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State University of New York Press - D. Andrew Yost

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118 pages

English

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In The Amorous Imagination, D. Andrew Yost builds upon Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of love to argue that through the interpretive activities of the imagination the Beloved appears to the lover as this Other, not the Other. Weaving together insights from Romantic thought and contemporary French philosophy, Yost describes the distinctive role the imagination plays in individuating another person so that they appear radically unique, special, and unsubstitutable. This radical uniqueness—or haecceitas—emerges out of the lovers' engagement in an "endless hermeneutic," an ongoing process of creative and responsive meaning-making that grounds the lovers' lives in each other and opens them up to new possibilities. All of this, Yost argues, is made possible by the amorous imagination. Drawing from the deep well of love poetry, mythology, philosophy, and literature The Amorous Imagination comes to the provocative conclusion that without the productive power of the imagination love itself could not emerge.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Love, the Imagination, and the Other

1. The Philosophy of Love: A New Opening

2. The Lovers Emerge: Marion, Saturation, and Individuation

3. From The Other to This Other: Individuation and Imagination

4. The Amorous Event and the Endless Hermeneutic

5. Toward a Phenomenology of the Amorous Imagination

6. The Dark Side of Love

Conclusion: Love's Univocity and What's Left Unsaid

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de l'esprit

Philosophie du langage

Philosophie de la religion

Philosophy of religion

Theology

Epistémologie

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 août 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438484754
Langue	English

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The
Amorous Imagination
The
Amorous Imagination
Individuating the Other-as-Beloved
D. A NDREW Y OST
Cover image: Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Amore e Psiche. Wikimedia Commons.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Yost, Andrew D., author.
Title: The amorous imagination : individuating the other-as-beloved / Andrew D. Yost, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438484730 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438484754 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Laura
One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain Because the mountain grass Cannot but keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.
—W. B. Yeats
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Love, the Imagination, and the Other
Chapter 1 The Philosophy of Love: A New Opening
Chapter 2 The Lovers Emerge: Marion, Saturation, and Individuation
Chapter 3 From The Other to This Other: Individuation and Imagination
Chapter 4 The Amorous Event and the Endless Hermeneutic
Chapter 5 Toward a Phenomenology of the Amorous Imagination
Chapter 6 The Dark Side of Love
Conclusion: Love’s Univocity and What’s Left Unsaid
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
The ideas expressed in this book could only have emerged as a result of a lifetime of being loved. It was love that set them free. I thank first and foremost those who have tended to me, cared for me, and cultivated me, especially Ann Yost. I am also grateful for the tutelage and wisdom of Dr. Sarah Pessin at the University of Denver, whose oversight and conversations with me transformed this work from one of hunches and intuitions into scholarly reflection and articulation. Thanks also to Dr. Gregory Robbins, Dr. Theodore Vial, and Dr. Adam Graves for your comments and thoughtful feedback. I thank the staff members at SUNY Press, and especially my editor Michael Rinella, who stuck with me despite the chaos of a pandemic. The reviews of two anonymous readers were invaluable, and I am humbled by the thoughtful critiques and careful consideration they gave the manuscript. I am particularly grateful for the charity and commitment of Dr. Benjamin Peters and Jeff Appel, both of whom played an instrumental role in helping me think through my ideas about love and the imagination, and continue to give me the gift of friendship and the joy of philosophical conversation.
Introduction
Love, the Imagination, and the Other
L ove and philosophy go hand-in-hand. To philosophize is to love, and to love is to philosophize. But according to French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, love needs rethinking. “Philosophy today no longer has anything to say about love, or at best very little. And this silence is for the better, because when philosophy does venture to speak of love it mistreats it or betrays it.” 1 How can this be? How is it that philosophy—the love of wisdom—has betrayed love itself?
The answer is complex, of course, but part of the answer lies in methodology. Love’s enigmatic nature makes choosing a proper method of study difficult. Moreover, all methods run the risk of putting the answer before the question. What one studies is always in some way shaped by how one studies it. Theories of love can “betray” love by reducing it to something other than itself. These theories adopt a hermeneutic of suspicion, explaining love in terms of a “deeper,” more “fundamental” process: love is just a complex chemical reaction (biology), a symptom of our subconscious desire to bond (psychology), or a culturally codified type of relationship (sociology). Love is never what it seems. Others “mistreat” love by pulling it apart, by dissecting its univocity and drawing distinctions along analytical lines such as eros, philia, and agape . While such distinctions may help us highlight the different ways in which we love, they fail to account for what these loves have in common. There are ties that bind, some shared qualities between the different ways we love. But what are they? A strictly analytical approach makes this a challenging question to answer. Some philosophers are suspicious of love in principle. They claim that love is essentially an ideology, arising for example out of an underlying set of material conditions. Wary of oppressive, culturally constructed norms, they claim love does more to reinforce bourgeois power and capitalist values than to tell us something important about what it means to be human.
I don’t mean to be crass. Each of these approaches makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of love. But Marion is right to suggest that empirical and analytical inquiries tend to restrict love to the parameters set down by the method, rather than allowing love to show itself on its own terms. We cannot avoid method, but we can acknowledge it, along with its limitations and concealments. Empiricism runs the risk of bowdlerizing love, stripping away parts of it as a truly lived experience in favor of a reductive explanation of its so-called underlying causes. Traditional philosophical analysis risks disassembling love in a way that hides its common structures. But love always seems to exceed these modes of inquiry. As Pascal says, it has a logic of its own. Part of what makes love so enigmatic is the surplus of experience and meaning it generates. Love resists totalization. As a result, there is always a tension between love and method because there is no one, correct way to explain it. Love is irreducible and, therefore, in a sense, unknowable.
And yet, Marion invites us to rethink love, to try and philosophize about it without mistreating it or betraying it. His is a welcome invitation. But to properly philosophize about love we must be sensitive to the implications of method and cautious when relying on accounts of love that explain it in terms of something other than itself. While there is indeed no one, perfect, way to approach the study of love, the philosophy of love must take seriously love as it appears, on its own terms, without explaining it away as a manifestation of some more basic condition. For these reasons, phenomenology is a preferred method because it begins and ends with things as they appear. It starts with life itself, and ends there too. It does not search for a source, but rather, examines what gives itself in experience. It asks, “How does love appear?” In this book I employ a phenomenological method to examine one, even more pointed, question: “How does the Other become the Beloved?” What interests me is the way in which love is marked by a radical particularity; that is, the way in which we encounter an Other and how the Other is “transformed” into someone unsubstitutable, someone whose presence seems to reorder the very way in which we experience life. How does the Other becomes this Other? 2 That is what I want to explore.
My hunch is that the imagination plays a large part in the answer to this question. The imagination is a powerful faculty and has received a lot of attention in the history of Western philosophy. Thinkers as ancient as Plato and as recent as Richard Kearney have analyzed the imagination’s creative-responsive capacity and its ability to engage in the hermeneutic activity of understanding, interpretation, and invention. 3 In this book, I want to build on the work other thinkers have done and develop what I call “the amorous imagination” as part of a hermeneutical phenomenology of love in order to show how love appears as an experience of radical particularity. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology is inspiring to me because of its careful attention to the way love appears, as a phenomenon in its own right. And his philosophical concepts are useful in developing a theory of the amorous imagination because of their sensitivity to experiences that exceed our cognitive intentionality. His accounts of givenness, the gifted ( l’adonné ), and the saturated phenomenon are especially useful in this regard. However, in Marion’s description of love in The Erotic Phenomenon and, oddly, in spite of his own phenomenological concepts, he focuses too much on the lover’s advance and does not fully explain the evental nature of the Beloved’s givenness. Marion also mentions the need for an “endless hermeneutic” to respond to saturated phenomena but leaves the idea underdeveloped. Nevertheless, Marion’s ideas, especially saturation and the endless hermeneutic, provide a generative opening for a fuller account of the amorous imagination.
Despite its strengths, Marion’s phenomenology alone is insufficient to explain in detail the relationship between love and the imagination. For that, we need something more. We need to explore theories of the imagination that do not dismiss it as fancy but take seriously its role in constructing a world and imbuing it with meaning. We need thinkers like Stendhal, Novalis, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. We need the Romantics. Building on Kant’s account of the productive imagination, the Romantics viewed the imagination as a powerful source of hermeneutical and creative activity. From the nexus of Marion’s phenomenology and the Romantic imagination t