He was the first to create and establish a concept of love that included Eros and Agape in the form of Caritas. Greatly influenced by Neoplatonist versions of Symposium and his studies of Agape, St. Augustine in his early period described a positive paradigm of Christian life, in the sense of Agape through different stages, in works such as De Quantitate Animae and De Genesi contra Manicheos.
In these works, he fights against the teachings of the Manicheans who were inspired by Mani 3 rd cn. Later on, however, he refutes this kind of Platonic ascension and develops his own kind of Christian Agape and platonic Eros, which is neither Eros nor Agape, but Caritas. Where does he see a flaw in Eros that must be repaired by Agape? The answer lies in pride superbia , which is connected with Eros. This is because man cannot reach heaven by himself.
This is the reason why Christian spirit emphasizes humbleness humilitas , which is Jesus Christ. All people see God as the highest, most beautiful, the brightest, eternal, wise, good, true and truthful entity who ever existed at all.
No one on the Earth possesses the features God has. He is life itself, pure love and the origin of everything that is: God … gives preference to that which lives before to that which is dead and he is the highest Good Summum Bonum.
Augustine, a, p. Namely, people are, contrary to God, made creatures—and live solely through him. A man-made creature does not possess his own bonum but he needs to find it—which is achieved through love as a yearning to acquire good.
Happiness is thus having this good and keeping it in our life. Desire and yearning is thus a sign of a created creature, whereas God himself is without desire and lives according to himself and through himself. Such a God is self-sufficient and autarkical. Creatures belong to the world of transitions: created beings never fully exist the past is gone, the future is yet to be , and they exist only in now which soon turns into the past—what truly exists is only now which is not in time, but in eternity, which is God.
Therefore, if a loving one chooses created and transient objects of this world, we have love called Cupiditas; if he chooses an eternal and non-created object God , we have Caritas. Jean Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher, pedagogue, composer, writer, and one of the first autobiographers in the world. His political ideas were highly influential for the French Revolution and later for socialism and even nationalism.
In his early writings, Rousseau claimed again and again that human nature was corrupted by the habits and manners of society in the big cities, which made people shift from natural moral, political, spiritual values to artificial and immoral values, based only on looks, superficial talk, material goods, and civil and cultural conventions.
Rousseau notices this corruption on social and personal levels in the relationships between men and women, thus he suggested a new way to form loving relationships. And there exists yet another feature of love: enthusiasm, which not only provides lovers and partners with enormous energy, but also drives them beyond themselves and towards the ideal of perfection and highest moral virtue.
For Rousseau, love is goodness that works for and has its origin in a balanced nature of a person. Love originates in a good-natured person from a balanced combination of our instincts, heart, mind, and soul: what the heart feels, the mind confirms.
Reason is also important for love, so that lovers know how to lead and handle their needs and desires properly. Even more interesting is that Rousseau wrote a love story in which, even after Julie gave birth to two children, she remained in love with Saint-Preux and later admitted her affair to de Wolmar, who was saddened upon learning this fact but continued to love her nonetheless.
Jean Starobinski in his book Transparency and Obstruction provides a plausible insight:. Erotic demand and demand for order are eventually in peace with each other…. In the refreshed society benevolence and gentle sympathy rule, and this is the result of a total transparency of consciousness of the people living at Clarens.
All this sounds ideal, and we would expect that we reached the final level of true love and community. Why would Rousseau want Julie to die? Julie dies because she had fulfilled the duty of moral-social order but not her personal wish for a happy life together with the one she truly loved. But if Rousseau showed us the tragic-passionate love in Julie , he clearly set up a description of a marriage in his famous work Emile: Or On Education where he, for the first time in Western society, describes a basis for a free romantic love, sealed in marriage without the pressure of social moral order or duty.
Rousseau in the first half of Emile presents the whole physical, emotional, rational, and spiritual upbringing of a child Emile , according to which pedagogy as a field came into existence. At this age they are both mature enough to meet and know each other and to seal their love in marriage. It is clear from the start that Rousseau does not promote equality of men and women, but sees them as complements to one another in the eyes of nature. And from the nature argument he infers that a man is or should be superior and a woman inferior, as they both serve the same end, their union and reproduction, but in different ways; each with their own means, capabilities, and contributions.
And it is based on this inference that Rousseau proposes the first moral difference between genders: a man is active, bright, strong, a leader, proud, and a penetrator, and a woman is passive, dark, penetrable, weak, a follower, modest, and full of grace; a man needs to have power and will and needs to develop musculature , and a woman needs to not offer too much resistance but instead possess grace and charm with which to seduce.
A man, Rousseau says, is more of the head reason, intelligence, knowledge and spirit, while a woman is more in tune with the heart, body, and intuition. A man is made for ruling and the public sphere, and a woman for obeying and the domestic sphere: she needs to learn how to bring up children and please her husband as this is her task and the reason for her origin design.
Because a bitter and angry wife does not fulfil her marital duties and is not a good mother. In this way we can read Emile: Or On Education as some sort of guide to marriage, which was highly influential in the 18th century. But it is still unclear why Rousseau, who was so liberal and open-minded in other areas, was so conservative in gender matters. Sigmund Freud was trained in medicine neurophysiology and later became the founding father of psychoanalysis.
Freud set up a practice in neuropsychiatry with the help of Joseph Breuer. That is how he came to know Anna O. Eleven years later, Breuer and Freud wrote a book on hysteria in which they claimed that when a client becomes aware of the meanings of his or her symptoms as can occur through hypnosis , unexpressed emotions find release and no longer exhibit themselves as symptoms. Breuer called this catharsis, from the Greek word for cleansing, and through catharsis, Anna lost many symptoms of her hysteria.
Freud also noted that Breuer and Anna were falling in love with one another. This later served as the basis for his idea of transference love. Freud found out from his practice that the unconscious mind signals coded messages in the form of dreams and symptoms, which must be deciphered by the analyst.
At some point, however, associative language could not provide any more answers and the language was interrupted by what Freud called resistance and silence resulted. Freud found out that this silence serves as a birthplace not only for love, but also for our drives Freud, Love is that which starts showing itself through language and moves to that which is beyond language—into drives. And what is a drive that is not an animal instinct?
In his famous work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , Freud tells us that drive presents itself without words, mostly through crying and meaningless shouts—some sort of stream of energy where there are no borders between subjects and objects. These shouts reach their limit with the use of swear words. Just after swear words we come to the border, and when it is crossed language appears and the drive disappears.
Subjectivity, reflection, and distance appear and the drive is transformed. The border can be crossed from the other side: When words are without power and the subject disappears, it makes a space for an uncontrolled stream of energy, which flashes away the distance and intermediary and enables a state that is solid and liquid at the same time.
Where does drive originate? Freud sees drives as a borderline between our body and psyche, composed of four components: on one side, we have the pair of tension and pressure and, on the other side, the pair of aim and goal. The first two have physical bases and the other two psychological bases.
The overall source of drive, however, lies in our body, which is a combination of sexual organs, genes, and hormones that all form some sort of energetic tension inside the body, which can be released with heterosexual intercourse. But Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe in his work Love in a Time of Loneliness is against this notion of drives because, in his opinion, it ignores one of two important aspects of drives: each drive is always partial and autoerotic.
Consequently, he thinks that a drive is neither heterosexual nor homosexual. When he says that a drive is partial, he means that something in particular attracts us to the other person not necessarily of the opposite sex and vice versa—this attraction includes different parts of the body and other activities as well, either passive or active, and does not necessarily lead to intercourse with the aim of procreation.
Interestingly enough, a drive does not need the whole body, but only parts of the body, hence the different drives: oral, anal, voyeuristic, exhibitionistic, and the like. Also, all these body parts represent our contact with the external world: mouth, eyes, ears, nose, breasts, feet, genitals, and anus, which accompany activities such as smelling, watching, listening, touching, sucking, and penetration.
Freud named these two tendencies of each drive Thanatos and Eros, and claimed that they are intrinsically connected into a whole. Eros carries the power of uniting different elements into a bigger unity: Eros is the union of different elements so division does not exist anymore.
Thanatos is, on the contrary, a process of fragmentation, an explosion, a big bang which releases tension. According to Freud, drives aim at the pleasure of reaching the original, zero-tension, or unity of mind-spirit-body, which Lacan later calls jouissance , the energy of the highest pleasure. Freud and, later, Lacan thought that love and successful relationships partnership or marriage depend on a solution of the internal conflict between drive and desire—this duality Freud saw in the division between pleasure of sexual drive and a desire for love.
Other divisions are consciousness and unconscious, ego, id, and superego, and sensual, sexual, and emotional levels of our being. This kind of love that we as grownups try to repeat Freud calls, as mentioned earlier, transference love. Freud came to know this through sessions with his patients who fell in love with him, although he recognized that they were not actually in love with him but had transferred their original attachment to their father to him.
According to Freud this first relationship with our parents especially mother shows the following traits of totality and exclusivity unity of mother and child , l oss the aforementioned totality is lost after the birth, especially with the introduction of language , and p ower the mother and child relationship changes and starts to include giving, receiving, rejection, forgiveness, and reparation, which are constitutive of their relationship.
In addition, in Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics , Freud uses the story of King Oedipus to create and illustrate the so-called Oedipus Complex, in which the superego the universal law, the law of the father , uses guilt to prevent continuation of incestuously oriented relationships between mother and child. At one time, it was thought that children had only duties and did not have rights as well: we used to believe that children had duties to their parents, duties such as to love thy parents, obey them, and care for them when they grow old, but times change and philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, and others started debating about the rights of children and about whether parents had duties toward their children, such as to love them, as well.
For example, philosophers such as Liao, Boylan, and Feinberg in their articles present several positions regarding duties to children related to correlative claim rights, and one of the most important is to love them.
But why do they take such a position, that duty must correlate with claim rights, and why do they emphasize that parents need to love their children? It is obvious that children are the most vulnerable people on the planet and are likely to fall to poverty, illness, and death due to illnesses and violence.
And … many children face dropout in the secondary school and even less of them go to college and university. All the facts listed show that children are a vulnerable group that need special care, love, understanding, and protection. Before we can take a justified position regarding the duties parents may have towards their children, however, we need to understand and define what love is in this regard.
Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life. You're changing all the time. Every day a tiny bit. If I could, I'd keep a record of it all.
Your hair grew a fraction of a millimeter longer. And your breasts grew a fraction of a—" "They did not! The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also become a little sadder.
Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life. Have you ever been happier or sadder than right now, lying here in this grass?
Some people[ Are you the happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been? I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her.
Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand Come down!
Stars spilled across the black sky. Folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs They had two sets of arms They had two sets of legs They had two faces peering Out of one giant head.
So they could watch all around them As they talked; while they read And they never knew nothing of love It was before the origin of love The origin of love.
And there were three sexes then One that looked like two men Glued up back to back Called the children of the sun. And similiar in shape and girth Was the children of the earth They looked like two girls rolled up in one. And the children of the moon Were like a fork stuck on a spoon.
It's even surpassed the popularity of that other trendy phrase, "Keep Calm and Carry On. That's because it's a condensed version of a much longer work that has been falsely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, thanks to a "Dear Abby" column.
You'll likely recognize more of the contest-winning piece, but our "Live, Laugh, Love" inspiration can be found in the first line:. He achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it; Who has left the world better than he found it, Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; Whose life was an inspiration; Whose memory a benediction.
Perhaps a measure of one's success is having one's words inspire the creativity of others over a hundred years later. If you agree, you might be interested in some of Amazon's most popular items with this saying on them. Happy shopping!
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