Am I Fooling Myself?
In What Is Ancient Philosophy? (in the midst of a very subtle and illuminating discussion of Eros, Socrates, and the philosopher), Pierre Hadot paraphrases a portion of Plato's Symposium:
Socrates therefore begins by questioning Agathon, asking him if Love is the desire for what one has or what one does not have. ...we must admit that Love is the desire for what we do not have...Love exists relatively to something else, and to something which it lacks...
This seems to me to be a reasonable starting point for the view through the ages of love as an ultimately frustrating, if occasionally pleasurable, madness--the view taken by Shakespeare and Cervantes through Proust and Freud to the movies of Woody Allen and Francois Truffaut, and a view which does not seem to admit of exceptions. I have certainly experienced love that way--the uncertainty, the desperation, the jealousy, and the thrill it somehow manages to induce--love as an illusion and a projection of our desires and insecurities. For Freud, for instance, this illusory projection grimly forms the basis of religion.
But I have also experienced love otherwise, as certainty rather than uncertainty, as serenity rather anxiety, as stable rather than volatile, as safety rather than danger, as comforting and yet no less thrilling. More than anything, it's a desire for what I do have. The best secular thinkers (Freud, Proust, Harold Bloom, etc.) would tell me this is impossible, and the best religious thinkers would tell me it's possible only with respect to God.
Yet I know it to be real and not directed to God (though it does lead me that way--I'm far more inclined to faith having discovered love in this form). It has survived unchanged through more than two years of disruptive therapy that have changed my most basic beliefs, my view of myself, my relationship with my family, and even my understanding of my marriage. In fact, it has served as the single stable basis for that therapy and all the change it has wrought. Is that really possible? Am I really that lucky? Are things really that simple?
This is precisely what Dante attempted to finesse by placing Beatrice (whom he loved and whose extinction he simply couldn't accept) as an intermediary to God. It's audacious and blasphemous, but his poetic strength was such that history has accepted it. But even though his structure of the afterlife has since been taken up in every form of art, I'm not aware of anyone taking up his conception of true love.
11:26:19 AM 
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