The desperate pursuit of meaning systematically destroys the meaning sought.
Evidence
Now that we can no longer pluck flowers to adorn our beloved – a sacrifice that adoration for the one atones by freely taking on itself the wrong it does all others – picking flowers has become something evil. It serves only to perpetuate the transient by fixing it. But nothing is more ruinous: the scentless bouquet, the institutionalized remembrance, kills what still lingers by the very act of preserving it. The fleeting moment can live in the murmur of forgetfulness, that the ray will one day touch to brightness; the moment we want to possess is lost already. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 141 (
#exemplifies, via linked claim)
Love is a contradictory effort to surmount the factual negation while preserving the internal negation. I demand that the Other love me and I do everything possible to realize my project; but if the Other loves me, he radically deceives me by his very love. I demanded of him that he should found my being as a privileged object by maintaining himself as pure subjectivity confronting me; and as soon as he loves me he experiences me as subject and is swallowed up in his objectivity confronting my subjectivity. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 958 (
#exemplifies, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: A fulfilled demand for love destroys the very condition the demand required. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 958; Faith that tries to transcend knowledge is destroyed by that very attempt; Attempts to preserve the fleeting actually destroy what they seek to keep. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 141 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Attempts to preserve the fleeting actually destroy what they seek to keep.
#exemplifies(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 141 - A fulfilled demand for love destroys the very condition the demand required.
#exemplifies(0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 958 - Faith that tries to transcend knowledge is destroyed by that very attempt
#exemplifies(0.82) - Attempting to appropriate the Other destroys the incarnational freedom desire sought
#exemplifies(0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 989 - Thought divorced from emotion destroys the impulse that nourishes it
#exemplifies(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 150 - For Sartre, the For-itself is constituted by desire, so annihilating desire destroys consciousness itself.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 59