An anatomy of the amorous passions; or ‘love’
Our language fails in the face of it. In English we have but one word at our disposal to account for the plethora of powerful emotions and mental dispositions usually understood by ‘love’, ranging from the sublime heights of virtuous passion down to the curious yet hesitant glance. The term itself derives from the Old English lufu; which in turn is said to stem from the Sanskrit lubhyati, roughly translating to ‘desires’ – in the plural. The issue here rests with its basic equivocality; the range of unique feelings we subconsciously link together by virtue of their shared ‘desiring-nature’ and often fail to distinguish because of this, because ‘love’ as a general term blurs the boundaries between particular forms of love which are not obvious to us. Much unnecessary confusion can be said to rest with this basic issue, that of our language failing us. What be the alternative?
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As recommended by Heidegger, when trying to construct a discursive paradigm by which to define and describe a basic component of the human experience in this tangible world, we should appeal to the ancient Greeks for the fruit of their ‘original’ insight. Heidegger did so with the concept of Being, or how we conceptualise our being-here in this special and temporal world: how am I to understand the fact that ‘I am’, that I exist as something that is and cannot not be? Meaning and interpretation rest ultimately with language, and how the inherited words and phrases we employ when referring to the world and our position in it have the effect of shaping and constraining our conception of the world and how we relate to it. We may adhere to one understanding of the world, of Being, for it constitutes one intellectual pillar of the cultural context into which we were born and in whose shadow we came to self-recognition. But does the vail of authority bestowed upon some idea by its perennial pervasiveness in our cultural setting correspond to, or even necessitate, some relative Truth?
Assuming there is such a thing as Truth, as Heidegger does, would it be fair to say that what we perceive as being a truthful interpretation of reality has always been so, persisting intact through history? Probably not. One may counter this by supposing that interpretations rise and fall with the wayward sway of historical contingency. Societies are not static; they occupy a state of perpetual flux, jettisoning past authorities and inaugurating new ones with the rapid consistency of a flowing river. Neither is knowledge absolute, but forever partial and accumulating as new modes of enquiry open and close based on their relevancy to our own political or cultural moment, or lack thereof. One looks upon the past, as to the future, from a position invariably rooted in the present; our focus therefore is never fixed. There is no ‘end-point’ of history, for this overlooks the fact of contingency; neither is there a point at which we can confidently say via a process of logical deduction that we have reached a final understanding of the world and our place in it, where our knowledge is certain and our interpretations final.
There is no point of finality or certainty; only change and possibility. But does this rule out the prospect of a beginning? Or a primal root to which our present understanding of a particular topic can be traced back through a mountain of accumulated interpretations, with one leading to another in a process of dialectical sublation, of appropriations and subsequent articulations? It was Heidegger’s ambition to affirm this in the case of Being, through recourse to the earliest Greek philosophers to have put the question of being into words, thus sparking off a great chain of discussion, elaboration, and distortion that leads back to them once the blinds of history are sliced through with a knife. Heidegger’s elevation of the ‘archaic’ (deriving from the Greek, arché, ‘point-of-origin’) philosophers provided the grounds for him to characterise Being as Dasein – ‘being-in-the-world’; ‘being-there’. From this foundation Heidegger constructs his system, eventually setting off an intellectual revolution in post-1918 continental Europe. There are several issues with Heidegger’s archaeological method. It does, however, provide a method for us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the nature of love. The ancient Greeks had no understanding of ‘love’, for the term itself was unknown to them. One could draw a parallel with the Greek understanding of ‘sexuality’, for there was no such thing as ‘sexuality’. There was sex, of course, but their vocabulary for speaking about it was completely different to our own. This term, sexualitas (in Latin), only emerges sometime in the early modern period, and didn’t attain its standardised (modern) connotation until the eighteenth-century, arguably. What did they have instead, and how may it facilitate a richer, broader understanding of ‘love’?