Love Actually - Love and the Humanities (Week 2)

Question 1

Eros

Answer 1

-Passionate Love
-Lust and desire
-Named after the Greek god of fertility

Question 2

Philia

Answer 2

-Platonic Love; Friendships
-Valued far more than eros
-Concerned with the deep bond between soldiers who went to battle together in ancient greece
-Loyalty, self-sacrifice, and sharing emotions with friends

Question 3

Storage

Answer 3

-Familial love
-A type of philia (platonic) love
-Made from fondness and dependence
-Love between parent and child, owner and pet
-often one sided

Question 4

Ludus

Answer 4

-Playful, fun love
-Referred to the affection between children or young lovers
-Occurs when we laugh and spend time with friends

Question 5

Agape

Answer 5

-Universal love
-“Love for all”
-Love that extends to all people even people you don’t know personally

Question 6

Pragma

Answer 6

-Mature love
-Longterm relationships
-Compromising so that your relationship can keep going
-Showing patience and tolerance toward each other

Question 7

Philautia

Answer 7

-self love
-unhealthy variant: narcissism
-healthy variant leads to higher self-esteem and more capacity to love

Question 8

Plato’s Symposium

Answer 8

A collection of imagined speeches about famous men who dined at the symposium to deliver speeches in praise of the God of Love (Eros)

Question 9

The Speech of Aristophanes; Plato’s Symposium

Answer 9

-There were children of the sun, children of the earth, and children of the moon
-Two men, two women, and a man and a woman who’s fused together
-When fused together humans were too powerful so Zeus separated them into two
-Now humans spend their time finding their other half

Question 10

Erich Fromm

Answer 10

-Giving love is harder than finding the right person
-Argues that love is a verb, an action/practice, instead of a permanent state of enthusiasm
-Love is something that should be practiced
-Love is more about giving than receiving

Question 11

What is needed to practice an art?

Answer 11

-Discipline
-Concentration
-Patience
-Supreme concern for the mastery of the art

Question 12

Discipline

Answer 12

-Don’t be lazy
-It shouldn’t be seen as painful or difficult
-Art shouldn’t be used as an escapist activity

Question 13

Concentration

Answer 13

-Our culture acts against concentration; excess of products, content, and distractions
-We need to learn how to be alone in order to concentrate
-We need good, spiritual role models NOT celebrities

Question 14

Patience

Answer 14

-Is seen when a baby learns how to walk; they never give up and eventually learn the skill
-Industrialization acts fosters the opposite; quickness

Question 15

Supreme concern for the mastery of the art

Answer 15

Life-long devotion to the art that you’re practicing

Question 16

How to Practice Love according to Fromm

Answer 16

overcoming narcissism and idealization

Question 17

overcoming narcissism

Answer 17

-Narcissism is the thinking that your existence is the only valid one and disregarding all others
-have to be shifted from self-obsession to caring for others

Question 18

Five things you need to overcome narcissism

Answer 18

-Reason: the ability to think objectively
-Humility: emotional attitude behind reason
-Objectivity: ability to see things as they are
-Rational faith: belief rooted in the experience of thought and feeling
-Courage: ability to take a risk

Question 19

Overcoming idealization

Answer 19

-Idealization; assigning more value to something that it’s really worth
-Too much self-idealization draws us away from the real world
-Too much idealization of others depletes the self which causes lower self-esteem

Question 20

Stephen Mitchell

Answer 20

Author of Can Love Last? (required reading) which was published after his death

Question 21

What is the role of fantasy & imagination in love?

Answer 21

-Planning the future together
-Sets an expectation of what love should be
-Could lead to unrealistic standards
-Fantasy vs stability; people want to be in the fantasy of love
-People in stable relationship sometimes fantasize about getting out
-Can coexist with reality

Question 22

Can Love Last? Ch 1 “Safety and Adventure”

Answer 22

-The conflict between love and desire, safety and adventure, security and thrill, familiarity and novelty in romantic relationships
-“Where they love, they have no desire; where they desire, they cannot love”
-We want both so how do we manage and balance this tension
-Mitchell states that safety and stability itself is an illusion
-We pretend that our relationships are safe and secure to protect us from taking risks
-Sexual arousal is vulnerable so we only allow ourselves to feel it outside of our relationships

Question 23

The “Common Narrative”

Answer 23

-We start relationships by seeing our partners in a perfectly idealized way
-Then we see the flaws in our partners
-We reconcile these two perceptions of our partners so that we can see them as ordinary people
-Our fantasies were immature illusions and we grow out of them

Question 24

Can Love Last? Ch 4 “Idealization, Fantasy and Illusion”

Answer 24

Deprives from the “common narrative” and states that we cannot learn to see people objectively

Question 25

Suggests 3 State of Mind

Answer 25

-Neurotics who daydreams and fantasies
-Psychotics who are delusional and lives in those daydreams
-“Neurotics daydream about sandcastles in the sky; psychotics live in them”
-And a singular reality where non-neurotics and non-psychotics live

Question 26

Mary Oliver - “Wild Geese”

Answer 26

The ability to love is innate within us we just have to let ourselves feel it and externalize it

Question 27

Congratulations by the way; George Saunders

Answer 27

-“What I regret for the most about my life is the failure of kindness”
-The failure of kindness
-The older we get the more love and kindness we have