PHIL 36706 Eros and Reason: Philosophical Perspectives
There is a long and venerable philosophical tradition which not only distinguishes considerations of love from considerations of reason, but which regards the two as fundamentally opposed. On this traditional view, “love is blind” and to allow oneself to be led by considerations of love is to risk straying from the sunlit path of rational truth. Yet there have also been prominent dissenters to this view of love, who have variously regarded a loving engagement with the world as a precondition for the successful operation of reason, or chosen to eschew reason in favor of eros, or argued that love is capable of a unique form of insight that outstrips our powers of ratiocination. Still others claim that the logic of eros is fundamentally continuous with our rationality. Adjudicating these debates involves reflecting on how we ought to conceive of our erotic investments – i.e. what we should take such relations to consist in – and asking what role they play in our mental life. Moreover, as these conceptions may be subject to historical shifts, we must ask whether and how such changes in our self-conception may affect the very constitution of the self we are attempting to describe. With an eye on these metadiscursive questions, we will track this dialectic between love and reason as it works itself out both in historical texts and in more recent work. Our historical readings will draw on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul, and Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, among others. We will also draw on work by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Iris Murdoch (including her novel The Sea, the Sea), Jonathan Lear, and Martha Nussbaum.