Year: 1997
Type: article
Abstract: Descartes on Love and/as Error Byron Williston But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs, paining soul, or sense, And of the sun his working vigour borrow, Love's not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their Muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.'One of philosophy's most enduring questions is inspired by Plato's Euthyphro: do we love something because it is lovable, or is it lovable because we love it?2Perhaps nowhere is this problem more intractable than in Descartes's theory of love.In his view love is the concrete attempt on the part of humans to develop an ethical reciprocity which ideally fulfils the need both to discover and to create value.The strict disjunction of the Platonic question is to this extent somewhat misleading because Descartes is genuinely challenged by the respective demands of both sides of the question.It would therefore be a mistake to fasten on one side of this distinction to the utter exclusion of the other.But the temptation to do precisely this with Descartes is strong indeed.This is a temptation which extends even to ethical matters, in which Descartes seems loathe to subordinate the search for certainty to merely contingent practical demands.In addressing the problem of moral weakness he writes, for For their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I would like to thank Ronald de Sousa, Andre Gombay, and Robert Imlay."Love's Growth," John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London, 1986), 69. 2 Plato, Euthyphro, from Five Dialogues, tr.G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, 1981), 14.Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 1, addresses this problem as the "antinomy of objectivity," which derives from the "plausibility of both alternative answers" to the question of the Euthyphro.429
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas
Author: Byron Williston
Institution: Wilfrid Laurier University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2007932483