MWF 11am

MWF 10am

TR 11:15am

TR 8:25am

T 5:40pm

What love?

The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.-- Graffiti from the May 1968 revolt in Paris.

It's time to talk about a taboo topic: LOVE.

From Hollywood movies to love stories to pop music to the media, almost all cultural manifestations in the West are based on some idea of romantic love. According to the narrative, love is -perhaps- the only means- to happiness. Yet, as our recent financial melt-down seems to show, we don't act like a happy society.

Most people seem indifferent with the fact that our culture uses "love" as a placebo to attract our attention to anything, whether material (such as money) or more intangible goods (such as fame).

No wonder love leads to manipulation, hatred, abuse, and even makes us kill. 

How about asking the difficult questions?

Is love a kind of disease or an affectional bond based on the universal tendency for humans to seek closeness in order to experience security? Is it about limbic resonnance? Is it some kind of propinquity?

Is love a glorified form of serotonin rush inducing a pink-colored version of the world?  (by the way, check this conference by Peter Salovey, professor at Yale College on Love, evolution & emotion).

I'll walk you through some hypothesis from Psychology, while contending some of these views:

In the 1970's Zick Rubin from Harvard proposed that romantic love is made up of three elements: attachment, caring, and intimacy. Attachment is the need to receive care, approval, and physical contact with the other person. Caring involves valuing the other persons needs and happiness as much as your own. Intimacy refers to the sharing of thoughts, desires, and feelings with the other person.¹

In the end Rubin's hypothesis remain merely descriptive. Suppose that's what we do, but why? Can my need of attachment be also based on selfish manipulation? Is love not more than mere need? Can it be a form of excess?

According to psychologist Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues, there are two basic types of love: compassionate love and passionate love. Compassionate love is characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection, and trust. Compassionate love usually develops out of feelings of mutual understanding and shared respect for each other. Passionate love is characterized by intense emotions, sexual attraction, anxiety, and affection. When these intense emotions are reciprocated, people feel elated and fulfilled. Unreciprocated love leads to feelings of despondence and despair. Hatfield suggests that passionate love is transitory, usually lasting between 6 and 30 months.

According to Hatfield, passionate love arises when cultural expectations encourage falling in love, when the person meets your preconceived ideas of an ideal lover, and when you experience heightened physiological arousal in the presence of the other person. Hatfield explores the possibility that "falling in love" could be a form of social brain washing. The idea is that passionate love ----> compassionate love, which is far more enduring. But does it? Is what they sell as "compassionate love" not a form of social domestication?

While most people desire relationships that combine the security and stability of compassionate with the intensity of passionate love, Hatfield suggests that this is rare.

So far compassionate love wins, passionate love looses. Isn't Hatfield Christianizing the idea of love, that is to say, infecting it too much with St. Paul's well known idea of agape?  On the other hand, Hatfield makes an interesting point about cultural expectations. Why? Because Western "love" is sold as a cultural habit. As long as we're bombarded with "love," we'll go on spending money on wedding plans, expensive houses, baby's clothes, cars, and whatnot. 

In his 1973 book The Colors of Love, John Lee compared styles of love to the color wheel. Just as there are three primary colors, Lee suggested that there are three primary styles of love. These three styles of love are: (1) eros, (2) ludos, and (3) storge. Continuing the color wheel analogy, Lee proposed that just as the primary colors can be combined to create complementary colors, these three primary styles of love could be combined to create different secondary love styles. For example, a combination of eros and ludos results in mania, or obsessive love.

Lee's three primary styles:

eros: loving an ideal person.
ludos: love as a form of conquest.
storge: love as friendship.

which bring about three secondary styles:

mania (eros + ludos): obsessive love.
pragma (ludos + storge): realistic and practical love.
agape (eros +storge): selfless love.

Another way to look at it is to admit that it's quite difficult to separate ourselves from the "desire" factor, that is, feeling attracted to people sexually. And that need -as many psychologists have hinted- is simply biological. Libido is a pull from the species to produce more offspring. And we mask this pull with all sort of sweet and nice words. In view of the sentimental and moral problems that our propensities entail, it is worth pondering the price we pay for our desires. But as Hume and Rousseau rightly assumed, our lives seem to be ruled by our desires.

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze did not see desire as a lack (as is commonly defined in psychology), but instead as a human form of production, with a positive side. He writes:

There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other…We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. ²

We need to explore further this link between our prevalent culture of love (that I referred to above) and the constant production of desires by the machinery of Capitalism. That is to say, the link between the economic and the sentimental side.  

Do we love the way we want because we want, or is this form a prepackaged form of manipulation of the system? No wonder our idea of love cannot exist without the market that supports it.

Lastly, how to negotiate desire with respect? It's crucial to address how little we respect one another. How much we think love as a form of ownership (since so much inve$tment is usually required).  Is it possible to love and respect one another. How?

(I'll close this post next Tuesday, March 29, at 11pm) 
__________
¹In 1958, British developmental psychologist John Bowlby published the ground-breaking paper "the Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother", in which the precursory concepts of "attachment theory" were developed. ²Deleuze &amp Guatari, Anti Oedipus, p. 28, 29.

Female circumcision

Regarding our discussion of cultural relativism. I'd like to talk about female genital mutilation and examine whether the practice makes sense.

What is female genital mutilation?

Amnesty International estimates that over 130 million women worldwide have been affected by some form of FGM, with over 2 million procedures being performed every year. FGM is mainly practiced in African countries.Most Muslims reject this practice in its entirety, however it remains a tradition within certain countries which was not entirely overcome by the arrival of Christianity and Islam. A lack of religious education among these people leads them to mistakenly believe this ancient tribal practice is a religious observance.

UNICEF reports that: Al-Azhar Supreme Council of Islamic Research, the highest religious authority in Egypt, issued a statement saying FGM/C has no basis in core Islamic law or any of its partial provisions and that it is harmful and should not be practiced.

In fact, this pre-Islamic barbarity runs contrary to the Islamic tenet which dictates that a man should make sure his wife enjoys their lovemaking. Coptic Pope Shenouda, the leader of Egypt's minority Christian community, said that neither the Quran nor the Bible demand or mention female circumcision. Yet, the practice continues. Why?

Some see it as a form of patriarchy. Others as political tool of resistance against colonialism. For instance, in Kenya, missionaries present in the 1920s and 1930s forbade their Christianised adherents to practice clitoridectomy. In response, FGC became instrumental to the ethnic independence movement among the Kikuyu, the most populous ethnic group of Kenya -indigenous people reacted against what they perceived as cultural imperialistic attacks by Europeans. If this is the case, the women end up suffering twice: first at the hands of colonizers, second, at the hands of their own people. Again, this is one of the unintended consequences of culture going haywire.

How are you doing in my class?

There are ways to know how you're doing in my class. You could go by the average from our two tests so far: (q means quizz, mt = midterm)

Cq---Dmt = C-*
Cq---Cmt = C
Cq---Bmt = C+ or B-
Two B's is a B+
Bq---Amt = A-
Aq---Bmt = B+

If you have a D, your chances of getting a B depend of your commitment to change course, which is something I've been talking about in my lectures.You can add a little more to it if you have posted regularly. If your attendance is good it also helps. By the way , you know how you are attendance-wise because I'm always addressing attendance as I take it (some of you have been dropped and reinstated). I've said that having more than 3 unjustified absences may have an impact on your final grade.

To the oft-asked question "can I get an A in this course?" I always say, "You can," but you have to do it, that is, you have to make the commitment to change a habit.

Bolek I Lolek

democracy is a word-->a word is not a fact-->democracy is not a fact

It's hard to hard to watch the theater of politics, particularly for some of us who support the freedom of the Arab youth throughout the Middle East. The spectacle of the Libyan tyrant parsimoniously hosting foreign journalists in Tripoli while his air-force bombards opposition and civilian targets in Ras Lanuf and Zawiyah is more than I can stomach. Worse yet, some foreign journalists report that "in Tripoli things are quiet" (as Gaddafi's mercenaries terrorize the capital).

More @ Miami Bourbaki. You are more than welcome to leave a comment there and become a friend of Bourbaki.

T 5:40pm

TR 11:15am

TR 8:25am

MWF 11am

MWF 10am

Philosophy Club's meeting, this Thursday, from 1-2pm @ 1564

It's official. The Philosophy Club meets every Thursdays, from 1-2pm, at room 1564.

Spread the word!

Soul dust

Fort those of you who sometimes entertain that our class discussions may be too "out there", check this article in the New Statesman about the idea of the mind.  A paragraph like this should not be that strange:

Just because neural activity is a necessary condition of consciousness, it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of consciousness, still less that it is identical with it. And Darwinising human life confuses the organism Homo sapiens with the human person, biological roots with cultural leaves. Nevertheless, the coupling of neuromania and Darwinitis has given birth to emerging disciplines based on neuro-evolutionary approaches to human psychology, economics, social science, literary criticism, aesthetics, theology and the law.

What do you think? And good luck on the midterm!