Thursday, 12 February 2015 19:00

5. To live in order to love

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Finally, let me state this: for me, all human emotions/attitudes are “just human”. I mean: no divine or demonic intervention is needed to explain them.

But love has a creative force - of different intensity when compared with other human emotions with a creative force (such as gratitude, joy, admiration, forgiveness, compassion…) – and love has a different source (a human source) when compared with hate - which has a destructive force (common to many other destructive emotions, with a difference of intensity, such as envy, jealousy, resentment, regret, remorse…). Still, I think love is inexplicable because an explanation has too much to do with rationality and logic; and for me love is beyond that: you can love people that rationality and logic suggests you not to. You don't need a reason(ing) to love; you just do it (you "open up", you trust, and give, and care....) You follow an inner vibration. Something also inexplicable, that has nothing to do with logic either. Who can explain that? I cannot.

In other words: for me, love (the way I intend it) can explain life: you can say that we (should) live to love (and be loved - not as a counterpart though; rather, as a deriving symmetry). On the contrary, life cannot explain love: you cannot say that we love in order to live: there are many people that can live without love (how much they are aware of that, or what kind of life they live, these are completely different questions, which have nothing to do with the inexplicability of love itself). For me, love gives sense to an otherwise meaningless human existence. And yet, love itself is a mystery. As for the many other emotions/attitudes: the destructive ones, besides being easily explained, far from giving life a sense, they tend to deprive life of sense; while the other creative ones, are not enough (in terms of intensity) to give life a sense.

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Laura Capogna

I am a philosophical practitioner living and working in Rome. I am a member of Phronesis, the Italian Association for philosophical counselling (www.phronesis-cf.com).

I entered Phronesis (in 2011) for two reasons: to learn if and how it was possible to put philosophy into practice again, at the service of common people in everyday life, like Socrates and the ancient Greeks did; and to meet, and become part of a community of modern, living philosophers, with whom I could share, compare, and “put on trial” my vision of the world. I accepted Ran Lahav’s proposal to work on the Agora project for these same reasons.

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