溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is Love a Madness Sent by the Gods?
Is the madness of love that unseats reason a sickness, or the highest of blessings?
The greatest of goods come to us through a kind of madness.
After Socrates praised love as "divine madness," views of love split sharply over the place of reason and passion. Plato himself sought to govern this madness, making it the engine of a ladder ascending toward beauty. The Stoics and Epicureans went the opposite way, warning against love's passion as a madness that shatters the soul's calm, and counseling a quieter affection. Later Romanticism revived the madness itself as love's authenticity, singing that one must love enough to lose reason for it to be true love. Is love's madness a blessing or a sickness, to be drunk on or to wake from? The question still divides the heart that trusts passion from the heart that guards against it.
In an age flooded with advice to manage emotions and love safely, Socrates's question — calling love's madness a blessing — asks back what it is we are so afraid to lose.
Having just scolded the madness of love, Socrates reverses himself and praises it: the greatest goods that come to a person come through a madness sent by the gods.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Having just scolded the madness of love, Socrates reverses himself and praises it: the greatest goods that come to a person come through a madness sent by the gods. He paints love not as a sickness that muddies reason but as a divine fever that grows wings on the soul and lets it remember beauty itself. I find this reversal bold. We are ashamed to lose reason in falling in love, yet Socrates calls that loss a blessing. Is love's madness a thing to govern or to receive with thanks? I ask whether I should have been ashamed of the self that once trembled with love.
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