Dante's Broken Hammer by Graham Harman

Author:Graham Harman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dante’s Broken Hammer: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics of Love
ISBN: 9781910924310
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

e. Conclusions

Before we move on to consider the implications of Dante’s theory of love for philosophy, let’s summarize what we have learned about that theory. For Dante, love is the engine of the cosmos, and is the very essence both of God and of his creatures — though Dante is never entirely clear as to whether “creatures” means more than angels and human beings. Natural love can never go wrong, and is steered the wrong way only through the mistaken choices of free will, for which we fully deserve punishment in the afterworld. Virgil’s remarks in Purgatorio teach us that love can go wrong in three basic ways: the choice of a perverse object, a deficiency of love, or an excess of love. Paradiso shows that, for Dante, the ultimate object of love is God in His wisdom and goodness. It also gives us some examples of saintly love that fall short of the maximum, whether through yielding to violence, chasing honor, or indulging too much in the pleasures of the flesh.

The lesson of Inferno is that while sins of incontinence can be bad enough to lead to a soul’s damnation, the ultimate human sin is fraud. The mechanism of this sin is the pretense of love for something or someone, who is then cruelly betrayed in the name of some venal interest. A woman is flattered and taken, but then left aside as Don Juan moves on to fresh conquests. Alchemists present their golden coins to the currency exchange, hiding the fact that this gold was unnaturally produced through the manipulation of other metals. Traitors swear allegiance to the homeland before selling it out for some personal interest: Alcibiades, Benedict Arnold, or Kim Philby. The host offers safe harbor to guests, then has them approached by stealth with garotte or stiletto. The most diabolical form of love is found not in its excess, deficiency, or perverse choice of object, but in a love that is only a stratagem, rather than real love. At least the libertine truly enjoys his orgies, and the opium addict her hours in the den. But the fraudulent person never really enjoys what he pretends to others to enjoy, dealing only in counterfeit coinage. He is thus the true servant of the Devil, father of lies.

Love is a form of sincerity, in which the amorous agent expends energy in taking some object — of greater or lesser merit — seriously, and devoting itself to this object. On this basis we can assume that Dante would not have been fond of an especially modern group that is never found in his Hell: critics. With this term I mean those modern thinkers who hold that the purpose of the intellect is to diminish the amount of naiveté in the world, debunking and eliminating the vast majority of objects in the cosmos, replacing them with nothing but tiny particles, socially constructed language games, or an outright nihilism that takes the goal of the mind to be the final scientific elimination of all entities whatsoever.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.