Love, Duality, and Art

Currently Reading: Island (Aldous Huxley, 1962) - 50%; Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Khaneman, 2011) - 40%
Currently Listening: http://www.noonpacific.com/spacejams/

Happy New Year! It's been a while since the last time I blurbed about intangibles.

On Love

I've been thinking a lot about what "romantic love" is--as a concept, as a verb, as an emotion... It's an inevitable contemplation being in the early stages of a relationship, guarded yet longing to jump right in. What is love? Do I love? Does he love? What does it mean when you say it out loud?

Love is often glorified as a noble virtue, act, or emotion. While on its lofty pedestal, nobody can quite place it in an objective manner. Love bears a different meaning for everyone - but many believe it completes the human experience.

There are established precursors to it: including attachment, romance, kinship, friendship, shared experience, limerence, and infatuation. But to better understand love, I've tried to understand why people believe that it "ends" -- or, rather, evolves-- in the context of romantic relationships.

With my ex, I believe I learned about committed romantic love. But despite this, the relationship ended and after working out the pain of loss, the most painful part now is feeling like I failed in love. A feeling spurned by the "sunk cost fallacy", perhaps? The breakup was partially out of my control, true, but I often feel remorseful that I was less critical, less careful about falling in love at the beginning of that relationship. This time, I must find due vigilance.

There is a belief floating around that people 'fall out of love'--that, at some point, people take this journey, change, and end up 'growing apart.'

I don't believe that people really fall out of love with a person. I think that they loved the static--the instantaneous--derivatives of that person (the present ones and the potential ones of the future). But a person has fluidity and a person is always changing; the more cognizant one is of that, the more likely you are to "look for love in the right places." To me, a person has an essence to them that life experience and human interaction build off of to shape who we exude in a single moment. Thus, what you perceive and what you experience about a person will be processed through multiple filters: your own and theirs.

Love is about a person and how his or her infinite derivatives dance with your own through time.

While humans are erroneous in their perceptions, I think the value of love is your faith in the essence of that person. Love is not everything in a relationship but it is, in fact, what holds true when you and your contexts change. If love is mutual, it becomes a dance (e.g. compromise, work, effort, two-way street, etc.).

Love is still, and will always be to me, a cerebral thing. It is a feeling and a verb consciously decided on. It is a two way exchange of trust and vulnerability - where, eventually, someone else's happiness supersedes your own.

On Duality

Among my favorite books during my college career were The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1890), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886), and Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte, 1847).

The stronger the inner conflict and the more manifest the paradox, the more engaging the book was. In addition to duality within a single character, I'm also attuned to character foils in movies and books. Many interesting stories involve two people striving for the same goal while maintaining divergent approaches and philosophies.

I've begun to think that this fascination with the paradoxical lies in the fact that those dualities came from a singular, whole source. Not merely the conflict between good/evil or light/dark but their necessary coexistence.

Perhaps I sense a sort of duality in myself and part of the human experience is reconciling the two parts... my own depravity kept secret in a Mr. Hyde of my own--my alter ego perhaps--vying for an outlet with my superego, the courageous, kind-hearted, intellectual persona I've worked so hard to cultivate. Are they one and the same?

reddit/badphilosophy
pantheism
dualism and duality

On Art

My sister recently showed me an essay prompt for one of her college applications (art school):

What is the role of an artist or designer in today's modern society?

That's a difficult question for a high schooler who has yet to see the world. And yet... a necessary mental exercise.

Three sources that I can draw from for my personal views:

1) Plato's Views on Art
2) Human, all too Human (Nietzsche, 1878): we have been the colorists
3) Twelve Virtues of Rationality (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, 2006): 11th virtue (scholarship)

I tend to think of the world as harboring a duality between "rational" (logic, pragmatism) and "emotional" (creative, idealism). While rationality and hard logic are necessary for survival and success, art and design also have a critical, yet less defined place in society. This seems to be inherent since logic is straightforward and creativity is... well, exactly that.

I think of their relationship as a "push-pull" action, where each is a driving force for the other. Art and design reflect society while also challenging and motivating it to change and explore. Without art and design, science would be recursive and directionless - there would be no motivation towards transcendence. Without science and thought and existence, there would be nothing for art to reflect. Art/design is an outward expression of human creativity and without it, there would be no external world in which to chase our imaginations with science.

Afterthoughts

On Love & Thinking, Fast and Slow

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. (W. Somerset Maughum) 

Exaggerated Emotional Coherence (The Halo Effect): 'The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance but sequence matters--the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.' -Daniel Khaneman

On Art, Wholeness, and the Ultimate Order of Things

Thermodynamics proposed the concept of entropy and how everything has the tendency towards disorder. The second law of thermodynamics is the reason there is a direction of time. Because we recognize nature's initial state to the next more disordered state.  

But what if what we realize as order is not really order at all? Not "ultimate order" at least. What if there was a bigger picture that humans are building against, just to fulfill our concept of order? Who knows what this ultimate order is.... ultimate and absolute truth, do you really believe in such a thing?

 This song is still stuck in my head.