Nine Questions about Love (Amour)
Question No. 2: Is passion compatible with happiness? (or, Why do the lovers in classic love stories always have to overcome obstacles to win their love?
FORMAT FOR CLASS ON MAY 19th
We will begin by looking at the story of Tristan and Iseult. If you have time, we would recommend reading Joseph Bedier’s telling of the story. You can download for free HERE or purchase on Amazon HERE. You can find a good survey of information about the story HERE at Wikipedia. After discussion the classic version of the romantic love story, we will share our favorite versions of the story from contemporary film, novels, TV, anywhere. If you’d like to bring a snipet from your favorite film to view together, please do so!
To get your juices flowing, start by listening to the famous prelude to Richard Wagner’s operatic version of the story.
NOTES FOR THE CLASS
Our first class concerned the connection between love and ethics or goodness. We began with the question, how can love make you a better person? Most people have experienced and understand the feeling of how when you are in love with someone, your love and respect for that person makes you want to be a better person. But not always. If you are in love with a person who is not virtuous, their desire for you to act a certain way to please their narcosis may lead you to morally hazardous behavior yourself. So what kind of love/desire is the kind that moves you to transcend yourself, and which kind turns you into a slave? This is the topic of Plato’s dialogue on love called Symposium which we discussed in our first meeting.
Plato ultimately argues (or seems to argue) that the only kind of love that is guaranteed to lead to complete and perfect satisfaction is not the desire/love – what the Greeks termed “eros” – for a person at all, but the desire for wisdom, the desire for the Whole of life. This kind of love – literally a kind of falling in love with the world its its truth and evolutionary possibilities – is what offers true eternal bliss, because it pulls you away from the temporal satisfactions and inevitable dissatisfactions with identifying with your Ego (or someone else’s Ego). On this perspective, our eros for individuals is actually a deeper desire to identify – to find our true non-ordinary identity – in a cosmic unity with the truth of the universe. Is this an unrealistic, grandiose goal or is it an inspiring, and urgent one?
In our next class, we pick up the theme of romanticism, and the kind of love that historically was named by the French word “amour”. Historically and philosophically, romanticism rejects the ancient Judeo-Christian-Greek emphasis on the eternity and ethicality of love, and instead focuses on the beauty and goodness of the Individual – not simply as a soul but as an irreducible unity of body and mind and spirit. Passionate desire and longing for a unique individual is the key phenomenon in romanticism.
Each concept of love carries with it a basic question, a tension or a problem which shapes and gives meaning to the struggle for existence and happiness and awareness. For romanticism, the key to passion or amour is that it transcends other reasons that bound people together, such as political alliances – the key function of marriages in the medieval world – or economics, or obligation, or something external to the experience of intimacy itself. This is the significance of why the first and archetypal or classical love story of Tristan and Iseult is a tragic adulterous and politically incorrect love affair. True passion shows itself by trumping every other reason for wanting to be together with someone, regardless it seems of the larger consequences.
