Letter From The Editors

We are excited to present the 10th edition of Anamnesis. This issue, themed The Anniversary,  marks a celebration of love, an innate human emotion that connects all of us. This year, we welcomed thought-provoking essays that engage with love in its numerous forms, exploring questions of its origin, its impact on human life, and its deeper philosophical meaning.

We began with a simple, yet reflective question, that searches for the inner lens: what is love? Our contributors have taken this query in many directions. From examining the romanticizing of negative emotions to exploring love as a force at the foundation of our existence. Each essay brings a unique perspective lens, engaging with love not just as a feeling, but as an energy that can reshape our understanding of reality.

Throughout our addition, we feature Alexis Cao's essay, "Romanticizing Negative Emotions as a Way of Non-Seriousness, Instrumentalization, and Abjection," which interrogates the societal tendency to romanticize negative emotions. Arshia Hamidi’s "The Essence of Existence: Omnipotent Love as the Foundation of Reality" challenges us to consider love’s relationship with existence, while Elena Ding reflects on the nature of reason and its mutual correspondence to love. 

In addition, we are honored to include an interview with Rick Anthony Furtak, a professor at Colorado College. Furtak’s work has focused on making sense of love through the lens of existential philosophers. The reflections help us piece together how love shapes the human experience. 

The works in this piece reflect the diverse ways in which love influences our lives and our thinking. We hope this edition sparks thoughtful reflections and conversations, inviting you to consider the many facets of love that shape us all.

With much love, 

Your editors 

Mission Statement & Acknowledgements

Anamnesis is the student-edited philosophy journal of Colorado College. The journal publishes philosophical undergraduate essays from colleges and universities worldwide. Colorado College students founded the journal in order to give their peers a taste of what the discipline can be at its best. In line with this goal, we aim to publish clearly written, elegantly argued essays. We also strive to publish essays that tackle the most interesting, difficult, and pressing issues in both philosophy and our lives.

We would like to thank Cutler Publications and the Colorado College Philosophy Department for making the journal possible this year. Special thanks to Rick Furtak and Willow Mindich for their support.

Reflecting on 10 Years of Anamnesis

Dear Editors,

According to Plato, the human soul is immortal, and universal knowledge is embedded within it. Upon death, humans are released of all memories; but upon being reborn, they come to learn (or re-learn) about the world and its metaphysical truths through processes of recollection and remembrance. This theory is known as Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis. For Plato, learning does not consist in acquiring new knowledge, but in rediscovering or recovering past truths. In this framework, when faced with the unknown, we turn toward the past to make sense of it.

My personal view of knowledge-making is decidedly less atomistic and more rooted in our present existence. That said, during my final year as an undergraduate at Colorado College, I imbued the concept with an idiosyncratic meaning: there may be limits to what we are able to learn through recollection and remembrance; but, if nothing else, I do believe that such processes can yield important insight into oneself.

Most of us are familiar with the experience of standing before a threshold – moments when “life as we know it” comes to a halt, yet the future remains unknown to us. While we may sometimes “choose” to step through or beyond such a threshold, more often than not, we are compelled to do so against our willing and choosing. I didn’t know this at the time, but in these moments, Heidegger suggests that we look toward the past to uncover possibilities for the future. In my view, upon doing so, we glean valuable knowledge about ourselves, what we take to be most important, and what we most want to carry with us beyond or through the threshold.

Thresholds manifest in a variety of forms and magnitudes, and throughout our lives, we encounter more than we might choose. In my view, graduating from college unquestionably counts among such thresholds. Anamnesis: The Colorado College Journal of Philosophy was born out of a desire to provide a foothold for students who occupy this liminal space: those on the verge of graduation who are uncertain of what the future holds and/or how it will take shape. It was, and remains, my hope that Anamnesis – and in particular, the skills and passion for philosophical writing that one cultivates through their involvement with the journal – might offer one such thing that students can carry with them from their past into the indeterminacy of the future that awaits them.

Congratulations on 10 years of Anamnesis, and cheers to the next 10!

Sincerely, 

Willow Mindich

Colorado College Class of 2016

Co-Founder of Anamnesis: The Colorado College Journal of Philosophy

Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at Stony Brook University

Problems of Romanticizing Negative Emotions: 

Romanticizing Negative Emotions as a Way of Non-Seriousness,  Instrumentalization and Abjection 

Alexix (Yuan) Cao • Colorado College

Whoever has not experienced the awful agony of death, rising and spreading like  a surge of blood, like the choking grasp of a snake which provokes terrifying  hallucinations, does not know the demonic character of life and the state of inner  effervescence from which great transfigurations arise…in which paradisal visions  conquer you with their splendor and you rise to a purity that sublimates into  immateriality…in which death appears with the awful seduction of nightmarish  snake eyes.

 Cioran, On the Heights of Despair 

The passage with such ardency and passion is Emil Cioran’s account of the true agony of death, following Cioran’s critique of the believers of spiritual immortality viewing death as a  triumph. Ironically, I do not take this account of death’s true agony as more authentic than the  theistic triumph of death. Cioran’s description of agony is not true; the meticulously crafted and  fabricated agony using ostentatious language has long transcended and left the agony of death in  itself. Romanticizing death as a luring snake at night would paradoxically mild or degrade the  emotion; the more intense and enthusiastic diction, the more superficial the emotion becomes. 

In what follows, I will indicate problems of romanticizing negative emotions, like the  agony of death. Here the phrase “negative emotion” is used in a generalized fashion, and it  includes but does not limit itself to agony, melancholy and fear. The use of  “negative emotions” is by no means equating them as Aristotelian vices opposing virtues. Neither is it sinful nor wrong, according to Pope Gregory. Negative emotions are indispensable components of our lives. I would contend that we should live a life of seriousness, that is, a life with full attention  and non-indifference, a life experiencing things in themselves, and this should also be the attitude  when it comes to negative emotions. Romanticization deals with and describes negative  emotions in an idealistic fashion and makes them more appealing than they are. Thus, it distorts  our experience of the negative emotions themselves. Romanticizing negative emotions creates a mirage for us and hinders us from a serious life. 

Romanticizing as a Way of Avoiding Experiencing Negative Emotions Seriously:

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, 

and count myself a king of infinite space 

– were it not that I have bad dreams. 

 Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 24 

As I have contended, we should live a life of seriousness. I shall use the two-fold  definition given by Monteleone, a) attention to some intentional object and b) non-indifference  to that same object. Seriousness could not stand when either of the bipartite definition is  missing. An example of full seriousness would be when a professional coffee taster is paying  their main attention to the aroma of the coffee; they are voluntarily and involuntarily paying their  attention to the cup of coffee. The coffee taster is non-indifferent to this action since it ties closely to their interest as a person of expertise in the field, and the comment on the coffee is  related to their evaluation by their peers. However, if the coffee taster accidentally slips the cup  and the coffee is poured out, the coffee taster shifts the phenomenological experience of attention  to the mess created by the poured coffee instead of its taste. In this situation, the individual is no  longer serious about tasting the coffee, but the seriousness has been transferred onto another  subject: the mess of poured coffee. The coffee taster example is a showcase of how seriousness  works, and I will use this bipartite definition of seriousness to address negative emotions. The  shift of attention would be the main theme for me, arguing that romanticizing is a way of  avoiding experiencing negative emotions seriously. In this part of the essay, I will focus on the  negative emotions towards death and birth, since they act as the start and end of our desperately  finite life. 

I will first focus on death by Cioran and Hamlet in their perspectives of not having or having an  afterlife and point out their romanticization which distorts the seriousness of the negative emotion  towards death itself. Cioran describes how analogizing death and sleep makes  death less frightening and more ordinary or boring. The analogy is a direct way to turn the  attention to the object being used for analogy, which in this case is sleep. Here we can see Cioran  using powerful language to romanticize Death while Hamlet uses light-hearted language, but  both descriptions contribute to a distortion of death. Hamlet’s following guess about death is  based on sleep, and he thinks that the afterlife must have something dreamlike, which there  might be a false conclusion since the premise that death is like sleep is unsure. Hamlet then  reflects on the extremely long afterlife being painful and disastrous, and he makes an analogy  again, in a more hidden manner, about the afterlife and his life right now. There are attention  shifts as long as analogies are made, especially to things unknown, such as Hamlet’s state of  being dead. The attention shift may be involuntary, but it aids the non-seriousness. I suggest  when we come to negative emotions towards things that are impossible for us to know, such as  the state of being dead, we should not first try to compare it to things we know, but we should  focus on the unknown itself and experience the frustration it brings us and acknowledge our  inability to know and make sense of everything. When we pay attention to the unknown and  experience the relationship between us and the unknown as something we are unable to grasp, we are  experiencing serious negative emotions towards the unknown seriously. 

The fear and agony towards existence could be as profound as non-existence. “We do not  rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it.” Cioran  gives the reason for will-to-death as escaping the calamity of birth. He also quoted the Buddhist  idea that ahead of old age and death was “birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.” Alas,  we ignore birth since it happened, and we cannot travel through time, but it was birth that opened  the Pandora’s box in our lives. People may have a friendlier attitude or be clouded by the  romanticization of birth since it is prominent to the extent that people see them as truths or moral  norms. I will contend that birth is what needs to be granted more emotional seriousness  compared to death. The reason for more attention is because people forget negative emotions towards birth,  or perhaps the world forgetting it is voluntary, contributing to our forgetting being involuntary. The discourse often enhances positive images towards birth and considers our descendants in the  picture of political policies, which assumes the legitimacy of having more children, and that we  make efforts to provide them with a better future. Children are called the crystal of love, god’s  gift, or hope for the future. No matter how promising and fascinating it sounds to have more  children, we cannot ignore that children are brought into the world in pure passivity. Why don't we adopt an antinatalist stance towards our own birth? No one chose to be born, but one can choose to end their life. Alternatively, consider this: Is it not birth that gave birth to the possibility of death? The two conspicuous negative emotions towards birth are despair and disappointment. Despair is due to the inability to change the fact  that you are born. Yes, everyone reading my essay right now, you have to bear all the  consequences of birth. The world brings disappointment which utilizes birth for the society’s  ever-growing workforce. Despite the disappointment towards policy makers and the  government, the majority of the society is unable and unwilling to comprehend negative  emotions towards birth. In living a life of seriousness, our birth is the most important thing we  cannot and should not forget. Our lives begin from birth, and we should be non-indifferent about  it. Never compromise with birth since it granted us the ability to live a life of seriousness but  having such finite time that eventually led to annihilation.  

We could not choose but to be born, but we could choose to lead a serious life and examine romanticization, even if it could be determined by our experience or the extremely slight chance  of reading this essay. Ponder things that seem unnecessary to consider, criticize and reflect on  accounts by the discourse that is beautified, and be able to feel uncomfortable with it. Do not  shun the object of attention just because you are afraid to think more about it and be non indifferent to examine everything of attention possible. Strip down the delusion of romanticization. We thus create more possibilities to choose and think. We feel free to choose,  pay full attention and be interested in it since every decision could be important to living our  finite lives to a larger extent. There may be new revelations about reality and yourself, and try to  live a life of authenticity, not a life full of lies. 

Romanticizing as a Way of Instrumentalizing Negative Emotions:

While young, I knew no grief I could not bear; 

I'd like to go upstairs. 

I'd like to go upstairs 

To write new verses with a false despair. 

I know what grief is now that I am old; 

I would not have it told. 

I would not have it told, 

But only say I'm glad that autumn's cold. 

Xin Qiji, Tune: Song of Ugly Captive 

Romanticization hamstrings our ability to experience negative emotions seriously since  we are prone to elevate and transcend them to something artistic and poetic. So far as we notice  the start of the negative emotion, we skip experiencing it and are eager to make a product out of it. We even fake negative emotions for art, like the poem’s narrator above. We make art out of  negative emotions to make it have more connotation and let more audiences empathize with it.  Good art may only need attention, but serious art needs non-indifference, not only non indifference at the start but through the process. I will first address how art as romanticization is  a way of distorting negative emotions.  

 The purpose of art is not to depict reality; thus, it requires distortion, exaggeration,  simplification, embellishment, etc. How writers would potentially distort the types of expressive,  rhythmic work through romanticization has the same guidelines of being non-serious; either they  shift the attention or are indifferently created. One way a writer could distort an expressive  rhythmic work is in its name, rhyme. Using rhyme to distort the negative emotion is different  from forced rhymes which are rearranging phrases to make the rhyme end of the line or  respelling the end word to force it to rhyme unnaturally. Distorting the negative emotion in a  rhyme is hard to detect by the reader, but it happens by the writer’s will. For instance, the writer  changes the emotion from anguish to sorrow to rhyme; though it may be hard to tell by the  readers, the changed word choice of emotion weakened the intensity of the language. Rhythmic  works are not always for the reader but also for writers. When their works serve as a source of  memory, distorted negative emotions will give them a more inauthentic conception of the  moment they hoped to capture at that time. On top of distortion, the more problematic  romanticization could happen with a made-up negative emotion or an underdeveloped negative  emotion. Made-up negative emotions could be the product of societal expectations since they  romanticize negative artistic emotions. Nevertheless, faking a negative emotion is, of course, an  inauthentic attempt or even crude imitation. Making up negative emotions to create art for fame,  wealth, or any voluntary intentions will only degrade the art to a soulless production.

Unlike made-up negative emotions, underdeveloped negative emotions are even difficult  to notice by the creator. This type of romanticization in arts often happens in but is not limited to  underdeveloped melancholy, agony, and disappointment. When people cannot wait to transcend  

their negative emotions into art, they are sublimating the emotions before experiencing them  purely. This is not to say that we should not make art from negative emotions but that it is  disproportionately less experienced than positive emotions. When we experience joy or serenity,  we often experience them by ourselves, fully immersed in the external world that brings us such  emotions, such as the scenic route of the train we are on; we are in a state of enjoyment. It is  much less likely when we want to write or paint something because our friends gave us a  surprise, or we won the lottery. However, we often get inspired to do art when we first  experience negative emotions considered painfully beautiful. When we lose our love, we cry that  perhaps fate is unfair and me and my love are destined to be apart. We write poems that you are  the moon in water, and I am the blossoms in the mirror, both impossible to grasp. We cannot or are  not used to stand the pain of losing our lover, so we lie to ourselves to turn the sadness into  something romantic before the painful emotion has been experienced more.  

I would suggest that before romanticizing, we should first realize how our lives would  change without them. Every time you pass their favorite cafe, would you still have the courage to  enter it? Losing them means the person who left all the traces in your life is gone; every  experience created could only be traced in your memory but not recalled by your lover. Go  through the emotion, feel the ache of your heart, realize the missing parts of your life, and try to  feel the emotion before transcending it to something symbolic. Do not escape from negative  emotions, shallow or deep. Experience and explore the thingness of the negative emotion  concerning that moment or in that duration of time. 

Romanticization could be authentic and serious after experiencing negative emotions  seriously. After a serious experience with negative emotions, romanticization could be the  embodiment of authenticity itself. Romanticization is always an embellishment of the true  experience, and the experience itself should be the dominant record. The prevalence of  romanticizing negative emotions reveals their importance to people, often deeper and more  intense than positive ones. Schopenhauer compared pain and pleasure in this aphorism, “One  simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the  feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” Perhaps the overwhelmingness and deepness we experience in some negative emotions are the  positive society’s disdain and disgust.  

Romanticizing as a Way of Abjecting Negative Emotions: 

I am free whether I love American prawns or not; but if I do not love  

human beings, I am a poor man, and I cannot find my place in the sun. 

Jean-Paul Sartre, Erostratus  

If the former passages about instrumentalizing negative emotions are more towards the  self, this part of the essay is more about how society looks at individuals with negative emotions,  especially intense negative emotions like anguish. People are at peace with negative emotions  when they are aesthetically pleasing, which normally exists in the fictional world. People would  be horrified when agonizers exhibit intense negative emotions since that person in agony would  bring them abjection. I will start with individuals that society approves of having strong negative  emotions, the tragic heroes. 

Tragic heroes are not individuals that could represent the majority: they are romanticized  fictional characters. Hamlet is a classical representation of a tragic hero; he looks aesthetically  pleasing, writes in an aesthetically ravishing manner, and dies in a dramatically beautiful irony.  Hamlet is himself an artwork of romanticization of negative emotions. Hamlet is pessimistic,  cynical, and bitter, but society still grants him the title of a tragic hero. No matter how much  Hamlet demonstrates negativity, the part of him being heroic is always waiting for a bright exit  from negativity. Bahnsen describes a tragic hero as “a pessimist who is at heart an idealist.” A  pessimist never abandons their ideals, but they continue to fight for them, even facing possible  defeat. It is not hard to see that when analyzing a pessimistic tragic hero, the focus is still put on  what society considers virtuous traits, such as striving for goals in the face of possible defeat.  How courageous and persistent are the tragic heroes even if they suffer from all the  disappointments! Negative emotions experienced by the tragic heroes are treated as a side dish,  while the main focus is to make a hopeful explanation out of one described as tragic. Society  would be calm when experiencing the tragic heroes since they are out of reach as an ideal in the  fictional realm and people fixate on the part of their positivity. 

The romanticization of the discourse spoils people even in reality. The news reporter will  remain dispassionate when an incident involves people’s death. There is a discrepancy between  their expression and the words “we are sorry for their loss”. When accidents involve gory scenes,  they will not be shown but instead described in words. Death and violence are thus weakened to  a large extent. Despite the weakened presentation of death and violence, they are negative  emotions widely sympathized with by the majority. There are negative emotions that society  pities and sympathize with, and they are not limited to losing a close companion in life, breaking  up, feeling injustice, negative emotions towards traumatic memories, depression, and phobias.  People who exhibit negative emotions that society fails to sympathize with are not that fortunate,  and I will focus on the one which society abjects of: agony. The abject is a concept brought up  by Julia Kristeva referring to horror felt in response to a threatened breakdown in meaning  caused by the loss of boundaries between self and other. An example would be seeing a corpse,  and you may feel fearful and disgusted; the negative emotions towards seeing the corpse  originate from the ambiguous state of the corpse as something was alive but is now dead; the  corpse exists on the border of life and death. The corpse challenges our distinctions between life  and death. Thus, we move away from the corpse because of the negativity it brought us, which  rejects death and enhances our being in the realm of being alive. I contend that an agonizing  person is like a living corpse who does not respect borders and rules. 

One who agonizes about their eventual death and finds no way to avoid annihilation; in a  way, they embody death in themselves by their weariness. People are disgusted and confused and  tend to move away from those who agonize at the face level that they present as hollow, ominous  and lethargic, like a corpse. An agonizing person reminds others of their corporeal reality, especially by their dark circles and bloodshot eyes. People saw the agonizer and became even for  seconds sober of their bodies’ fragility, their organs soft, their proneness to disease, and their  predisposition to death. The agonizer exists on the border of life and death. Unlike the order of  positivity, the agonizer shows the immanence of negativity and death. People feel their realm of  life is intruded upon by existence as a paradox that is alive but reminds people of death. Even  more horrifying, the agonizer talks about how it is painful to be prone to death and birth, not  their identity, goals of life or achievements. The agonizer’s appearance and outward thoughts  and emotions vaguely indicate that they are not in the order world the discourse has provided  people. The person experiencing the agonizer would then feel uncomfortable, disgusted and  horrified; they hope to move the agonizer out of their realm of reality. Unfortunately, rejecting  the agonizer out of one’s realm is problematic. After all, isn’t rejecting the agonizer also a  rejection of oneself’s aliveness? After the intrusion of the agonizer, even the most optimistic  could not eliminate their agony out of the way. Seeing an agonizer in reality, would people’s  joyous life ever be the same? People will not accept the change of their positive life order; thus,  they categorize the agonizer as insane, ungrateful, and non-humane. If it does not work to reject  the agonizer to the realm of the dead, then reject them to the realm of non-humans. 

The agonizer was brought to existence from the boundary of fiction and non-fiction when  a person first experienced them; it is hard to comprehend such a person exists in reality. The  agonizer also challenges one’s boundary of death and life since they resemble a corpse in  appearance. Moreover, the agonizer intrudes on the order of the healthy, lively discourse, further  disgusting the person who is now in touch with them and being infected. Now, the agonizer is  juxtaposed with symbols of abjection like a corpse, open wound, feces, sewage, and the skin on  warm milk.

A Peculiar Case of Romanticisation, Instrumentalization and Abject: Shinju: 

Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell. We who walk the road to death, to what should we be likened? To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard, vanishing with each step we take ahead: how sad is this dream of a dream!

—— Chikamatsu Monzaemon, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki

The symbolic weight of shinju—a lovers' mutual suicide—rests uneasily in its duality: an act of profound unity and an affront to societal order. It is a gesture suspended between devotion and defiance, love and annihilation, life and death. Yet, as with all romanticized expressions of negative emotions, shinju has been elevated to the sublime, transformed into a cultural artifact where love and death collide in an orchestrated crescendo. This romanticization, rather than illuminating the act, veils its essence. Like the melancholia of Hamlet’s soliloquies or Cioran’s meditations on death, shinju is contorted by metaphor, reduced to something digestible, stripped of its raw, visceral truth. In seeking to beautify despair, we displace its power, rendering it distant and ornamental.

“Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell,” writes Chikamatsu Monzaemon in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, his words woven into the michiyuki—a poetic journey toward death. This lyrical farewell, inspired by a real double suicide, has come to define shinju in cultural memory. Chikamatsu, much like Georges Bataille, confronts the primal forces of life—love and death—where ecstasy reaches its zenith only to dissolve into annihilation. Just as violence and transgression erupt to disrupt the established order, shinju tears through the fabric of societal norms. Yet how could I not mourn its transformation into spectacle, its wild intensity dulled by poeticization? The michiyuki’s frost-laden path to the graveyard no longer bears the weight of death’s inevitability; instead, it has become a fragile ornament, polished and safe for the aesthetic gaze.

Romanticization, then, betrays the gravity of shinju. It shifts our attention from the lived agony of despair to the polished sheen of its outward performance. The lovers’ mutual embrace of death becomes not an act of profound suffering but a symbol—a cultural mirage of love so boundless it defies mortality. This transformation, while captivating, displaces the raw immediacy of despair with an aesthetic that distorts rather than deepens our understanding. Shinju, as an act of flesh and finality, is diminished to mere narrative, its piercing agony dulled by the adornments of metaphor.

Instrumentalization furthers this diminishment, recasting shinju as a cultural artifact that titillates rather than disrupts. The 1932 Sakatayama suicides serve as a chilling example. The media’s detailed accounts of the woman’s purple yukata, the rumors of necrophilia, and the police’s proclamation of her corpse’s “unblemished beauty” elevated their deaths to a mythic status. The Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun declared their love “Bound in Heaven, Radiating Pure Fragrance,” a headline that amplified their story’s allure. In the months following, adaptations of their tragedy—films, songs, and performances—proliferated, transforming their deaths into a spectacle of public fascination. The aestheticization of their despair obscured its truth, reducing it to a tale of tragic beauty for consumption. As with Chikamatsu’s plays, their deaths were repurposed to reflect societal anxieties, their agony instrumentalized to serve a voyeuristic need for catharsis or titillation.

Yet, beneath this romanticized veneer lies the haunting specter of abjection.  The poeticized narratives of shinju may cast it as sublime, but real-life instances confront us with death’s raw, unvarnished reality. The failed Mount Mihara suicide of 1933 exemplifies this tension. One lover leapt into the volcanic crater while the other survived, transforming an initial narrative of “same-sex love suicide” into one of betrayal and pathology. The media’s sensationalized descriptions of the leap—her purple kimono billowing like a cicada disappearing into the volcanic smoke—quickly gave way to vilification. The survivor was cast as a “death guide,” a manipulative temptress who had lured her companion to her death. Here, shinju’s abjection emerges in sharp relief: a romanticized act shattered by the unresolved, messy realities it unveils. Society romanticizes the beauty of the act but recoils from its aftermath, dividing it into two irreconcilable halves: allure and repulsion.

Transgression defines shinju, for it collapses the boundaries between love and destruction, unity and dissolution. Lovers who commit shinju embody death while still alive, rejecting the societal constraints that suffocate their desires. Yet, society recoils from such defiance, seeking to neutralize its unsettling implications. The case of Sada Abe reveals the limits of romanticization. After strangling her lover, Abe severed his penis and testicles, carrying them wrapped in paper for days. She declared she wanted to keep a part of him forever. In this act of necrophilia. Abe blurred the line between the living and the dead, thrusting society into the existential horror of the grotesque of mortality’s proximity. The grotesque serves more than evoke fear and anxiety; it forces a confrontation with the abject realities of human desires and actions. Abe's actions, profoundly disturbing, resist aestheticization, compelling society to face the undercurrents of shinju—not as an act of transcendent love, but as a haunting collapse of moral and physical boundaries.

At its heart, the romanticization of shinju exhibits a broader failure to engage with seriousnessness. By aestheticizing despair, we strip it of its power to unsettle and confront us with our mortality. Shinju ceases to be an act of raw defiance and becomes a sanitized narrative, its disruptive potential dulled by its poetic framing. To reclaim seriousness of shinju, we must resist this temptation. We must look beyond the metaphor and the ornament, acknowledging the the profound humanity and tension at its core. Only then can we truly engage with shinju as more than a cultural artifact—perceiving it not as a polished symbol, but as an unfiltered reflection of love’s capacity for both creation and destruction, life and death entangled.

Negative Emotions: The Majority of Our Lives, Resurrected: 

Life is like a pendulum swinging in pain and boredom… 

When people put pain and suffering in hell, all that's left in heaven is boredom. 

Arthur Schopenhauer  

Negative emotions are prevalent and compose so much of our lives that we often ignore  or transcend them. One who does not review their birth, examine their death, and seriously  experience life’s suffering is not living. When people are suffering, they look to the possible  future of achievement; as a result, they lose the process, but when the goal is achieved, happiness  exists for a short time as we gain the desire for something new. We are, in fact, not experiencing  the majority of our time. In seriousness, we pull even force ourselves back at the moment, being  non-indifference towards our negative emotions, we live to a fuller extent. We combat the  temptation to romanticize and retrieve the majority of life lost: experience of negative emotions.  We thus live to be more in-the-moment and feel to the extent when the body aches.

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The Essence of Existence:

Omnipotent Love as the Foundation of Reality

Arshia Hamidi • San Diego State University

Intro:

The age-old question: What is love? For the reductive materialist, love is merely a complex interplay of biochemical reactions and neural activity in the brain, driven by evolutionary instincts and survival mechanisms. But surely love seems much more real beyond that. Why else would we sacrifice for love? Why would we live for love and feel as if we die in its absence? If love is nothing more than an arbitrary product of chance in Darwinian evolution, what is the spirit behind our search for a meaning in life and what lies beneath the deepest connections we make between our fellow human beings, the natural world we inhabit, and the transcendent and divine? Ultimately, are we falling victim to an arbitrary illusion, or does love carry a deeper significance in our lives—something more 'real' that we have failed to grasp in our age of enlightenment? In this paper, I make a proposition that love is not only real but is the fundamental reality–the truest thing there is, the ultimate source of life. Love is the reason for existence and the reason for creation. Love justifies the utter catastrophe of being. Without love, there would be nothing, and thus all things work together for love and the ultimate reunion back to love.

Love, Creation, and Metaphysics:

An ancient Jewish tradition poses the question: What does a being with omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence lack? The answer is limitation. If you are everything, everywhere, all at once, you have nothing to define yourself against. Without limitation, there is no distinction –no reference point for self-awareness. Just as you cannot determine the free movement of a ball in empty space without another object for comparison, a being without 

limitation would have no way to know itself or anything else. When I look at my hand, I know where it begins only because I can see where it ends; the boundary between my hand and what is not my hand defines its existence. Limitation, then, is essential—it creates the boundaries that allow for existence and self-awareness. Without limitation, there is no existence at all. 

To further understand this concept and the necessity of limitation, let’s play a game. You go first… You might be confused. What are the rules of the game? How do I play? It’s as if there is no game to play until we establish a specific set of rules that we agree upon. Without these rules—limitations, as they are essentially constraints consisting of what is and is not allowed —there is no game for us to engage in. We could do anything at any time, but without structure, there is no game to be played. Without understanding what is not part of the game, we can never fully grasp what the game is. Because I haven't defined what constitutes "not the game"—the rules that outline what is not allowed—we cannot move toward a deeper understanding of what the game actually is. 

If omnipotent love is the foundation of all existence and love is all there is, how can we recognize it as such? Just as light is understood through its contrast with darkness, and sound through its relation to silence, love requires something to contrast it against—without limitation, distinction, or the absence of love, it would be unrecognizable. So for love to know itself and experience its own bliss and joy, it needs to emerge from a state of absolute euphoria into a world of relativity, where it can encounter and define itself through differences and opposites, including what is not love. With this understanding in mind, for the remainder of this paper, I will proceed with the working assumption that omnipotent love is the essence of all that exists. While this idea may seem speculative or even too good to be true, the concept of divine love as the driving force behind creation underlies nearly every world religion and spiritual tradition. Aligning our lives with love as the ultimate metaphysical reality not only enriches us but is also the most practical choice. Since we inevitably base our lives on certain metaphysical principles, choosing love provides a grounding that enhances both our experiences and our actions. This perspective allows us to see everything in existence as a manifestation of divine love, expressing a boundless, blissful, and creative force. After all, why would this mysterious universe endure the complexities of existence? I argue that the only rational answer to Leibniz’s age-old question —"Why is there something rather than nothing?"—is far simpler than we might think: for the sake of love.

Love as an Existential Calling and That Which Justifies Existence:

Life often presents us with profound suffering, yet within this hardship, we glimpse moments of love that imbue our existence with deep meaning. These moments provide insights into our true nature and the essence of life itself, transcending the illusion of our separation from the omnipotent love that underlies all of existence. As human beings, we are presented with a fork in the road: we can either ignore the instinct for love or follow its call down an uncertain path. I argue that by embracing this call, we will find that the love we manifest is powerful enough to justify the entire catastrophe of existence. After all, deep meaning and purpose can transform and justify any amount of suffering. Suffering is only detrimental when it seems unjustifiable; however, if that suffering serves a greater purpose, it takes on a different meaning. For example, the discomfort we endure in the gym—such as the fatiguing and tearing apart of our own muscle cells—becomes justified when we emerge with greater confidence and improved muscular health. Similarly, if the suffering inherent in life is justified by the existence of unlimited blissful love as the underlying truth, then that suffering contributes to a greater good and becomes meaningful.

Many still challenge this notion, arguing that love is a false reality that can be reduced to its biochemical compositions, leaving existence unjustifiable in the face of senseless suffering. They ask: How can we believe in love when suffering persists? Can we truly be beings of love when we so often inflict harm on ourselves and others? These are difficult questions, but I propose that in the midst of a dark and chaotic world, love still knocks at the door—a calling grand enough to outweigh even the worst of life’s tragedies. 

The existential question becomes: What if we took this calling seriously? Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” This further suggests that with a compelling reason, we can endure life’s suffering. I propose that the most compelling “why” is love. In a world filled with limitation and suffering, only love has the power to transcend our pain. Only love can provide the meaning strong enough to make sense of the chaos around us, because if omnipotent love is the foundation of reality, then every event in existence can be justified as occurring for and because of love. This perspective suggests that everything in the universe is driven by love, offering us assurance that we have nothing to fear; the agony of existence becomes an illusion, rooted in our inability to see that love is all there is.

Love in the Struggle for Life, A Lesson from Infant Rats:

Let us take a moment to learn from infant rats and the instincts they have developed throughout evolution. Rather than contradicting the idea of transcendent love, evolution can be viewed as a testament to it. The survival and flourishing of species, including our own, often depend on the bonds formed through love and connection, highlighting love as a fundamental driving force woven into the very fabric of our evolutionary journey. This is particularly evident in the literature on mortality rates among infant rats—applicable to mammals in general—which has made one thing clear: without maternal care and affection, these young rats do not survive. In essence, love, characterized by the care and connection inherent in maternal affection, is vital for their existence.

 From an evolutionary perspective, love serves as a justification for the life of our ancestral primates. Without love, our ancestors would have faced overwhelming stressors in their environment, lacking the emotional resilience necessary to counteract daily hardships. If existence were defined solely by chaos, what compelling reason would there be to continue living? Biologically, an excessively active sympathetic nervous system can lead to burnout and a premature death. Yet, from a parallel philosophical standpoint, one must ask: why continue to exist if one's life is defined solely by continuous pain and suffering? Why hasn’t our species driven itself into a suicidal extinction? I propose that the reason we have not done so is that human life is not solely characterized by chaos and pain; it is equally defined by order and love. Even just a spark of love can convince us to see that there is more to existence than our suffering and anguish. A hint of love can provide the encouragement needed to justify the chaos of life and inspire a forward momentum.

Interestingly, further literature on infant rats supports this notion. Research shows even minimal forms of affection can have a significant impact. For instance, simply rubbing the end of a pencil against the stomach of a rat can mimic enough affection for it to persevere. Affection, though simple, represents an essential form of love because it aligns with love’s core intention: to uplift and nurture, to will the good of the other. To love someone is to desire their well-being, to raise them up, and to share the bliss one feels. When we embody love, our instinct is to give that love, creating an environment where others can experience the same joy. Love, by its very nature, invites and radiates outward, and affection is one way we express this impulse to share. Thus, affection is love in action; it embodies the notion that to love is to give and to invite others into the joy and fullness we experience. This illustrates that even the slightest expression of care—one form of love—provides a reason for life, reinforcing the notion that a hint of love can go a long way in providing us with meaning and purpose as an antidote to the anguish of existence.

In conclusion, the evolutionary history of rats, our fellow mammals, reveals a profound truth: existence can be brutal, and without love as a remedy, life can seem unbearable. Yet, in the presence of the universal force of love—even in its most subtle forms—we are offered a compelling "why" that helps us endure the "how" of existence. If we embrace this calling, we unlock endless possibilities and pave the way for resilience and meaning in our lives. Ultimately, rats show us that it is the calling of love that justifies perseverance and inspires us to move forward, reminding us that despite life's hardships, love hints at a reason to continue living. 

Love, Truth, and Our Highest Self:

Understanding love can deepen our insight into the metaphysical aspects of our existence and help us grasp our true nature and sense of self. Since love lies as the foundation of reality, we cannot be anything but inherently beings of love, yet we are often blinded by ignorance and our bondage to decay. From a religious perspective, many Abrahamic religions refer to this illusion as "the lies of Satan," whereas Eastern Hindu philosophy describes it as "maya." Regardless of the terminology, it is evident that each of us has an existential duty to align with our highest and truest selves. As Carl Jung put it, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are”- to take on the responsibility of fully aligning yourself with the truth that constitutes your being. Psychologists and philosophers alike have observed that within our subconscious there are multiple aspects of ourselves. As Sigmund Freud noted, “We are not the masters of our own house.”7 We often experience internal struggles where different parts of ourselves may create guilt or advocate conflicting actions. So which voice do we listen to? How can we act in accordance with the voice of true consciousness and our highest self? If omnipotent love serves as the true foundation of reality, then the gateway to love can be found no other place then within our very own stream of consciousness and sense of self. Or as Jesus of Nazareth was quoted saying in the Gospel of Luke, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (Luke 17:21). Our highest self represents our truest self, and this truest self is not defined by primitive instincts but by the capacity within us to act in accordance with love. The Golden Rule, which is found in virtually every religion and philosophy—"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (Matthew 7:12)—embodies this highest principle of love. We give to others as we would wish to receive, and we forgive others as we hope to be forgiven. Acting out of selfishness conflicts with our own truth and causes us to fall short of our highest selves. Conversely, when we choose love, we align with truth and embrace unity. By recognizing our interconnectedness, we acknowledge that we are all bound together by the strongest force in the universe: love. 

As seekers of wisdom, we often embrace the narrative that "the truth will set you free." This pursuit of knowledge in the sciences, humanities, and beyond serves a deeper purpose. I propose that the highest truth is love, and it is through this understanding that we can liberate ourselves from existential agony and distress. This love resides within us, intricately woven into the fabric of our very being. When we cultivate the love within, we not only align with our truest self but also with the most profound truth in the universe: that we are, at our core, expressions of love. While the self may manifest itself as many illusions, our highest self is love, and recognizing this truth ultimately sets us free.

Bibliography:

Decety, Jean, et al. “The Role of the Body in the Development of Social Bonds in Rats: A Psychological Perspective.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 34, no. 8, 2010, pp. 1160-1169. 

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Translated by James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume 19, Hogarth Press, 1923. 

Jung, Carl. “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” Selected Writings, edited by Anthony Storr, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Kuroda, K., Hirasawa, A., Hasegawa, T., and Shima, K. "Maternal Care and Survival of Rat Pups." Neuroscience Letters, vol. 503, no. 2, 2011, pp. 82-86. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.neulet.2011.08.018. 

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology. Translated by Robert Latta, Open Court Publishing, 1902. 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by A. Del Caro, Penguin Classics, 2003.

Shimon bar Yochai (attributed). The Zohar. Translated by Rachel Elior, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 125. 

Shimon bar Yochai (attributed). The Zohar. Translated by Rachel Elior, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 125. 

On Love:

“What is Love?” and the Role of Philosophy

Elena Ding • University of Notre Dame

Reason is the faculty that allows us to inductively or deductively form beliefs, which take the form of propositional statements that can be true or false. But propositional statements alone  cannot motivate us–– we are motivated to act by another existence called desires or passions. Reason might allow one to form the belief that exercising produces good health, but without any desire, say, for good health, this belief has no influence on one’s actions. This is what brings Hume to assert his notorious statement: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the  passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” As a corollary, philosophy seen purely as a product of reason cannot ever move people to act. 

Yet people often believe philosophy to be one of the most powerful forces that lead people to live their lives in certain ways. If the rational is powerless to move people to act by itself, I shall call the faculty which evades the grasp of the rational and brings about the fundamental formation of desires and passions the aesthetic. After all, what can compel us more to form convictions and to act than the perception of beauty? And the perception of beauty is beyond the realm of rational questioning. One can always question whether their belief that something is right or wrong is true, but one does not question their primitive feeling that something is beautiful. Philosophy, in so far as it has the capacity to move people to act, must be both a product of the rational and of the aesthetic. In the second way, it shares certain  similarities to a work of art; philosophy has the capacity to present an idea so beautiful that  people cannot help but acquiesce to it. 

A classical philosophical question like “What is love?” really contains two different kinds of questions in one. The first sense of this question calls for a rational analysis. Exactly what kind of thing is love? “Love” itself is a word which carries with it an ambiguous and contested  concept. Some philosophers have argued that love is a desire for unity. Some have argued that love is a robust concern for something or someone. Some have argued that love is a kind of valuing function. And finally, some have deemed love to be just a convenient label for a group of  biochemical interactions that are ultimately an inevitable product of evolution. All these different  analyses, and others unmentioned, have certain overlapping features, but whether they will  converge on one final account remains to be seen. The second sense of the question I find even  more interesting. It calls for an aesthetic portrayal. What can this mysterious force which is  vaguely but strongly felt by all be? What is its most wonderful form? In asking a question as  prevailing as “What is Love?”, we are confronted not just with the question itself but also with  the role of the philosopher. Should the philosopher take the rational or the aesthetic path? In this paper, it is my objective to pursue the latter by investigating two complementary dimensions: the completion of individuality in love and the completion of love in duty. 

Love and Absolute Individuality:

In The Meaning of Love, Solovyev writes that love is the “creation of absolute individuality” –– the individuality of the lover. In popular culture, representations of love often depict it as a process of losing some of one’s individuality informing a co-dependence on a partner. Solovyev’s assertion thus strikes us as moving but also bewildering. Can it really be that only when our complete attention is removed from ourselves, that we become the most complete and authentic as individuals? 

The essence of individuality is difficult to determine. When does a person feel most  themselves? It is common to hear people express the statement “I was not myself,” typically when referring to a scenario in which they believe they had acted poorly. One can imagine a woman who, as the result of having a bad day at work, goes home to her family with an irritable temper, speaking harshly to her children and spouse. She later regrets her actions, thinking that she was not herself. It seems that this statement “I was not myself” means that I was not acting in the  way that I deem I should have acted: a way that, under normal circumstances, I typically act. But being yourself is not just being the way you normally are. It is uncommon to hear someone say “I was not myself” when referring to a time where they were behaving slightly better than they normally behave. It seems then that “being ourselves” is inextricably linked to valuing and embodying that which we value. A fundamental facet of being human is the valuing of ideals, and the subsequent striving to embody said ideals. The person who believes in the importance of kindness and truly is kind in their everyday life is being themself. Alternatively, the person who believes in the importance of kindness but is not kind is someone who must be suffering from a certain cognitive dissonance. We admire someone who acts in line with their values– we see them as being most themselves.

To progress in deciphering how love makes possible “absolute individuality,” it is  necessary to distinguish between what is egoism and what is individuality. I agree essentially with Solovyev’s claim that “Love, as the effectual abrogation of egoism, is a valid justification  and salvation of individuality”, but I will make a different argument than his. I will define egoism as the state in which the center of one’s life is oneself in one’s own particularity. Absolute individuality is the state in which one orients one’s entire being toward the  striving for the attainment of a greater ideal. The reason that absolute individuality requires love is because, without love, our strivings towards an ideal ultimately ends in our own self exaltation. In this way, even the ideal we hold becomes a slave to our own selfish ends. To be a better person  for another and to be a better person for oneself are radically different. The difference is subtle and perhaps indiscernible in most practical matters, but to get a sense of it, one can imagine a man who in his striving for a powerful career is solely thinking about the loftier characteristics it affords him in contrast with the man who, in striving for the same ideal  object, is thinking about the way he can serve others.

Finally, loving entails the acknowledgment of the other’s unconditional and  transcendental significance. How can human beings, in our empirical imperfections, be of transcendental significance? In general, the statement is resolutely absurd. Even if one proclaims to believe it, one can really only accept such a fact in the abstract. Only by loving can this truth be made concrete in one’s life. For the true lover, it is undeniable that the one they love holds unconditional and transcendental significance. She simply sees this in the one she loves. The lover invariably idealizes the object of her love. But it isn’t quite right to say that the lover idealizes the object of her love, for this implies that the lover is consciously creating an image and could possibly be conjuring up a fantasy. It is more accurate to say a greater power, the one of love itself, forcefully presents the transcendent form of the object of one’s love before oneself in certain precious moments. And this transcendent form with all of its significance, in being seen by the lover, is solidified in reality. However, this presentation cannot be maintained so forcefully at all times. The person we love in the real world contains all the callous imperfections that come with life. And the lover may doubt the image of their beloved presented by love. To continue loving then, faith is required–– faith in that original ideal first presented to us by love, in other words, faith in the transcendent significance of that which we love.

The transformational effect of love is not just limited to the object of love but extends to the lover as well. The lover, in seeing the significance of the person she loves, is also necessarily  confronted with her own significance. Love is between equals. And human beings are all  fundamentally equal and possessing of unconditional and transcendental significance. This,  known as abstract truth, is made concrete in life through love. Love also allows us to form  an intimate connection with the ideal world. Becoming aware of the transcendent significance of  ourselves and the one we love, we cannot help but desire to get closer and closer to the idealized versions of ourselves. We desire to be more ourselves, to strive to more perfectly embody our values or ideals we hold. And the tact of loving entails the pursuit of the ideal of love itself. Those truly in love are always trying to love better, to perfect their love. But now the end is not in ourselves but in another. We are now able to understand how loving is the fulfillment of absolute individuality. The striving to attain our ideals is for the one we love, allowing us to escape from the paradox of egoism and giving us complete, untainted individuality.  

“You Shall Love”:

Having addressed how love is the completion of the individual, it is fitting to finish our picture by addressing the completion of love. The faith which we have established is required for the continuation of love is only a prerequisite. For love to be complete it must be made independent of the contingencies of life. How unfitting would it be if the existence of love, one  of the loftiest of human endeavors, depended on contingent conditions? How tragic is any love that is not everlasting but must have an end in time? This is seen all too often in life. I love you, but if you change, then I may stop. I love you, but if you stop loving me, I may stop. I love you, but if the throes of life become too difficult, I may stop. The kind of love that depends on the changing particulars of the world cannot fulfill the loftiest ideal of love we have brought forth.  

But what about the lover who says to her beloved, “Regardless of the matters of our life,  regardless of what changes, regardless even of your reciprocal love for me, I shall love you.” She  has transformed love into her duty, and as a result, her love has gained an austere and 

otherworldly quality. It is no longer subject to change. It is no longer dependent on any contingencies. It is complete. When it is a duty to love, Kierkegaard asserts, “love [is] made  eternally free in blessed independence.” The completion of love lies in its transformation  into duty; the key to it lies in the command, “You shall love.” When one has faith in the  transcendent significance of another, one cannot stop loving them. Only if one loses this faith can  one stop loving. Therefore, this “You shall” is simultaneously a command to faith. By being  bound to this eternal command, we establish our love as eternal. For Kierkegaard, the authority of this command comes from the Christian conception of an eternal God. Is the Christian conception of divinity required for such a sacred command? I am inclined to think perhaps not. But what conception of divinity is required for each individual in order to sustain such an everlasting sense of duty? This is a question I leave open for the reader.

Bibliography

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Vol. 1. Reprinted ed., 1789. "Of the Influencing Motives of the Will," pp. 413–418. https://doi.org/10.1037/12868-063.

Solovyev, Vladimir, and Jane Marshall. The Meaning of Love. Glasgow: The University Press, 1945. 

Kierkegaard, Søren, et al. Works of Love. Modern Thought. New York: HarperPerennial, 2009.

On What it is to Love

An Interview with Rick Anthony Furtak

Rick Anthony Furtak has been a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College for 20 years. He started working immediately after finishing his PhD at the University of Chicago where he wrote his dissertation called “Wisdom in Love” which was published in 2005. His research centers on “trying to make sense of love as a human experience through philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the kind of early generation of existential philosophers (Furtak). In addition to philosophy, Rick has found mediation in the form of philosophical conversations at baseball games, riding public transportation, and spending time with his four small parrots. 

Anamnesis: In your view, is love more an inherent essence within us, or is it something we cultivate and refine over time? How do we balance the idea of love as both innate and something that requires growth? 

Rick Furtak: Obviously, we're born with not just the capacity to love, but we are born with aspects of our personality that are more unique to each of us. Mine is different from my sisters. Even though our experiences growing up were so similar, she's a very different person. And so, it can't be just a matter of being a specific gender, ethnicity, or religious tradition. I do think there's a capacity to love that human beings as far as I can tell, all have in common. But the way that our capacity to love takes shape, even if it's somewhat distinctive from the beginning, even if it's an innate thing that's a capacity we all have, but that our way of loving is more unique to each of us, then that capacity, whether it be the raw capacity to love or whether it be something like Rick's capacity to love yours. The way it takes shape in the world means that it's unfolding itself, our capacity to love in highly contingent and idiosyncratic circumstances. 

A: You mentioned being influenced by a dear friend of yours who also writes about love. You say that they believe in a more deterministic idea of love. We were very curious to explore whether love is predetermined or if it is something that can be created. If it is predetermined, then that would mean we have no say on who or when we love. It will just happen as it will. But, if it isn’t, then does that mean we can create it, and thereby manipulate it to our liking? Moreover, what does that more negative-leaning language mean for love? 

R: Jean-Paul Sartre has this line from later in his career when he was reconsidering his notion of radical freedom. He says: “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us” (Sartre). What we can make of what others have made of us provides an element of freedom, but it also shows that we've got determinate situations and relations that also simply are what they are and we have to try to appropriate them in a way that's more free. But if someone you love breaks up with you and never wants to speak to you again, then I think it would be self-deceiving to say, well, I'm not going to be limited by the circumstantial fact, but rather, you know, I will try to find an interpretation of how this apparently devastating loss is still something I can live through and be myself on the other side of. 

A: I want to return to your idea of identity and how love manifests itself differently in everyone. Do you think love can be understood as a guiding force that shapes our identity, or does it instead reveal aspects of ourselves that were already present? In what ways might love both act as both a  creator and a mirror of the self?

R: If there's anything besides love that makes us who we are, I don't know what it is. But I also feel like, we're not simply determined, but that we are able to have some creativity in what love makes of us that we can know, even very powerful emotional motives can be resisted. And yet, I think we should ask ourselves very carefully what we want to resist because I think it's right to let love play the role in its life that it almost invariably does. And I think there are so many sad stories of how people have talked themselves out of love rationally speaking. Only to realize they should have trusted him even though it comes with no guarantees to do so. 

R: I have in mind the experience of myself and my closest friends and family members, but, of course, we're also shaped by the ideals that are put forward to us from culture, from movies. My mom watches a lot of the Hallmark Channel and I feel like the reason why this ideal of living happily ever after appeals to her so much is because deep down she knows that life is much more complicated than that. We can have major loves in our lives that don't end well, but they still shape who we are. When I got divorced, I wasn't ready to reflect on this, but years and years after the divorce, I started realizing, you know, I spent like a decade of my life with this person. I don't want to just erase that because it didn't have a happy ending. There must have been some good things to it or else we wouldn't have stayed together as long as we did. But that has taken years of therapy for me to even be able to admit because we're so brainwashed by the happily ever after story. 

A: Even if a relationship were to not end well, the experience of it still shaped you. Even the relationships that ended were not romantic. Families that have lost ties or friends that have exited your life.

R: Aristotle believed in philia, the friendship form of love.  An idea that love for another comes internally. For example, a child that you've never met that doesn't even know that you're its parent. I feel like there are good reasons for the diversity of terms to refer to love. There are also good reasons to have this general term love. All forms of love may be distinct in certain ways, but there is some common experience that's at the heart of all of them.

A: Which is why we can mourn not only a lost romantic love, but we can mourn all types of love. A friend, a family member, even a pet. 

R: I feel like any conception of love, which claims that we can only love beings that are as intelligent as ourselves, has this huge counterexample. That being a love of pets. I can not go to my pets and say, “Oh, I'm so bummed out because I got in an argument with this friend of mine” or “I didn't get this job I really wanted to get”. But they can pick up on my mood. They share my day-to-day routine. They don't care if you're smelly. They don't care if you're depressed. They just want to be with you and share their daily lives with you. 

A: Do you believe that love requires certain preconditions, shared experiences, mutual goals, compatibility, or can it arise spontaneously without these elements? How do these preconditions impact the nature of love? In our current political state that is so divided, do you think you can be in a relationship with another person whose core beliefs differ from yours? 

R: That's a highly pertinent topic to raise. The times in my life when I've experienced love at first sight, and there was one of these that was just incredibly overwhelming.It was someone I had met through, well, somebody that I knew at least a few things about. Prior to this. But first and foremost, it was just like I know there is such a thing as loving someone before you know them because I have had that experience. In an extremely powerful way. Whether you can love someone who has the same political opinions as you, my answer would be, I certainly hope so. Because I wouldn't want politics to somehow prevail over arrows. And there are going to be plenty of differences even if you vote for the same candidates and if you can't view that as part of the beauty of love. For example, how long do you like to cook your spaghetti or steam your vegetables? Like, how mushy do you want them to be? That's something that my wife and I always disagreed about, but it was not that that broke us apart. And that kind of compromise where, you know, she might make the veggies a little bit softer for me and I might make the veggies a little bit less soft. That kind of thing, that kind of difference isn't enough to sabotage love. 

A: How do you feel about the idea that society has influenced identity factors and the possibility of prevailing the chemical reaction that is love?  

R: But isn't it peculiar that we have those chemicals released for some people so much more than others. Who are equally attractive objectively speaking. And we have these colloquial ways of speaking that we'll talk about, well, just the other day I was talking with a friend about an actor and actress that I especially like and I was saying when she starred with so and so, they had such chemistry. Yeah. Yeah. Right? As if to acknowledge that we, you know, somebody who's a straight male may be on the lookout for attractive females even if he's married. But that you single this person out it just seems, you know, if we only could have an evolutionary biologist account for love, we wouldn't be able to grasp why we can get so single mindedly devoted to this person out of all the others who are equally lovable, equally attractive, and so forth. 

A: How might societal expectations shape our personal expressions and understanding of love? 

R: I think our culture and media hand us certain packaged ideals about what love ought to look like. And they often don't do justice to how difficult it is for one human being to love another in a way that's even partially successful. So, at the same time, I don't think our confusions about love can simply be ascribed to being brainwashed by certain ideals of love. I mean, those ideals have a possibility to them because it is possible to have people that you love who remain in your life for decades at a time for the large part or the entirety of your life. My parents have loved me for the entirety of my life. They're 75 years old now, and, if they're alive, they will love me. And if I'm alive, I will love them. And I've got friendships, relations with siblings, things like that that also stretch from my earliest childhood through hopefully my dying day. But when with romantic love in particular, I think there are pernicious paradigms out there. That we measure ourselves against, and then we find ourselves wanting. Lacking in comparison with them when that's not even what we should want. I mean, I think the best films about love are ones that really do justice to how it's complicated. I mean, we wouldn't want to simplify it if it weren't complicated in itself. So, we can only blame the media for so much. I mean, you could say Hollywood makes these romantic comedy films. And, therefore, Hollywood is to blame, but I don't think so. I think Hollywood is partly to blame, but the consumer of this art is at least half to blame. Why do we want there to be a Hallmark Channel? Why do you want to pay money to go see all these romantic stories? Well, because we want happy endings. But to me, any convincing literary work that has a happy ending, it's really got to earn it. Yeah. It has to somehow do justice to the great difficulty of love. Rilke said, “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and … the highest task for a bond between two people” (Rilke). So how many of us even if we have those that we love in our life, how many people have come close to realizing the most difficult task of loving one other person with all our heart? 

A: Something to come back to the idea of why we want the Hallmark Channel, why we continuously gravitate towards these, like, idealistic virtues of love. Do you think that there is something sort of addictive about fantasizing about a perfect love? We like to live in that delusion because it's easier than having to face the harsh reality that love is a challenge. As bell hooks would say, love is a continuous practice. It is not passive, but rather active. 

R: Well, I think one of the worst aspects of the happy ever after story, the story that says they lived happily ever after is the ever after part. We want to know who we are going to end up with. You know? Who will be who will we be in love with, and who will we be in a close relationship at the time that we die? And that means that we focus on the endpoint more than the process. I mean, just because my wife and I didn't end up together as we thought we would at the time of getting married, we were still, you know, a part of a long relationship in which we affected each other. Changed each other and transformed each other in ways that are not all bad. And it kind of bothers me that, like, my family thinks that for my sake, they need to just put away all the photos. As if that whole 9 years of my life had ever happened. Whereas, you know, will I ever again have a 9-year romantic relationship? Maybe I will, maybe I won't. But if I do, I mean, I could have another 9-year relationship that ends disastrously. But I don't want it to be simply like it never happened in the first place as if that's the only way we can metabolize these losses. I learned so much about myself through this failed relationship. I still care so much for this person with whom I was in it. And so, there are two points here. One is that the best outcome is not necessarily that they live happily ever after. Maybe it's more like they learn from each other for 9 years and then they just can't keep it up for this or that factor. But they only could learn that fact by living through the years in between being together. So, the happily ever after story disposes us toward thinking we fall in love once and for all and if we're lucky it works out and then the end. That's not how life is. 

A: Love is often thought of as an agent of personal change. How do you see love's power to transform a person's values, beliefs, or a sense of self? Is this transformation unique to love, or can other emotions or experiences also initiate such deep changes? 

R: Well, I certainly think love can be transformative. It almost always is in one way or another. It might lead you to someone who has, you know, a different family background. I married someone from another religion than my own. And yet I feel like to this day, even years after my divorce, my own spiritual identity has been shaped by that decision to marry someone who's Jewish when I was not Jewish myself. I, you know, we can have transformative experiences of anger, but if we didn't have a love for something in the first place, we wouldn't get angry. If I didn't love my country, I wouldn't be angry that it just elected Trump. We don't get angry just by random, but I think it's by virtue of loving and caring beings. So, everything transformative can be traced, I think, to love. 

A: That's a great connection. The philosophy of anger has been well talked about, but only going in a forward direction. Franz Fanon and bell hooks have talked about anger as a tool or leading towards violence. But anger and it stemming from love is an important aspect of that emotion. We do not get angry unless we feel love somewhere for something in the situation. 

R: So, if there's a terrorist who wants to kill me because I'm an American, I might respect that person's reasons, but I'll do my best to get away from them. That terrorist loves certain ideals, nationalistic, spiritual ideals, and that's why he wants to kill me. I don't think there are people who just are moved without loving something favorably to do harmful things. 

A: Can we love authentically while simultaneously analyzing that love? Moreover, is love something that we should surrender to entirely? Or is there value in a reflective critical approach to it?

R: I certainly hope that we can love while reflecting upon that love and interpreting it, analyzing it. But I think that you can kill love through scrutinizing it, but that the more you're preoccupied with asking yourself questions like, do I really love this person? Are they really the one for me? The more we do that, the more we are at risk of intellectualizing our way out of love. Yeah. And I think if we're not just going to get stuck in that point of intellectualization, we do need to kind of throw ourselves into it. We have all these songs that are telling us what I think is really something true even if the way that message is conveyed can be pretty cheesy in a lot of cases. I can't help it, but we're falling in love. I'm not going to distance myself from that. There are not that many songs about, like, “Oh, I'm in love. I need to distance myself from it”.  However, I think we should be cautious, especially when there are, you know, these kinds of red buttons that, like, someone else has traumatized us because of having this attitude. And you put these walls up. The next person who comes along, like, they have that same attitude. I think we can reflect on this and say, why am I drawn to people with this attitude when having that attitude really harms me? But I also believe that we shouldn't avoid an emotion just because it overwhelms us and we can't control it.

A: It ties into this larger societal norm of pushing away what we cannot control. If I cannot understand it or it overwhelms me, I am going to choose to put it away and ignore it. It is the most efficient and easiest way to get through something. But I feel like that can not apply to true love. With an all-encompassing love, it is not efficient or easy to understand. It is a sort of one step forward, two steps backwards. As soon as you understand a little bit of how you are feeling, new thoughts come into play and you are back at the beginning. 

R: There are things that if you are willing to take a leap of faith and believe in them, the possibilities that materialize may be ones that you would have simply cut yourself off from if you had scrutinized it. Just try it out.

A: I would like to end our conversation asking if you think there will ever be a point in your career where you have figured out the mystifying idea of love? 

R: No. And I'm not sure that would be a happy outcome anyway.