Critique of Love

Outline of a critique of love

From the mouth of the character played by Catherine Deneuve in the film "Les Voleurs" we hear a quite interesting phrase regarding the excentric interests of her pupil who also was her female lover and a thief: "Ah, the XVIII century - the time of orgies. An orgy has the property that one offers there all of oneself whereas in love one always gives either too much or too little of oneself." Hey! A criticism of love, encouragement to a theoretical study of the scope of its validity and utility. Quite in the style of Kant and his critique of all those other faculties. Perhaps the term orgy is a bit extreme, but helps by stimulating the imagination and motivating the intelect.

It is known in chemistry that the discovery of the law of constant proportions led to the atomic theory of matter and the system of chemical elements - a truly grand achievement of analytical thought. This law says that fixed quantitative proportions exist in chemical compounds but not in mixtures. Only mixtures in proportions precisely prepared to resemble those found in chemical compounds can completely react with themselves. I suppose that love is consists in attraction and bringing together of such complex amalgams, but in differing proportions such that they cannot completely react with each other. In an ordinary mixture after a reaction with another mixture remains an excess of one component while another component is entirely exhausted. Say, a person is such an amalgam of aspirations, desires and gifts, which he or she wishes to offer to others. Then she or he desires love as a proportionate utilization of his/her gifts and satisfaction of his/her hungers and appetites. A person wants to be whole in love. However, because of chronic mismatch with what the person encounters we get want, hunger and exhaustion. A fatal indeed consequence of love. "Too much or too little" it's the effect of the strive for being served or for serving another with one's being in a complete and final manner that collides with a lack of constant proportion of elements between the loving and loved. Not only the giving "too little or too much" is an unfortunate consequence of the love interaction, but also the receiving of "too little, or too much", the remaining with a sad unutilized excess of what one had too much of, or the shame of not possessing in an apporpriate degree of what is desired.

Another bad effect of love is the dependency on the loved object and the representation that he (or she or it) is the one who satisfies all hungers and accepts all gifts, and without it life is worth nothing. It is the essence of "being in love" - illusion and chimera of fulfillment, while in fact it is the looming of both saturation and exhaustion.

>>>> Digression - the Forces in Love

Love is attraction. There is no repulsion. Also Newton's III law is not in force - it means that an action does not have to cause a reaction. The forces are therefore one-sided, but always attractive. The attraction to oneself is called agape, charity; the strive after another is called eros, desire, lust.

The opposite of love is hatred (known so for lack of better name). Her forces are also one-sided, but repulsive. The repulsion from oneself is known as scorn, disdain, the flight from another is called regret and disenchantment.

>>>> End of digression

So how is it with the orgy? How is it possible to give and receive with one's whole self since the orgy's participants are unequally equipped persons?

The participation in the orgy is not a simple act. It requires preparation. While love often desires spontaneous perfection, an orgy does not expect perfection at all, but never leaves out the preparation. That's why the orgy is almost always successful.

Accordingly, one can get prepared for the orgy by renouncing the sublimation of elementary components and by melding them into one single quality, which, on the principle of arithmetic average, will be approaching the quality generated by the other orgy participants. A human person attempts to lose his/her identity in order to enter the orgiastic ceremony. When the functional elements of the person merge together into one, a question arises -- what is the result? I dont have the answer: it may be energy, chaos, source, the abyss of death, self-depredation. I don't know. In fact such behavior was encouraged by many a divine or semi-divine instructor.

Another preparation to the orgy is precisely the sublimation, separation, selection of the single element that is designated for the orgy. It means leaving the larger remainder of the elements of the person under protection. And thus here we encounter sophistication or refinement, sometimes slightly incorrectly termed as licentiousness. But this is exactly the Apollinian, artistic version of the orgy, where the participant controlling the proportions of his/her elements is supposed to intensify and utilize one of them. The version of merging the elements of a person together is the Dionysian approach.

The force of love still play a role in the orgy. By pursuing the object of attraction (eros) or attracting this object to oneself and making a gift of oneself (agape) the subject of orgiastic activity is no longer viewed as a whole person, but as a transformed agent who is either from the Dionysian chaos and source, wherefrom he erased and canceled his traits and features, or from the realm of Apollo as a sublimate artist - a proficient master of a selected sphere of his person.

Types of orgiastic ceremonies.

Orgies have been practiced in many ways and under a variety of guises. It is easier to enumerate the Apollinian methods.

1. Narcotic drugs - those that separate one of the regions of interaction and sensing.
2. Sports, physical effort and athletic achievement, e.g., running or weight lifting.
3. Apollinian arts: poetry, literature, visual arts such as painting and photography, where one strives after grasping something attractive and holding it in an essentially static form.
4. Physical debauchery - the separation of the sensuality and flesh from the rest of the person.
5. Intellectual debauchery - utilizing solely the intellectual part of the person.
6. Work or productive debauchery - also leads to the amplification of some qualities and extinction of others.

Other are the Dionysian ways:

A. The benign ones: music, dance, theater or rock concert.
B. And horrible types of self-destruction:
-- in danger, as in mountain climbing, sailing across seas, attempts at survival in the wild;
-- in death, i.e. in suicide, and perhaps also in homicide;
-- in surrendering to the power of unknown forces, as in agreeing to work for a criminal organization;
-- in breaking the ties with the family and flight into unknown -- emigration in a foreign land, but such that it really becomes a change of personal identity.
C. Prayerful ecstasy - or an attempt to approach a higher being and losing in that contact one's personal identity.

Verification of the presented theory in questions and exercises.

1. Love of the God of Christians.

Does the love of God demand from man an orgiastic preparation? Is this an ideal love, i.e., such that adapts to the specific personal mixture of qualities and ideally satisfies the desires and hungers and gratiously permits one to offer one's gifts? For the latter there are many examples in the Gospels. Jesus appears to be the ideal lover, for example, he dispenses the water of life such that one desires no longer, promises eternal life, that is eternal personal integrity. The problem with him is that he talks about a narrow path of salvation, demands suffering and forbids pleasure. Sin is in essence a separation from God - I would really like a better definition, but could find none in the catechism. I think it is refusal of obedience to God and from doing his will. Aeschylos in "Oresteia" presents the following connection between sin and lust. He speaks about Paris:

"Lust drives him on - lust, desperate and wild,
Fate's sin contriving child -
And cure is none; beyond concealment clear,
Kindles sin's baleful glare."

So it is the desire, that is giving in to erotic pursuits is the "fate's sin contriving child", this co-maker of fate leading to the separation from God. Adopting this concept leads to the following hypothesis of the nature of God's love that is in agreement with the hypothesis of Jesus as the ideal lover. Namely, God loves man ideally - without affecting his specific composition - and wishes to transport him into the realm of eternal life whole - the same way as he tranported Christ. What kind of does God demand from man in exchange? In essence he demands self-depredation, and with respect to the fellow man and the oneself he demands charity. But self-depredation is characterized above as a Dionysian method of orgy, and charity is an elementary force of love consisting in giving of oneself to others. So man loses himself in God and distributes himself to others. There is no erotic force, whereby man pursues something that attracts him - because that something may be something other than God. And God requires exclusiveness. The erotic force is in fact already embedded in the love of God, but is already built into the framework of the orgy of self-doom in God. Eros outside of this particular self-renunciation is sin, or a source of sin, as in seeking love outside of God, treason.

2. Olympic Gods of ancient Greeks.

Those Gods do not demand love. They are victors and bid us to struggle and compete against them on the way to immortality. Immortality is the prize of the heros. The titan Prometheus is a natural enemy and competitor of the Gods of the Olympus. His slogan is a defiant challenge to the Gods and not humility before them. He is essentially different from Jesus or Moses. The latter at most negotiated with God, but never opposed him. The hero of the Bible is actually Korech, who questioned the authority of Moses and Aaron and was immediately taken alive into hell together with his family and relatives. Jacob in the Bible fought once against God's angel and became lame for life from the experience. This convinces us that one cannot oppose God of the Christians. The only acceptable attitude is obedience. However we long after the world of the Greeks where man, as much as he did not try to reach the status of the absolute, for Gods are not that, still achieves immortality thanks to his own heroic attitude. Immortality is more glory than happiness.

3. Marriage.

Marriage is a common among a variety of cultures idea aimed at the definition of the right of one person to another person. It is a useful institution from the point of view of organization of the society because it puts reason at the post of the regulator of the drives: the sexual drive and the drive to possession of property. We remember that a frequent result of the sexual act is offspring, which becomes an investment remaining in someone's possession with attached costs and expected returns. This circumstance is especially strongly emphasized in the Old Testament. It seems that in many traditional societies marital love was treated in an objectified manner - one might say orgiastically. The man provided material conditions, the woman gave her child-bearing bosom. In modern societies, where man is being strongly persuaded about the of his individual person, the marriage participants try not to lose their personality and fight for ideal love rather than descend to the level of the orgy. A marriage is trying to achieve harmony because its participants are convinced that they have to offer their own whole person and accept the whole person of the partner. This conviction is reinforced by the sacrament, a blessing, or maybe just a civil ceremony.

Summary and conclusion.

Love seeks respect and appreciation from the other. A person in an orgy seeks out in oneself the faculties, which are he or she utilizes him/herself - only with eventual participation of another person. Therefore love is oriented toward another person, while an orgy is essentially egocentric. The other person in the orgy is essentially only a stimulant. The paradox is in the fact that this is the orgy that leads one to leaving the realm of the ego toward something new and likely greater than the individual. Love wants to focus on the other person, unite with the other person and in effect create at best a union of two individualities. And such is love's limit.