Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Love is not physical possession because the beloved's consciousness always escapes us.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@de_beauvoir_second_1949, loc. 1875, @sartre_being_1943, loc. 775, @fanon_black_1952, loc. 18

4 min read

Love is not physical possession because the beloved’s consciousness always escapes us.

Evidence

And yet, she does not really consent to have the man be nothing else but her prisoner. Here is one of the painful paradoxes of love: captive, the god sheds his divinity. The woman preserves her transcendence by handing it over to him: but he must bring it to the whole world. If two lovers disappear into the absolute of passion together, all freedom deteriorates into immanence; only death can provide a solution: this is one of the meanings of the Tristan and Isolde myth. Two lovers who are exclusively destined for each other are already dead: they die of boredom. Marcel Arland in Terres étrangères (Foreign Lands) described this slow agony of a love that devours itself. The woman understands this danger. Except for cases of jealous frenzy, she herself demands that man be project and action: he has to accomplish exploits to remain a hero. The chevalier who embarks on new feats of prowess offends his lady; but she scorns him if he stays seated at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love; woman wants to have man all to herself, but she demands that he go beyond all the givens he could possibly possess; one does not have a freedom; she wants to lock up here an existent who is, in Heidegger’s words, a “being from afar,” she knows full well that this effort is futile. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1875 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

It is evident that for the For-itself the mode of being-what-is-not-the-Other is wholly paralyzed by Nothingness; the For-itself is what is not the Other in the nihilating mode of “the-reflection-reflecting.” The not-being-the-Other is never given but perpetually chosen in a perpetual resurrection: consciousness can not-be the Other only in so far as it is consciousness (of) itself as not being the Other. Thus the internal negation, here as in the case of presence to the world, is a unitary bond of being. It is necessary that the Other be present to consciousness in every part and even that it penetrate consciousness completely in order that consciousness precisely by being nothing may escape that Other who threatens to ensnare it. If consciousness were abruptly to be something, the distinction between itself and the Other would disappear at the heart of a total undifferentiation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 775 (#expands, via linked claim)

Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 18 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Love fails because both parties cannot escape objectifying each other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 93; Consciousness’s transcendence is haunted by love, understanding, and dissolved truths — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 18; Being nothing lets consciousness escape the Other who would ensnare it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 775 (+2 more)

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