The Twofold Task of Union

Journal of British Studies, 2008

Theory, Culture and Society 15: 243-63, 1998

How culturally and historically specific is the experience of romantic love. Western expectations and beliefs about romantic love clearly develop out of our unique historical trajectory and cultural background. But this obvious truth should not blind us to deeper correspondences between our emotional lives and the emotional lives of people in cultures different from our own, who, like lovers in our society, report an intense idealization of a loved person, feelings of exaltation in their presence, and suicidal despair when they are absent. The cross-cultural and historical instances presented in this article shows that romantic love is not necessarily the prerogative of a leisured class or a complex society; it is not solely heterosexual, nor does it always lead to marriage; it is not intrinsically linked to capitalism, small families, sexual oppression, a cult of motherhood, or a quest for identity, and is not simply a disguise for lust or evidence of the unseen hand of evolution at work. The extraordinary phenomenon of romantic attraction ought to be understood as a peculiarly human response to characteristic social contradictions and tensions that people seek to escape through the love of another individual.

chapter in (2012) Hines, S. & Taylor, Y. (eds) Sexualities: past reflections, future directions. Palgrave., 2012

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986

In this important book Niklas Luhmann - one of the leading social thinkers of the late 20th century - analyses the emergence of ‘love' as the basis of personal relationships in modern societies. He argues that, while family systems remained intact in the transition from traditional to modern societies, a semantics for love developed to accommodate extra-marital relationships; this semantics was then transferred back into marriage and eventually transformed marriage itself. Drawing on a diverse range of historical and literary sources, Luhmann retraces the emergence and evolution of the special semantics of passionate love that has come to form the basis of modern forms of intimacy and personal relationships. This classic book by Luhmann has been widely recognized as a work of major importance. It is an outstanding contribution to social theory and it provides an original and illuminating perspective on the nature of modern marriage and sexuality.

Pre-existing gender differences are generally said to account for the different experiences each gender has of love. The belief that love is gender-neutral and affects the genders differently due to their subjective awareness and gender stations prior to entering into a romantic love relationship with someone of the opposite gender however fails to recognize the productive aspects of love. Through a phenomenological reading of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, and Isadora Duncan’s My Life, I reveal a “romantic” structure of love that is necessarily asymmetrical and that positions each gender, regardless of sex, differently within a ‘dialectic of romantic love’ to produce different experiences of love and transcendence for each gender that influence creative activity and the construction of subjective boundaries.

The Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) studied philosophy and psy- chology at the Humboldt-University in Berlin (1903-1908) and was a student of Carl Stumpf. With him also studied future gestalt-psychologists. The intellectual impulses he received at this time had a determining influence on his thinking and on his way of understanding knowledge and literature. The present paper attempts a reconstruction of how Musil tried to transpose psychological theories on the Ego and on human feel- ings, which Stumpf discussed with his students, into a narrative structure. This will be achieved through an analysis of Musil’s novellas “The Temptation of Quiet Veronika” (Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika) and “The Perfecting of Love” (Die Vollendung der Liebe), which were published in 1911 in the collection “Unions” (Vereinigungen). The aim is to show how Musilʼs conception of literature as a particular dimension of “non-ratioïd” knowledge was developed during his studies in Berlin and is closely connected with the theories Stumpf presented to his students, above all, with his theo- ry of emotions.

Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review , 2019

In the short section of Reasons and Persons called "Am I a Token or a Type?" Derek Parfit discusses the issue of love. Admittedly, he was not intending to present a theory of love, but his view of love and the relation between it and his notion of personal identity raises some interesting questions. This section is part of chapter 13 titled "What Does Matter" a follow-up chapter to "Why Our Identity is Not What Matters". In the earlier chapter Parfit attempts to show why the "true view" (the reductionist view) should be believed even though we are intuitively or emotionally attached to a view that implies some further fact of personal identity. Parfit leads us through multiple examples from actual scientific cases, science fiction scenarios and philosophical thought experiments in order to demonstrate what he sees as the undeniable truth of the reductionist view. He recognizes our attachment to the idea of personal identity as traditionally conceived but tries to wean us off of this attachment by showing us the plausibility of these examples. In this paper I want to explore two issues concerning what matters in love and the implications that these issues have for a view of personal identity. The first issue has to do with whether or not Parfit is correct in his claim that one's love for his beloved 'should' (in the logical, not the normative sense) transfer to a qualitatively exact replica of his beloved. I raise some problems with this claim and suggest an alternative possibility. 1 The second issue focuses on Parfit's characterization of what matters in

Lest We Lose Love, 2023

This book is an invitation to all readers to become curious and interested in the notion of love. It is not merely a book that interprets philosophy of love, but instead, it makes it possible for the reader to have an easy access to accounts of love in the Western thoughts. It is not simply a text charting love in our culture, rather it systematically explores these in classical Greek thoughts, Christian theology and modernist and post-modernist ideas. In doing so, it opens the window to a vista of the landscape surrounding ways of loving. It is a call to embark on a voyage, to immerse in the scenery, to encounter, to explore, to see anew and to transform. There have been many books about love precisely because love is at the core of human existence. In those volumes, what were captured are not only different ways to describe love, there are also innumerable perspectives to articulate what love is and how love can be pursued. Yet, a compelling book is still required to investigate what has been offered by the Western culture to our understanding of love. This investigation is particularly necessary at present time when humanity is once again at a crossroads. The choices we make and actions we take will determine the kinds of legacy to be inherited by our future generations. How we choose and what we do will ultimately make a difference between a path towards collective flourishing and a path of collective peril. In other words, at this point in human history, it is love that matters. How we understand love matters. How we embrace love in our ways of being matters even more.

Thoughts of Love, (ed Fiona and Gary Peters) Cambridge Scholars Press

The Phenomenology of Love and Reading, 2017

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love´s habits - attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.