溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Are There Two Loves, One Noble and One Common?
Is love of the body a different love from love of the soul, or two faces of one love?
Love is not single; Eros is twofold.
This split of love into noble and base became a long spine of the Western view of love. Plato himself, later in the Symposium, embraced even bodily beauty as the first rung of a ladder rising toward soul and Form, trying to reconcile the loves of body and soul into a single ascent. But the later ascetic tradition pushed Pausanias's division to its extreme, lowering bodily love into sin; the moderns, in reverse, doubted the hierarchy itself and restored the love of the flesh. The question of whether love can be ranked still contends between the wish to purify love and the wish to embrace it as it is.
The habit of ranking bodily attraction as shallow and spiritual connection as deep still lives in us. The question of whether love has grades still divides us.
Pausanias divides love in two: a common love that chases only the body, and a noble love that seeks to grow alongside the other's soul.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Pausanias divides love in two: a common love that chases only the body, and a noble love that seeks to grow alongside the other's soul. Both wear the same name, he says, but aim at different things. I find this division convenient and dangerous at once — push the body's pull down as base, and we come to be ashamed of the most honest part of love. Yet I also know attraction alone cannot fill love out. Between the noble and the drawn, I ask which way my own love leans.
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