Love in our time is a topic more indecent than sex. More worrisome. More intimate. More complex. One can even doubt its reality: what if it is just a dream, an illusion, a lie? What if love exists, as La Rochefoucauld suggested, only to the extent that it is spoken of?
They talk about love without ceasing. Egoism is also love, love for oneself, neither the presence nor the strength of which can be denied. But what about love for children? If we do not love them, then we are so afraid? And then there are our friends. Even if we love them only for our own sake, which in fact is quite possible, this does not make them any less precious in our eyes than our enemies or those, innumerable, to whom we are indifferent.
This means that love still exists, because it at least introduces this difference into our relations: between those who are dear to us and those who are nobody to us. Without love, everything is indifferent to us; when we love, we care about everything.
And there are all these loves that our existence is filled with: for delicious food, for pleasures, for life itself. What would even sex be worth if we didn’t love it?
You will say that we are talking about completely different feelings, that we cannot put love for an object (for example, a dish or wine) in one row and what we feel for people and that only can be called true love.
Maybe. But in the end, we can only tell them apart if we first compare them.
The ability to enjoy and the ability to suffer go together, like joy and sadness, like love and hate.
To love is the ability to enjoy something (someone) or enjoy something (someone). Thus, it also means suffering: pleasure and joy here, by definition, depend on an external object, which may be present or absent, may surrender to us or refuse …
“With regard to an object that is unloved,” writes Spinoza, “no strife will arise; we will not be sad if he dies, we will not be jealous if he ends up with another, we will not be afraid, hate, experience emotions … «
If we loved nothing and no one, not even ourselves, our life would be calmer. But then there would be less life in us, or we would be completely dead.
A person cannot live without love, because it is love that makes him live. But it also contains our weakness, our fragility, our mortality. The ability to enjoy and the ability to suffer go hand in hand, like joy and sadness, like love and hate.
This is what dooms us to hopes and fears, to joy and pain, and finally to tragedy and dissatisfaction. What is love? Spinoza gives a beautiful definition: «Love is the joy that the idea of an external cause evokes.»
And if we do not have this reason? Then only sadness and the feeling that we are missing something remain. It depends on us whether we can love another or in a different way. Because reality is always given to us.