Everything I Know I Learned From TV: Philosophy for the Unrepentant Couch Potato by Mark Rowlands

Author:Mark Rowlands
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780091898359
Publisher: Ebury
Published: 2005-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Schopenhauer: love is blind

In these modern times, most of us are not too happy with the idea of transcendent realms of existence. And, I think, rightly so. Plato’s account has lots of problems. Some of these he even worked out for himself. Take his explanation of why people, or things, are beautiful. Courteney Cox is beautiful because she resembles the form of the beautiful, or beauty itself. Ditto for Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Reese Witherspoon, Christina Applegate, and so on. So, you have all of these beautiful people resembling the form of the beautiful. More generally, all beautiful things, Plato would have us believe, resemble the form of the beautiful. And ugly things don’t resemble it. What does that tell you about the form of the beautiful? I mean, if all beautiful things resemble the form of the beautiful and no non-beautiful things resemble this, what does that imply about the form of the beautiful? Basically, it seems to imply that the form of the beautiful must itself be beautiful. If not, how could all beautiful things resemble it and no non-beautiful things resemble it?

But if the form of the beautiful is itself beautiful, Plato’s theory is up shit creek. The form of the beautiful, beauty itself, is supposed to explain what all beautiful things – Courteney, Jennifer, Reese, Christina, etc. – have in common. So, Courteney is beautiful because she resembles the form of the beautiful, so too for Jennifer, and so on. But if the form of the beautiful is itself beautiful then there is one more thing that needs explaining – what is it that makes the form of the beautiful beautiful? It seems we will need another form of the beautiful – beauty 2 – to explain what makes the original form of the beautiful – beauty 1 – beautiful. But it is difficult to see how beauty 2 could explain why beauty 1 is beautiful unless beauty 2 is also, itself, beautiful. How could resembling something that is not beautiful make you beautiful? Therefore, it seems, we have to allow that beauty 2 is also beautiful. But then it shares something with beauty 1 and Courteney, Jennifer, Reese and Christina. What is it they have in common? We are going to need as new form of the beautiful – beauty 3 – to explain what this is.

And now we’re well on the way to what philosophers call an infinite regress. You are trying to explain something, but what you invoke to explain this presupposes the thing you are trying to explain in the first place. So, your attempted explanation gets you nowhere. Plato himself realised this problem with his theory; he talked about it in one of his books, The Parmenides. Unfortunately, he never came up with a convincing answer to the problem.

Therefore, maybe we can proceed to a more modern version of the nature of love in general, and the relation between love and lust in particular. Plato was one of those people who would answer ‘no’ to the question of whether love reduces to lust.

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.