thus started to wander around the Earth missing ‘the other half’ of themselves. Aristophanes claims that when two people who were separated from each other find each other again, they never want to be separated and feel ‘whole’ again (192c).
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