Chapter 4 of Solomon, Love.
We identified 3 types of love: Philia (friendship, sibling), Eros (romantic love, perhaps propelled by self-love or libido) and Agape (pure love, either brotherly for the Greeks or Godly for the Christians).
Solomon stresses the special ability of love to expand one’s perception. When one describes her/his beloved, she/he can always find “add on virtues” (pp.54) in the beloved. In turn, the beloved discovers more about her/himself from the lover’s perception. A question was raised about whether those “add on virtues” are existent before being discovered by the lover; to more extreme, whether some “add on virtues” can be entirely fabricated by the lover.
The answer to this sort of blends into the matter of the intentional object of love. Love’s object is not the beloved as we would expect, but the joining of the lovers into one being, the relationship of the lovers in love. For this junction to be possible, each of the lover expands her/himself. Engaging in a relationship of love not only helps the lovers to discover (for each others) the virtues already existent in them without their knowledge, but also actively create more good virtues. The relationship is alive in this sense.
In contrast, this good model of love tells us species of bad reasons to love. For instance, loving the beloved just because of the beloved’s good virtues is dangerous or inauthentic because people always change. (Perhaps we can think of an ironic example in which the beloved’s virtues change, simply due to the beloved’s awareness of the lover’s affections. A bad reason to love stands in the danger of undoing itself.)
The object of love as the one being of relationship also tells us how love is not selfless, but two selves coming into one, the relationship. Whatever good that happens to the relationship is simultaneously good for the lovers.
Solomon ends the chapter by the controversial proposition that love is indispensable for a good life.
Chapter 6 of Solomon, extreme emotions.
Solomon thinks grief, laughter, happiness are most meaningful when shared.
To create a more positive view of grief, Solomon theorizes grief to be an emotion that keeps the lost love alive (pp.74); while the loss of love itself is painful, grief is not. Hunter talked about the example of loosing a dog. Grief withdraws one from the present sharp pain of seeing the absence of the love to grief, recollection of the memories of the past, when the love was still alive. This way grief alleviates the pain of loss, rather than causing pain on its own.
Grief is also positive in that it reminds us of how each person’s life is limited, and we might be prompted to do good by “the urgency of life”.
Dr. Gallegos stressed that “Emotion is something we do with other people.”, that emotions almost always has to do with conditioning one’s status within the social space Take laughter for example: we rarely laugh by ourselves because laughter & humor essentially express solidarity. Humor cannot be possible without contexts, which are almost always social.
Solomon first defines happiness negatively: (1) not a facade of cheerfulness, (2) not tranquility, (3) not distributed even throughout one’s life. For him, happiness is again, an engagement with the world.
Chapter 5 of Solomon, sympathy and empathy.
We differentiated sympathy from empathy in the following points: (1) Sympathy is possible only with the prior existence of empathy. (2) Empathy has a larger range of intelligence, as sometimes we need to knowingly and strenuously imagine ourselves to be in the shoes of the other, in order to empathize. Sometimes empathy requires my conscious abstraction into the other’s perspective. (3) Sympathy can be more primitive, but the sympathizer automatically assumes a higher, more fortunate position to feel sorry for the suffering other.
Dr. Gallegos introduced Nietzsche’s conception of empathy & sympathy as both ultimately expressing contempt for the other, both emotions of self-indulgence that can only harm social bonds.
As empathy is not exclusively natural to us, sometimes involving intelligent abstraction & imagination, it is a skill that we can get better at. Steven shared how in counseling traumatized people, counselors are taught to be very quickly responsive, rather than worrying about formulating proper, intelligent replies.
Chapter 6 of Solomon, guilt, shame & pride
We differentiated guilt from shame in the following points: (1) Dylan raised that shame focuses more on oneself among other people, and on one’s own & personal characters. Guilt targets at a specific action. (2) Wallace raised that shame can be purely self-ascribed while guilt needs distinctly the ascription of blame from an authority or law (pp.97).
As shame is more dependent on “my” ascription & “my” acceptance of blame to myself, shame is characteristically quasi-virtuous. Whenever the wrongdoer feels shame, it signals (to the wrongdoer her/himself as well as the society) that the wrongdoer still has at least the honor of admitting being wrong, plus the desire to continue being part of the society. Solomon does say that guilt & remorse also “partially redeems” the blame (pp.99).
Shame, guilt and pride are the same kind of emotion in that both of them are self-evaluating, either to blame or to praise.
A more special species of guilt named “neurotic guilt” by Solomon refers to feeling guilty without having done anything wrong, blame-worthy. This ties in with a difficult discussion of evil as whether requires the explicitly (and perhaps self-knowing) act of doing evil, or some states of living are already in themselves evil (pp.99). Dylan talked about how emotions of shame and guilt can differentiate different kinds of evil. Uma referenced Kierkegaard, that one necessarily need to overcome the feeling of some shame and guilt, which are like a bound imposed by society, to be truly able to do good. Solomon’s own emphasis in this issue is that evil should not be grossly thought of as the cause to all harms. Instead, to understand evil, we should begin with the wrongdoer’s acknowledgement of her/his guilt.
Dr. Gallegos introduced Heidegger’s conception of guilt (as it seems to relate to “neurotic guilt”): guilt is a core & universal human condition that arises merely from the fact that we are not (yet) living up to our full potential.
My (Wallace’s) personal afterthought was inspired by Lorriane, who raised to me Epicurus’ 3 kinds of desires. It seemed to me that Heidegger’s conception of guilt was based on an unnecessarily high evaluation of humans. Humans are limited and, in their lifetimes, always incomplete, so it is strange to me that Heidegger would expect us to fulfill every potentials we have in the first place. His ridiculously high expectation of humans, would be properly categorized as “artificial and unnecessary” under Epicurus, a desire to be rejected rather than aspired for.
Shared by: Wallace Li
Image Credit: A screenshot from Sailor Moon (1992)