Love

1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

                4 Love suffereth long: it is bountiful: love envieth not: love doth not boast itself: it is not puffed up:
                5 It doth no uncomely thing: it seeketh not her own thing: it is not provoked to anger: it thinketh no evil:
                6 It rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth:
                7 It suffereth all things: it believeth all things: it hopeth all things: it endureth all things. (1599 Geneva Bible.)

            4 Love is patient, love is kind.

            Love does not envy,

            is not boastful, is not conceited,

            5 does not act improperly,

            is not selfish, is not provoked,

            and does not keep a record of wrongs.

            6 Love finds no joy in unrighteousness

            but rejoices in the truth.

            7 It bears all things, believes all things,

            hopes all things, endures all things. (Holman Christian Standard Bible.)

A Theory For Everything

Lucian Blaga, Lucian Blaga: Selected Philosophical Extracts (Vernon Press, 2018), Aphorisms, p. 147:

Those who in order to live need a theory of living, those who in order to be enthused need a theory of enthusiasm, those who in order to become passionate need a theory of passion, those who in order to exist need a theory of existence—ought to leave living, enthusiasm, passion, existence in the hands of others. 

Making Knowledge One's Own

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, bk. I., ch. 24, Of Pedantry (tr. Charles Cotton):

We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this very like him, who having need of fire, went to a neighbour's house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any with him home. What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat, if it do not digest, if it be not incorporated with us, if it does not nourish and support us? Can we imagine that Lucullus, whom letters, without any manner of experience, made so great a captain, learned to be so after this perfunctory manner? . . . I do not like this relative and mendicant understanding; for though we could become learned by other men's learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom.

Love's Greatest Gift

László F. Földényi, Melancholy (Melankólia), tr. Tim Wilkinson (Yale University Press, 2016), ch. 7, Love and Melancholia, pp. 245-246:

Loneliness separates the lover from other people, and love from all other relationships. The lover is left to himself by the object of his love (the latter does not allow herself to be reached), but instead of seeking a cure, the lover derives pleasure from suffering and avoids every situation in which his solitude might be relieved in some way. For this is love’s greatest gift: it makes it possible for the lover to rise above quotidian existence and, by constructing the object of his love, create a new world for himself. This is a world of lack. It is accompanied by suffering: the lover finds no place of abode or rest, other connections having lost value in his eyes. He disdains the world and neglects everything that had once been of value to him. He is neglectful of his life, and regards this carelessness as the most natural thing. There is no greater or more natural force than ruining one’s own fate, which is typical of the lover. He fritters away his energies—though from his point of view, this dissipation is actually a way to gather strength for enduring a higher-order life that affords a glimpse into the destructive power of nothingness. Faith in the other sustains him, and he feels that in that other person, a new world is realized, for which he must leave this earthly world.

                Faith is the substance of the things we hope for
                and is the evidence of things not seen.
                                                                (Dante, Paradise, canto 24, ll. 63–64)

Yet that new world, needless to say, seems to be unstable and unattainable. A lover thinks that the new world will resolve all the contradictions and painful restrictions that torment him in the old world. Of course, we know full well that this is not what is going to happen. But one can sense just as well that once one has got over the suffering of the lover, love’s greatest gift is not just wanting but faith as well. The lover is like a work of art in the process of being realized; love condemns him to solitude and crushes him but, by way of compensation, raises him out of this world so that he can pass beyond time and geographic boundaries for a while, and gain insight into a world that is at least as real and existent as our usual home, and look back on our home from that remoteness, rearranging the order of his world from afar. The new world in which the lover ends up is a world of melancholia, which slowly consumes everything—and by rearranging the order of this world, he helps smuggle nothingness, along with his love, into it. This makes the lover awe-inspiring and uninhibited, but also extremely lamentable, since he has overstepped the boundaries that people who are not in love and nonmelancholics regard, in their own defense, so to speak, as the ultimate barriers of existence.

A World That Makes You Recoil

Giacomo Leopardi, The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi 1817-1837, tr. Prue Shaw (Routledge, 2017), from the 3rd letter, To Pietro Giordani, Milan, 30th April, 1817:

But not having a man of letters to talk to, keeping all one’s thoughts to oneself, not being able to air and discuss one’s opinions, innocently show off one’s studies, ask for help and advice, take heart in the many hours and days of exhaustion and listlessness—do you think all this is a fine diversion? . . .

. . . I see clearly that to be able to continue my studies I must break them off at once and give myself a little to those things they call worldly, but to do this I want a world that entices me and smiles at me, a world that shines, even if it is with a false light, a world strong enough to make me forget for a few moments what is above all close to my heart, not a world that makes me recoil at once, that turns my stomach, enrages me and saddens me and forces me to run back for comfort to the very thing from which I wanted to escape.

. . . how am I to get free of it, if all I do is think and live on thoughts, without a distraction in the world? and how make the effects stop, if the cause continues? What is this talk of distractions? The only distraction in Recanati is study: the only distraction is the thing that is killing me: all the rest is tedium. I know that tedium can do me less harm than exhaustion, and so often I settle for tedium, but this increases my melancholy, as is natural, and when I have had the misfortune of talking to these people, which seldom happens, I go back to my studies full of gloomiest thoughts, and I go brooding and ruminating on that blackest of subjects.

Misanthropic & Romantic Pessimism

Georges Léon Palante, Pessimisme et Individualisme (Paris, Alcan, 1914), tr. Mitch Abidor:

The foolishness that this [misanthropic] pessimism particularly takes aim at is that presumptuous and pretentious foolishness that we can call dogmatic foolishness, that solemn and despotic foolishness that spreads itself across social dogmas and rites, across public opinion and mores, which makes itself divine and reveals in its views on eternity a hundred petty and ridiculous prejudices. While romantic pessimism proceeds from the ability to suffer and curse, misanthropic pessimism proceeds from the faculty to understand and to scorn. It is a pessimism of the intellectual, ironic, and disdainful observer. He prefers the tone of persiflage to the minor and tragic tone. A Swift symbolizing the vanity of human quarrels in the crusade of the Big-endians and the Little-endians, a Voltaire mocking the metaphysical foolishness of Pangloss and the silly naiveté of Candide; a Benjamin Constant consigning to the Red Notebook and the Journal Intime his epigrammatic remarks on humanity and society; a Stendhal, whose Journal and Vie de Henri Brulard contain so many misanthropic observations on his family, his relations, his chiefs, his entourage; a Merimée, friend and emulator of Stendhal in the ironic observation of human nature; a Flaubert attacking the imbecility of his puppets Frederic Moureau and Bouvard and of Pécuchet; a Taine in “Thomas Graindorge;” a Challemel-Lacour in his Reflexions d’un pessimiste can all be taken as the representative types of this haughty, smiling, and contemptuous pessimistic wisdom.

In truth, this pessimism isn’t foreign to a few of the thinkers we have classed under the rubric of romantic pessimism, for the different types of pessimism have points of contact and penetration. A Schopenhauer, a Stirner have also exercised their ironic verve on human foolishness, presumption and credulity. But in them misanthropic pessimism can’t be found in its pure state. It remains subordinated to the pessimism of suffering, of despair or of revolt, to the sentimental pathos that is the characteristic trait of romantic pessimism. Misanthropic pessimism could perhaps be called realistic pessimism: in fact, in more than one of its representatives (Stendhal, Flaubert) it proceeds from that spirit of exact, detailed and pitiless observation, from the concern for objectivity and impassivity that figure among the characteristic traits of the realist esthetic. Does misanthropic pessimism confirm the thesis according to which pessimism tends to engender individualism? This is not certain. Among the thinkers we just cited there are certainly some who neither conceived, nor practiced, nor recommended the attitude of voluntary isolation that is individualism. Though they had no illusions about men they did not flee their society. They didn’t hold them at a disdainful distance. They accepted to mix with them, to live their lives in their midst. Voltaire was sociability incarnate. Swift, a harsh man of ambition had nothing of the solitary nature of Obermann and Vigny. But there are several among the misanthropic pessimists we just cited, particularly Flaubert and Taine, who practiced, theorized, and recommended intellectual isolation, the retreat of thought into itself as the sole possible attitude for a man having any kind of refinement of thought and nobility of soul in this world of mediocrity and banality

Goethe And The Joy Of Living

Pierre Hadot, Don't Forget to Live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises, tr. Michael Chase (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 4, The Yes to Life and the World, pp. 126-129:

This joy in existing is, first of all, an immediate, almost unconscious feeling. Goethe describes it in his praise of Winckelmann, written in 1805, which gave him the opportunity to praise the way in which, unlike the Romantics and Christianity, the ancient Greeks knew how to exist.

If the healthy nature of mankind . . . feels itself to be in the world as if in a Whole that is great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable; if harmonious pleasure provides him with a pure, free delight; then the universe, if it could be conscious of itself, would shout with joy, having reached its goal, and it would marvel at this summit of its becoming and its being.

Goethe explains his thought in these famous lines:

For what good is all this extravagance of suns, planets, and moons, of stars and milky ways, comets, nebulas, worlds that have become and are becoming, if finally one happy person does not rejoice unconsciously at her own existence?

Obviously, we find here the anthropomorphic vision of a universe whose goal is mankind, that being who is microscopic compared with the immensity of the cosmos. It is true, however, that for us human beings, what gives meaning to the universe is that spontaneous joy which, for us, is linked to existence, and to the fact of “feeling oneself in the world as in a whole.” And in order for us to exist, all this exuberance of suns and nebulas is necessary.

We feel this joy of existing, as it were, without any reason, for we understand nothing of the enigma of the world. Goethe compares it to a child’s pleasure when savoring what he likes. As he remarked in a conversation with Eckermann of February 28, 1831:

We suffer and rejoice in accordance with eternal laws, we accomplish them and they accomplish themselves in us, whether we know them or not. Doesn’t a child like a cake, although he knows nothing about the pastry-cook, and doesn’t a starling like cherries, without reflecting on how they were produced?

The great laws of nature (those of the Urworte, one might add), those laws of bronze that dominate us, transcend our understanding. Yet the unreflecting, pure joy of a child or an animal is a sign or a symbol of this unfathomable mystery. One thinks of this brief poem by Hölderlin:

Little knowledge, but much joy, / has been granted to mortals. / Why, o beautiful sun, are you not enough for me, / flower of my flowers, on a day in May? / What do I know that is higher? / Oh, that I were like children! / That I, like the nightingale, might sing / a carefree song of my joy!

If Goethe speaks of children and starlings, it is because there was a proverb he liked to quote: “One must ask children and starlings about the taste of cherries and currants.” He seems to have understood it in different ways. In Poetry and Truth, when discussing the System of Nature by Baron d’Holbach, a depressing book by a depressed old man, the proverb means that it is beings full of life whom one must ask for the taste for life and the spontaneous joy of existence. In a passage from the Conversations with Eckermann, by contrast, the proverb seems to mean simply that there’s no use arguing about tastes and colors.

For Goethe, reality and existence are thus inseparable from the joy of existing. Being-there (Dasein) rejoices in its being-there, or its existence. In a letter to Schiller, he writes:

Pleasure, joy, participation in things: that is the only reality, and all that produces reality. All else is vanity, and merely traps us.

Between Senancour And Amiel, The Malady Of The Century, & The Romanticists

Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Obermann, Selections From Letters to a Friend, tr. Jessie Peabody Frothingham (Cambridge, 1901), vol. I., Introduction, pp. xliii-xlvi:

Senancour’s rendering of nature, which makes him worthy of being classed among the poets, is on a far higher plane of beauty than that of Amiel, while he is greatly Amiel’s inferior in strength of intellect, culture, and mental training. It is Amiel’s keenness and justness as a critic of life and things, of men and books, that give him his claim to distinction. Senancour is a poet and moralist, Amiel a critic and speculative philosopher. The difference in their style is equally marked: Amiel is at his best where he is incisive, critical, epigrammatic, full of verve, cutting to the root of his subject like fine steel; Senancour, where he is poetical and meditative. The philosophy of Amiel is on a far more intricate scale and takes a more prominent place in his Journal than does that of Senancour in Obermann; but the idea of the indefinite, miscalled the infinite, appeals equally to both, though in different ways. Amiel is fascinated by it,—his individual life is absorbed, evaporated, lost, in the universal nothing; while Senancour, alone, as an individual, stands face to face with an immutable and inscrutable eternity, which terrifies and overwhelms him, but which he desires to comprehend through an etherealized intelligence. The common ground on which they meet is their desire to be in unison with the life of nature, their mystical pantheism, and their morbid melancholia which leads them into pessimism,—all of these traits being an inheritance from their great progenitor, Rousseau. It was the malady of the century,—“melancholy, languor, lassitude, discouragement,” as we find in Amiel’s Journal— lack of will power, the capacity to suffer, a minute psychologic analysis, the turning of life into a dream without production, that formed the basis of their affinity.

We must, in fact, go back to the ideas that formed the spring of the Revolutionary movement and changed the conditions of modern society, to find the common meeting-ground of all the romanticists. Unswerving belief in human nature, desire for the simplification of life and dislike of the complicated social conditions of the old order, passionate love of the natural world, full return to nature as the ideal of life, glorification of savage man,—these ideas, formulated by Rousseau, were the inspiration of Chateaubriand, Senancour, and Amiel. Rousseau, as the father of the movement, became the chief influence in the work of his successors: he set the type for their beliefs; he opened the path through which all were to walk,—some as leaders, like Chateaubriand, others as recluses, like Senancour; his spirit pervaded not only France, but Europe; from him proceeded Childe Harold, Werther, and René, as well as Obermann.

The Beloved's Parting

Johann von Goethe, Alexis and Dora, tr. Edgard Alferd Bowring:

            [...] Thou, too, art after me gazing in vain. Our hearts are still throbbing,

            Though, for each other, yet ah! 'gainst one another no more.
            Oh, thou single moment, wherein I found life! thou outweighest

            Every day which had else coldly from memory fled.
            'Twas in that moment alone, the last, that upon me descended

            Life, such as deities grant, though thou perceived'st it not.
            Phoebus, in vain with thy rays dost thou clothe the ether in glory:

            Thine all-brightening day hateful alone is to me.
            Into myself I retreat for shelter, and there, in the silence,

            Strive to recover the time when she appear'd with each day. [...]

            Vacant times of youth! and vacant dreams of the future!

            Ye all vanish, and nought, saving the moment, remains.
            Yes! it remains,—my joy still remains! I hold thee; my Dora,

            And thine image alone, Dora, by hope is disclos'd. [...]

            Visions of hope, deceive ye my heart! Ye kindly Immortals,

            Soften this fierce-raging flame, wildly pervading my breast!
            Yet how I long to feel them again, those rapturous torments.

            When, in their stead, care draws nigh, coldly and fearfully calm.
            Neither the Furies' torch, nor the hounds of hell with their harking

            Awe the delinquent so much, down in the plains of despair . . . 

            Now, ye Muses, enough! In vain would ye strive to depicture

            How, in a love-laden breast, anguish alternates with bliss.
            Ye cannot heal the wounds, it is true, that love hath inflicted;

            Yet from you only proceeds, kindly ones, comfort and balm.

Philine To Amiel

Philine to Henri-Frédéric Amiel, tr. Van Wyck Brooks:

My paradise on earth would be to live with you; a hundred years would not be enough. I should have to have eternity. To be with you, morning, evening, every hour; to surround you with my care, to cherish you, to be your secretary, your reader, your sick-nurse, your friend, your sister; to rest at your feet; this would be my dream and my felicity. That is why I am weak at the idea of separating from you, you, my treasure, my joy, my happiness, my soul, my all. (June 6, 1868)

I shall be ambitious for you. I must have a book from you every year. For the rest, I shall live where you wish. We shall travel or remain at home; all places, all dwellings are the same to me provided that we are together and that I live under your roof, provided I share your life and I am sure of not dying alone, of not seeing you die alone. 

My unevenness of temper would disappear the moment I no longer had to leave you. With you improvement, self-perfection would be endless, satiety impossible, discord inconceivable. You will never know my full worth until I am able to express in my life all that I am. You have surpassed even my dreams and I am rather afraid of dying of happiness than of not being happy, in entering your life for always. (June 10, 1868)