The Paradigm of Meaning/Intimacy

Six LOVE: THE PARADIGM OF MEANING/INTIMACY 1. Introduction Love is the barometer of meaning(ful) and intimate relatedness, and, therefore, the premier antidote to loneliness. The lack of this most eminent emotion is the chief liability of abnormal personalities and the capital asset of normal and above all supranormal ones. (In the present study, what is supra signifies the summit of an entity but, unlike what is super, it is the continua- tion of what is below it.) Accordingly, love will continue to be the most fea- tured meaning/intimacy of this volume, especially of this chapter. 2. Love, Philosophy, and Science Those who defend love’s meriting objective attention in the sense of syste- matic, impartial consideration, would likely subscribe to Fyodor Dos- toyevsky’s declaration that, without love, nothing else would make any sense (1970, p. 366n51). Therefore, a loveless world would be the maximization of meaninglessness, or axiological nihilism, the doctrine that whatever exists is ultimately valueless. Though virtue in general might consist in reasoned moderation à la Aris- totle, love, understood as a supravirtue, is a passion whose specialness con- sists in its being beyond yet in harmony with the demands of reason. Most of the repudiation of love as being less than rational—and, therefore,, inappro- priate for philosophical and scientific examination—concerns its reputation for being capricious, prejudiced, ephemeral, enigmatic, and esoteric not to mention inane and sometimes insane. However, these disparaging descriptions of love are usually restricted to its erotic species and then ordinarily only to its immature and lower Dionysian brands instead of love in its entirety. Over different periods in history, philosophy has been reckoned to be a kind of love and specifically, love of wisdom, as its etymology indicates. Traditionally, the practical acme of this kind of cognition was moral virtue and the wisdom of the heart, whereas its intellectual and theoretical apex was metaphysics and the wisdom of the mind. Yet, even some philosophers may be surprised that love has been the subject of almost every major Western philosopher’s reflections. It has been so among the ancient philosophers from Plato to Plotinus; the medieval, from Augustine to Aquinas; the modern, from René Descartes to Immanuel Kant; recent from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich He- 216 INTIMACY AND ISOLATION gel Nietzsche; and, among contemporary, especially continental European, from Max Scheler to Jean-Paul Sartre. Some philosophers have declared the study of love to be off limits for their speculations since they deem it an existential concern and as such unsuit- able for their ethereal enterprises. Nietzsche labels such philosophers “artisans in abstractions,” or “concept-albinos,” since they are immersed in the con- structing and conveying of pure ideas, which excludes the study of love and other emotions from their cogitations (1965a, p. 585n17; 1968, p. 277n513). As a result, Nietzsche characterizes such vehemently abstract(ed) thinkers as vampires and intellectualist ghouls who reduce actual existents to life- less, mummified essences or to mere “bones,” such as “categories, formulas, words” (1974, p. 333n372). In sum, these philosophers are, for Nietzsche, en- dlessly mired in convoluted disputations and pretentious verbiage about enti- ties with the slimmest, if any, extramental import (McGraw, 1993, pp. 16–20). Such thinkers have been regarded as advocates of extreme cerebralism in the form of logocentricity and even what is known as logomarchy, meaning the despotic rule of reason, especially in the form of extreme rationalism and intellectualism. The defenders of these doctrines have a propensity to decree love to be the paradigm of the purely subjective and, therefore, the non- rational or, worse, the anti-rational. Accordingly, logocentrics and, a fortiori, logomarchists exclude love from what they declare to be genuine philosophical (and scientific) endeavors or, and more often, they simple ignore this and other affective phenomena. On the other hand, many non-logocentric philosophers have pronounced love to be not only compatible with rationality and reason but also their ulti- mate touchstone. Some of these non-logocentrics have proposed that love— and specifically qua an emotion—has its own sui generis kind of intelligence and intelligibility. For example, Nietzsche maintains that love and the emotions have their “own quantum of reason.” Still, he concedes that concerning love, “there is always some madness” in it, but then contends, “there is also always some reason in madness” (1965b, p. 153). Nietzsche is well aware that there is a precedent in philosophy, most preeminently via Plato, for con- struing this pursuit of wisdom as a kind of craziness, albeit a heavenly and sublime sort. Nietzsche excoriates rationalist and intellectualist philosophers because instead of being lovers of life and of a living wisdom, they have become but mere scholars and pedants, or maniacs of minutiae and other trivialities (1992, pp. 107n48, 110n53). Nietzsche prides himself as a person and philosopher not just for affirming life, but loving it, irrespective of the misery it might contain. Consequently, Nietzsche exhorts people in general to “love life, not because [they] are used to living but because [they] are used to loving” (1965b, p. 153). Love of life, for him, is the supreme antidote to what is known as existential loneliness, the kind that emphasizes life as loneliness. It is the sort .

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