Is love a lack, a desire for something we miss? Or just unselfishness, sympathize with others without self-interest? Love according to the Bible, Socrates, Montaigne and Schopenhauer.
- Platonic love: eros
In the Plato Symposium, a number of people gather in the house of Agathon to celebrate his victory at a poetry contest. Those present, including the comedy writer Aristophanes and the philosopher Socrates, agree that, instead of putting it on a booze, they will all hold a eulogy on Eros, the god of love.
Through various speakers, Eros is sung as a personal, but also general primal force that encourages different forms of excellence and immortality, either in the form of children or in that of performances in the field of the arts and sciences. The usual meaning of eros as sexual desire is, in short, considerably stretched.
Socrates is the sixth speaker in Plato's dialogue. He agrees that Eros is much more than just sexual desire, but goes much further than the other speakers. Love is nothing less than a school for the practice of philosophy. Love encourages us to become deeper and deeper. The philosopher is attracted to beautiful bodies but will realize that thought are more beautiful and more resistant than physical grace. He will thus ascend through science until he gains insight into the perfect form of beauty: the beauty in itself - unchanging, eternal. The idea of beauty. The ideal image of love is a passion for wisdom and beauty for Plato.
- Christian love: agape
Like the symposium, the New Testament is written in Greek, but the word 'eros' and its derivations are of little use, although the message of the gospel is the course of love:' Above all God dear and your neighbor like yourself. " The writers and editors have been chosen: they privatize the verb genistein (" love ") into agape ," love ".
Now it is not unlikely that homosexual smear, but the importance of it is mainly due to the special nature of the love they express. want to bring. The totally unselfish love of God comes from above and descends on the earth.
The Platonic eros, which climbs up, is in Christianity. Whoever ascends the love ladder does so from a loss, in order to finally, when everything goes well, to see the idea of the beautiful, while the love of God is already everywhere. When we love humans, God loves us, it is because of God, because there is simply no love outside of God.
- Michel de Montaigne: friendship as true love
In a Christian-Stoic age where underwear was required at night, the woman was still an emissary of the devil and the mortification of the body was preached, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) takes a suspiciously stance: "Every movement in this world Tends towards and finds its completion in mating: this is something That everything is pervaded by, the point where everything revolves around.
He completely abandoned the vertical proportions of the Middle Ages, and Although he does not follow the ascending course of Plato to the universal, he renews the classic love idea of philia , friendship, Montaigne was married, but the great love in his life was a fellow lawyer, Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563).
Montaigne describes true friendship as a relationship that is separate from all possible interests and in which, according to Aristotle that friends are two bodies in one soul, everything is common: 'Wishes, thoughts, opinions, goods, women, children, honor and life. "
For almost thirty years -" only smoke and darkness, one lung, unhappy night "- Montaigne's lack has haunted. In his essays he finally comes to an answer to the question why he loved him: 'Because it was him Because it was me . "
- Arthur Schopenhauer: pity is true love
At the heart of Schopenhauer's philosophy is the thesis that everything that exists, lives and breathes is the embodiment of an unreasoning, blind, aimless, and insatiable that is infinite in its endeavor. Under that 'will', Schopenhauer understands both the whole of our psychic processes and the principle that these govern. Although there are many motives, emotions, moods and experiences that can be held in the world of our conscious self, the epitome of this is sexual desire, the eros.
The motives that can lead to action are, according to Schopenhauer, egoism, malice and compassion. The most fundamental motive, "both in man and in the animal, is selfishness, that is, the urge for life and well-being." Schopenhauer calls this natural, boundless and colossal - "It dominates the world." But in man the motive of compassion can also be identified: the desire not to harm others and to assist them, sometimes with the danger of putting their own well-being at risk.
With compassion the distinction between me and another dissolves; he who knows compassion identifies himself with the other in a certain way: "In him, I suffer, though his skin does not cover my nerves."Only by breaking the gap between me and the other can 'his suffering become a motive for me to act'. And that pity, that love, he calls agapè . "My teaching could be called the true Christian philosophy."