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The Philosophy of Romantic Love. Peter Keeble says philosophy, like love, is a many-splendoured thing. Philosophy is normally not shy in dealing with highly emotive issues: Philosophers often tell us what we should not do and that certain cherished beliefs are nonsense.
Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend.
The idea of romantic love initially stems from the Platonic tradition that love is a desire for beauty-a value that transcends the particularities of the physical body. For Plato, the love of beauty culminates in the love of philosophy, the subject that pursues the highest capacity of thinking.
There are many different theories that attempt to explain what love is, and what function it serves. Among the prevailing types of theories that attempt to account for the existence of love there are: psychological theories, evolutionary theories, and spiritual theories.
Below are three works by philosophers that explore the question of love. First, we will look at Troy Jollimore’s book Love’s Vision, in which he explains the vision view of love. Next, C.S. Lewis provides a Christian account of the nature of love in his book The Four Loves.
It examines major emotion theories in philosophy and psychology and shows that they fail to illustrate that romantic love is an emotion. It considers the categories of basic emotions and emotion complexes, and demonstrates they too come short in accounting for romantic love.
The philosophical ideas and thoughts of Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner have been frequently described as Romantic.
In romanticism, the “aesthetic”—most broadly that which concerns beauty and art—is not just one aspect of human life or one branch of the humanistic studies. Rather, if the romantic ideal is to materialize, aesthetics should permeate and shape human life.
Kierkegaard insisted that through concentrating on Romantic love, we develop a narrow and impoverished sense of what love can actually be. Love is not, Kierkegaard insisted, the special excitement we feel when in the presence of someone unusually beautiful, pure, clever or accomplished.
In the recent literature, philosophers have begun to investigate several important issues that relate to the moral principles that ought to govern our romantic, friendship, sexual and other forms of relationship with others. This includes discussions about the ethics of sexual and romantic preferences.