Love and Sociology

Hello there.

Philosophy is often rather draining for me. I just seem to struggle to understand how people are thinking when they write what they do. The other day, for example, I was reading something about the affective dimension of conscience; the way in which our conscience calls out to us via the emotions, and how the relationship between self and other is mediated by our emotional existence. But the writer in question decided to focus on the emotion of shame. Shame may be an important part of our lives, and our conscience. But I just couldn't get my head around why someone would choose to make it the defining characteristic of our moral involvement with those around us, when surely love and compassion are at least as important? It left me feeling rather alienated.

But more recently I have been reading the work of a Spanish sociologist called José Ortega y Gasset. He's a rather charming and intelligent writer. He has a lot of good ideas too (although he seems to have predicted that the English would be responsible for the disappearance of the handshake as a form of salutation, which as of yet hasn't transpired to the best of my knowledge). But what I enjoy most about reading his book, Man and People, is that he has a much more romantic soul than the majority of academic writers. The following passage, for example:

"There is no more superlatively human relation that that... between the man and the woman who love each other... This man is in love with this irreplaceable, incomparable, unique woman... Now, what the two lovers do most is to talk to each other... the love of lovers, which lives in looks, which lives in caresses, more than all lives in conversation, in an endless dialogue. Love is talkative, warbling; love is eloquent, and if anyone is silent in love, it is because he cannot help it, because he is abnormally taciturn... love is the attempt to exchange two solitudes, to mingle two secret inwardnesses - an attempt that, if it succeeded, would be like two streams mingling their waters, or two flames fusing into one."

Now, leaving aside the heteronormativity of this statement, I'm not even sure I agree with it. Silence seems a much more natural thing around someone you love than with anyone else. Perhaps he simply means that love cannot stay silent forever. Or that love calls out to be spoken. Even if this was the case, sometimes silence can be the greatest expression of the nobility of love (or it can be if you're Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, at least). I get the feeling that this isn't what he means though. I suspect that Ortega means that love requires and is based upon communication, and the desire to communicate. Which is true, but it overlooks how intimate silence can be; an intimacy of a sort that can only ever emerge when words are put to one side for a while. But, despite this, I take great comfort from the fact that this all exists, especially in an academic context.

Maybe all I need to do to find my place is move to Spain (half a century ago). Or maybe Ortega felt as out of place as I do now. Either way, I find the above rather beautiful, and all the more poetic for being philosophy (of a sort) as well as poetry.