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The Origin Of Love - Hedwig And The Angry Inch

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The Origin Of Love - Hedwig And The Angry Inch

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FOR DANA xox

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The Origin Of Love - Hedwig And The Angry Inch

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Mandy Len Catron: A better way to talk about love

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Mandy Len Catron: A better way to talk about love

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Mandy Len Catron: A better way to talk about love

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In love, we fall. We're struck, we're crushed, we swoon. We burn with passion. Love makes us crazy and makes us sick. Our hearts ache, and then they break. Talking about love in this way fundamentally shapes how we experience it, says writer Mandy Len Catron.

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Great Thinkers on Love: Which Philosophers Can You Trust and Which Should You Ignore?

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Great Thinkers on Love: Which Philosophers Can You Trust and Which Should You Ignore?

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Romantic relationships are difficult to get right no matter how hard we try. Thankfully, philosophers and other big thinkers have weighed in and offered advice. Here's who you should trust with relationship advice - and who you should run from.
WHO TO TRUST Simone de Beauvoir
Simone De Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, political activist, and feminist. She spent much of her life in an open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and while she considered herself "the midwife of Sartre's existential ethics" according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , she is now recognized as a philosopher in her own right.

De Beauvoir's biggest idea is that women are equal to men in all things - especially romantic relationships. "She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and... equality is not a synonym for sameness," explains Stanford. Meaning, instead of taking on gendered roles in a romantic relationship, the relationship is stronger, deeper, and richer if both parties retain their individuality and pursue their own interests. The best way to not fall prey to gender assumptions? Refuse to automatically bind your behavior (and happiness) to typical masculine and feminine roles and ideals. "Identify your assumptions, treat them as prejudices and put them aside; do not bring them back into play until and unless they have been validated by experience," according to De Beauvoir's most famous book The Second Sex. To put it more simply, " the best love relationships are those where lovers are free and equal ."
Søren Kierkegaard
Speaking of commitment, Søren Kierkegaard believed that a loving, committed relationship was how people became their best selves. A Danish philosopher who is best known as the father of existentialism, one of Kierkegaard's biggest themes was the idea of subjectivity. He believed that "subjectivity is truth... [and] truth is subjectivity", meaning, truth is not about discovering objective facts independent of lived experiences; truth is found in how an individual relates to those experiences. Basically, people are not meant to discover truth alone; they are meant to learn truth by relating to each other.

The best way to do that, in Kierkegaard's eyes, was in love. He puts it this way in Three Edifying Discourses:

But when the heart is filled with love, then the eye is never deceived; for love when it gives, does not scrutinize the gift... When the heart is filled with envy, then the eye has power to call forth uncleanness even in the pure; but when love dwells in the heart, then the eye has the power to foster the good in the unclean; but this eye does not see the evil but the pure, which it loves and encourages it by loving it.

Love has this ability because, as he writes in Works of Love: "Love does not seek its own, for there are no mine and yours in love." Love, he argues, seeks something higher. And when it is given room to grow and flourish, that is when people are at their best. As he writes with Judge Vilhelm in Stages on Life's Way: "Marriage is and remains the most important voyage of discovery a human being undertakes; compared with a married man's knowledge of life, any other knowledge of it is superficial, for he and he alone has properly immersed himself in life."
C.S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis was many things: an English novelist, a professor at both Oxford and Cambridge, a poet, and a Christian apologist. He was not a philosopher, but was certainly a big thinker: Lewis was a stickler for considering contradictory ideas in order to refine a belief. He applied that rigor toward love and wrote The Four Loves, a treatise on the kinds of love humans need to survive.

Lewis identifies four different kinds of love: affection, friendship, erotic, and unconditional. Affection is "the love of enjoying someone or something," according to this summary . It is the most humble of all forms of love, but it is also prone to selfishness; if the thing that's loved becomes an idol then, as Lewis writes, "Love, having become a god, becomes a demon." Friendship is the least needed: "Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure or burden." Neither of those two are enough to thrive on. Erotic love is the most consuming, as it can be "a wonderful light or a scorching fire." It is the one most likely to trip us up. Its polar opposite is agape, or charity. It is the hardest for us to do, but it is the most rewarding, as Lewis writes:

To love at all is to be vulnerable, love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make of keeping it intact...you must give your heart to no one not even an animal...lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change, it will not be broken it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

Essentially, by presenting all of these loves, Lewis offers us a choice: take a chance and risk the heartbreak of love, or suffer the isolation of loneliness.
WHO TO IGNORE Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre might be the most famous philosopher of the 20th century, but he was terrible with relationships. For one thing, he believed "love is conflict." For another, he was terrible to De Beauvoir. He kept their relationship open believing it would allow him to retain his freedom despite hurting her feelings. Also, "Sartre's financial and emotional support of many ex-girlfriends contradicted their freedom. Sartre explained it philosophically as freely choosing his priorities, and practically as preferring 'to be a fool than a jerk'. De Beauvoir said that it was his 'guilty conscience'," explains Dr. Skye Cleary in The Philosopher's Zone .

All of those actions may have stemmed from his belief that life was meaningless. Or, as he explained in his essay ' Being and Nothingness', "existence precedes essence" -- meaning, "human beings first come into existence then they determine their own essence," as professor Dallas Roark explains in On Existentialism . That idea led to Sartre's most famous: radical freedom. "Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does," cites philosopher Walter Arnold Kaufman in his book Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre .

Basically man is responsible for every single thing about his destiny but all of it is meaningless. That is not helpful relationship advice.
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, philosopher and journalist. He was also more of a pessimist than Sartre. While he too believed life was meaningless, Camus' belief stemmed less from a crisis of existence than a failing in the universe itself. His biggest idea, explained in the essay ' The Myth of Sisyphus', was that the universe is irrational and meaningless - yet we are desperate to find meaning in it: "my appetite for the absolute and for unity" meets "the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle."

In reaction to that impossibility, Camus posits three responses: ignore it and distract ourselves, accept it and kill ourselves, or revolt against it and be happy anyway. That third option is the foundation of absurdist philosophy. The absurd human is the one who realizes the meaningless of life and continues to live anyway. As Camus explains in The Stranger: "What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was."

Basically, any opportunity to escape the grind of the meaninglessness was the meaning of life. That is also not helpful relationship advice.

Hopefully these tips help you out the next time you need some relationship advice.

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5 Philosophers Who Could Make or Break Your Relationship

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Romantic relationships are difficult to get right no matter how hard we try. Thankfully, philosophers and other big thinkers have weighed in and offered advice. Here's who you should trust with relationship advice - and who you should run from. WHO TO TRUST Simone de Beauvoir Simone De Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, political activist, and feminist.

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36 Questions Designed to Help You Fall in Love with Anyone - Big Think

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36 Questions Designed to Help You Fall in Love with Anyone - Big Think

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Asking thirty-six specific questions plus four minutes of sustained eye contact is a recipe for falling in love, or at least creating intimacy among complete strangers.

Creating a close rapport between people who have just met is difficult, especially in laboratory conditions. But psychologist Arthur Aaron of Stony Brook University created a method for doing just this. Recently, the method was tested by writer Mandy Len Catron at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

After finding Dr. Aaron's questions online, she proposed an event with an acquaintance of hers. They would follow the method, exchanging questions for forty-five minutes which become progressively more intimate and then stare into each others' eyes for four minutes.

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Set I 1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? 2. Would you like to be famous? In what way? 3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why? 4. What would constitute a "perfect" day for you? 5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else? 6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want? 7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? 8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. 9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful? 10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be? 11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible. 12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
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Though not complete strangers, they were not on intimate terms either. Catron found the prospect of looking right at someone for four minutes intimidating:
"[T]he real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected."
That unexpected state was one of bravery and wonder, transcending the barriers and boundaries erected in day-to-day adult life. And while Catron doesn't quite believe you can easily create love between two strangers, feelings of intimacy and trust-necessary conditions for love to thrive-are just fifty minutes away.

Love, she says, is more of a choice than we allow ourselves to believe.
Set II 13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know? 14. Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven't you done it? 15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life? 16. What do you value most in a friendship? 17. What is your most treasured memory? 18. What is your most terrible memory? 19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why? 20. What does friendship mean to you? 21. What roles do love and affection play in your life? 22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items. 23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's? 24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
In his Big Think interview, Vanderbilt anthropologist Ted Fischer explains that because love is a very positive evolutionary force, the barriers to it are actually quite low:

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Set III 25. Make three true "we" statements each. For instance, "We are both in this room feeling ... " 26. Complete this sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share ... " 27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know. 28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you've just met. 29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life. 30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? 31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already. 32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about? 33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven't you told them yet? 34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why? 35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why? 36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
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Read more at the New York Times

Photo credit: Shutterstock

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36 Questions Designed to Help You Fall in Love with Anyone

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Asking thirty-six specific questions plus four minutes of sustained eye contact is a recipe for falling in love, or at least creating intimacy among complete strangers. Creating a close rapport between people who have just met is difficult, especially in laboratory conditions. But psychologist Arthur Aaron of Stony Brook University created a method for doing just this.

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Why ‘love’ is a useless word – and three alternatives

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Why ‘love’ is a useless word – and three alternatives

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Many of our relationship problems stem from the emptiness of our vocabulary around our affectionate emotion. We have only the minimal word 'love'. Luckily, the Ancient Greeks had a more nuanced and complicated vocabulary that we can usefully borrow from.

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Why ‘love’ is a useless word – and three alternatives

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Most of us think we know what love is; we may just be looking for the right person to lavish our love on. But it's no insult, and indeed it might even be helpful to imagine, that we don't have much of a clue what love really is, not because we are deficient, but because our culture never investigates the subject as it should. Here is a list of seven ingredients that the School of Life suggests lie at the  heart of a proper understanding of love.

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One of our greatest demands in love is that our partner should love us 'for who we really are'. It sounds Romantic enough, but in truth, none of us should ever expect another person to admire and adore us in our totality, with all our flaws and questionable sides. True love means being generous towards what is broken in ourselves and others - but not, for that matter, being expected to admire it all.

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Student Philosopher: Platonic Love & the Troubadours

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Student Philosopher: Platonic Love & the Troubadours

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In the modern world, being in love with someone is always connected up with the idea of having (or wanting to have) sex with them eventually. The Troubadours of 11th century Provence, influenced by Plato, had a very different idea: for them love was independent of sex or indeed marriage.

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Student Philosopher: Platonic Love & the Troubadours

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In the modern world, being in love with someone is always connected up with the idea of having (or wanting to have) sex with them eventually.

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Student Philosopher: Plato's Ladder of Love

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Student Philosopher: Plato's Ladder of Love

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Plato's theory of the Ladder of Love shows how you can move from a sex-focused vision of love to a love directed towards wisdom, truth and goodness.

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Student Philosopher: Plato's Ladder of Love

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Plato's theory of the Ladder of Love shows how you can move from a sex-focused vision of love to a love directed towards wisdom, truth and goodness. Em talks us through it.

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The most essential things in life are beyond definition.

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The most essential things in life are beyond definition, Riemen says.

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John Cameron Mitchell on the Origin of Love

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John Cameron Mitchell on the Origin of Love

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The "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" creator ponders the "ongoing understanding and quest" of love

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John Cameron Mitchell on the Origin of Love

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The "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" creator ponders the "ongoing understanding and quest" of love.

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Since the beginning of time human beings have been yearning for their other halves, the bit that’s missing. In Plato’s dialogue The Symposium, Aristophanes presented a light-hearted creation myth that explains it all.

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The philosophy of love, chat about sexy underwear, and Valentine’s Day!

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Overanalyzing Love, Lingerie & Valentine's Day

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The philosophy of love, chat about sexy underwear, and Valentine's Day! More videos like this one: Is the Nativity Sexist? http://tinyurl.com/l5j5rk5 Sexy Thumbnails: http://tinyurl.com/o6khbzm Subscribe!

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Sartre: Love is a hazardous, painful struggle.

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Sartre: Love is a hazardous, painful struggle.

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For Jean-Paul Sartre, freedom was everything. For him the reality of romantic love isn’t blissful mutual respect and a merging of freedoms. Far from it: love is conflict. Real freedom means freedom to change your mind, freedom to fall out of love…For Sartre, then, love is hazardous.

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Sartre: Love is a hazardous, painful struggle.

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For Jean-Paul Sartre, freedom was everything. For him the reality of romantic love isn't blissful mutual respect and a merging of freedoms. Far from it: love is conflict. Real freedom means freedom to change your mind, freedom to fall out of love...For Sartre, then, love is hazardous. Narrated by Aidan Turner.

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Why do we love? A Philosophical Inquiry.

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Why do we love? A Philosophical Inquiry.

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Ah, romantic love; beautiful and intoxicating, heart-breaking and soul-crushing... often all at the same time! If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet – but over the course of history, some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories. Skye C. Cleary outlines five of these philosophical perspectives on why we love.

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Why do we love? A philosophical inquiry - Skye C. Cleary

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by 8-Bit Philosophy.

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Is Tinder KILLING Love? – 8-Bit Philosophy

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Join Wisecrack! SUBSCRIBE! ►► http://bit.ly/1y8Veir Start building your website with Squarespace! ►►http://wscrk.com/8BsquareT Use the Offer Code: 8BIT for 10% off your first purchase! Is Kanye West Even Human? ► http://wscrk.com/1XCnwQ9 Press Start for "Is Tinder KILLING Love?" by 8-Bit Philosophy, where classic video games introduce famous thinkers, problems, and concepts with quotes, teachings, and more.

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So much in our culture emphasises long-term love; it may be time to hear a word or two in praise of the short-term approach.

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We talk of love as if it were just one thing: in fact, it’s two very different moves, Loving and Being Loved. You start to grow up when you stop focusing on the latter and get involved with the former.

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We talk of love as if it were just one thing: in fact, it's two very different moves, Loving and Being Loved. You start to grow up when you stop focusing on the latter and get involved with the former.

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We're generally hugely upbeat about how relationships might go. But every now and then, we should allow ourselves a glimpse of the darkest realities.