Elemental Passions and the Nature of Love

Abstract

And why should night and day be so radically divided? Is there anyone for whom loving and thinking are lived as different beginnings? Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions Philosophers have always been suspicious of erotic love. Some have viewed as unworthy of philosophical consideration; while others have condemned because challenges the order of reason and gives us over to our lower passional selves. Plato is an exception, for in the Symposium and in the Phaedrus he celebrates as the power which first pulls us out of ourselves and makes us yearn for that which is eternal and divine. But even here, is only the means to an end. The final goal of erotic longing is the rapt contemplation of the Good. And Plato's ideal is Socrates who has achieved self-sufficiency and who no longer needs to in the ordinary way, since to would be an expression of his own inadequacy and need. After Plato, there is no sustained and systematic treatment of erotic until we come to Hegel, and his discussions in The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of Right. Hegel responds to the rise of romantic in the modern age, when first became a popular theme. But Hegel seeks to constrain and appropriate romantic passion to the order of civil society itself. Given the accepted division of labor, where men must go out and be active in the realm of civic life, a woman's place is in the home, as mother and helpmate and organizer ofthe domestic economy. And hence follows that for a woman, must be experienced as a civic duty; is a requirement of her station in life and a labor of the the ethical household, Hegel writes, it is not a question of this particular husband, this particular child, but simply of husband and children generally; the relationships of women are based, not on feeling, but on the universal. By contrast, a man's is viewed as a permissible lapse into immediacy, from which he must nevertheless recover himself in order to return to the serious business of life.1 Hegel's discussion remains significant, because even if the civic order which he presupposes has changed, still continues to exist as a psychical residue in the minds of women and men. Thus, as Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, and others have pointed out, love means something quite different and occupies a very different place in the psychical economy of women as opposed to men. Given the civic reality that Hegel describes and its reflection into the unconscious, follows that woman's whole nature, and her personal fulfillment, would seem to consist in loving. Likewise, for a woman, is still understood as a duty; and even if academic or professional opportunities are available to her, she will often experience the desire for personal fulfillment and the need to take care of her husband and children as a conflict that is finally disenabling. But for a man, romantic remains only one facet of a fulfilled existence; and more often than not, is the order of the home and the of a woman that allows him to return to the public or commercial life that claims his most strenuous efforts. In all of this, the public activity of men is viewed as the most important thing. A woman's and domestic care is also very worthy and important, but only insofar as this allows public and professional life to continue. In recent years, feminist thinkers have sought to respond to this account. They have suggested at least three different strategies that might promote female equality and a more universal liberation of women and men. First, given that women are traditionally confined to the immediacy of love, the sphere of the domestic, and all the chores of everyday life, would seem important to encourage women to achieve the same transcendence from the natural order that men have already achieved for themselves. As Simone de Beauvoir writes, It is man's good fortune in adulthood as in early childhood. …