Accueil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_de_Sousa
https://fr.book4you.org/book/2493149/ee2e0d
"I will not be canvassing all our uses of the word ‘love’. Any thesaurus will supply some four dozen common near synonyms. Each has its own nuance; some are wide apart from one another. Fondness is not idolatry; liking is not lust; partiality may or may not result from passion; rapture is more rash by far than a soft spot. More arcane Greek words are used to distinguish some importantly different kinds of love. Three of them imply no sexual desire. Philia evokes close friendship. Storge (pronounced store-gay) connotes caring in the sense of taking care of, implying concern for the beloved’s interests and welfare, such as we might feel for close friends or family. But storge is not incompatible with sexual desire, unlike agape, sometimes rendered as ‘charity’, which is a sort of indiscriminate, universalized, and sexless storge.
The virtues of agape are described in one of Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians: ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs … It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’
These are qualities one might hope to find in any desirable human relationship. But for that very reason agape lacks two obvious features of love as commonly understood. First, love is all about singling out one (or at most a few) persons as irreplaceably special. Those we love play a role in our life that the mass of humanity cannot. Yet agape asks us to favour all our neighbours, to the exclusion of none. Second, the injunction to love one another implies that one could do so at will. But loving (or ceasing to love) is not something we can just decide to do."
"A fourth Greek word, eros, best picks out the topic of this book. Eros is typically associated with intense sexual attraction. It is eros, not agape or storge, or even philia, that has inspired a greater number of poems, music, works of art—and crimes—than any other human condition. For eros in its most extreme, obsessive, anxious, and passionate romantic form, I shall borrow the term limerence, coined by the American psychologist Dorothy Tennov. Despite the unfamiliarity of that word in ordinary speech, there are good reasons for reserving a special term for what George Bernard Shaw called ‘that most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions’. For although it is far from being the whole of erotic love, limerence hogs most of love’s press.
Contrary to what is often assumed, love is not an emotion. To be sure, the
thought of love is likely to conjure up delicious and tender feelings. Those
loving feelings are indeed emotions, but they are far from being the only
emotions that constitute erotic love. Depending on circumstances—
depending on where you are, in just what love story—love might be
manifested in sorrow, fear, guilt, regret, bitterness, gloom, contempt,
humiliation, elation, dejection, anxiety, jealousy, disgust, or murderous
rage. Rather, think of love as a condition that shapes and governs thoughts,
desires, emotions, and behaviours around the focal person who is the
‘beloved’. Like a kind of prism, it affects all sorts of experiences—even
ones that don’t directly involve the beloved. I will call that a syndrome: not
a kind of feeling, but an intricate pattern of potential thoughts, behaviours,
and emotions that tend to ‘run together’. And if it also evokes a disturbance
that might call for medical attention, that connotation is not always
inappropriate. A person in love, especially if they are limerent, is often said
to be crazy with love."
-Ronald de Sousa, Love. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2015.
https://fr.book4you.org/book/2493149/ee2e0d
"I will not be canvassing all our uses of the word ‘love’. Any thesaurus will supply some four dozen common near synonyms. Each has its own nuance; some are wide apart from one another. Fondness is not idolatry; liking is not lust; partiality may or may not result from passion; rapture is more rash by far than a soft spot. More arcane Greek words are used to distinguish some importantly different kinds of love. Three of them imply no sexual desire. Philia evokes close friendship. Storge (pronounced store-gay) connotes caring in the sense of taking care of, implying concern for the beloved’s interests and welfare, such as we might feel for close friends or family. But storge is not incompatible with sexual desire, unlike agape, sometimes rendered as ‘charity’, which is a sort of indiscriminate, universalized, and sexless storge.
The virtues of agape are described in one of Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians: ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs … It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’
These are qualities one might hope to find in any desirable human relationship. But for that very reason agape lacks two obvious features of love as commonly understood. First, love is all about singling out one (or at most a few) persons as irreplaceably special. Those we love play a role in our life that the mass of humanity cannot. Yet agape asks us to favour all our neighbours, to the exclusion of none. Second, the injunction to love one another implies that one could do so at will. But loving (or ceasing to love) is not something we can just decide to do."
"A fourth Greek word, eros, best picks out the topic of this book. Eros is typically associated with intense sexual attraction. It is eros, not agape or storge, or even philia, that has inspired a greater number of poems, music, works of art—and crimes—than any other human condition. For eros in its most extreme, obsessive, anxious, and passionate romantic form, I shall borrow the term limerence, coined by the American psychologist Dorothy Tennov. Despite the unfamiliarity of that word in ordinary speech, there are good reasons for reserving a special term for what George Bernard Shaw called ‘that most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions’. For although it is far from being the whole of erotic love, limerence hogs most of love’s press.
Contrary to what is often assumed, love is not an emotion. To be sure, the
thought of love is likely to conjure up delicious and tender feelings. Those
loving feelings are indeed emotions, but they are far from being the only
emotions that constitute erotic love. Depending on circumstances—
depending on where you are, in just what love story—love might be
manifested in sorrow, fear, guilt, regret, bitterness, gloom, contempt,
humiliation, elation, dejection, anxiety, jealousy, disgust, or murderous
rage. Rather, think of love as a condition that shapes and governs thoughts,
desires, emotions, and behaviours around the focal person who is the
‘beloved’. Like a kind of prism, it affects all sorts of experiences—even
ones that don’t directly involve the beloved. I will call that a syndrome: not
a kind of feeling, but an intricate pattern of potential thoughts, behaviours,
and emotions that tend to ‘run together’. And if it also evokes a disturbance
that might call for medical attention, that connotation is not always
inappropriate. A person in love, especially if they are limerent, is often said
to be crazy with love."
-Ronald de Sousa, Love. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2015.
