On love: Part 2

Notes on skepticism and faith:

3. Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table; it is hell to doubt the legitmacy of love.

5....What in us really wants "truth"?...We ask the value of this...Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?...The falseness of a judgement is not necesarily an objection to it.... The question is to what extent it is life -advancing; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements...are the most indispensable to us..that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. - Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzche 1990.

Notes on suicide:

7. A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide. An angry dog does not commit suicide, it bites the person or thing that made it angry. But an angry human sulks in its room and later shoots itself, leaving a silent note. Man is the symbolic, metaphorical creature: unable to communicate my anger, I would symbolize it in my own death. I would do injury to myself rather than to injure Chloe, enacting by killing myself what I was suggesting she had done to me.

Notes on love lessons:

5. The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated....Immature love (which has little to do with age), on the other hand, is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real. The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled appliances). For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of catclysm.

~Alain De Botton~