💫 Love over the centuries - Chapter 1
1. Introduction: Brief presentation of the work and its intent. Because telling the story of homosexual love through the centuries is important today.
Presentation of the work and its intentions
Love is an experience that we all have, eventually, and that we therefore believe we know.
Have you ever noticed, however, that in our civilization the word love is used in different meanings, even completely contradictory? If, for example, love means being willing to give even to the sacrifice of oneself, if it means wanting the good of the loved one, how can that dark impulse be defined as love that sometimes impels one to hurt him, to take revenge on him, even to kill him?
Why is jealousy regarded as an unequivocal symptom, and even an indispensable complement, of love, when it is evident that it arises from the infantile and selfish need to have, and certainly not from the altruistic need to give?
The news reports daily terrible cases of desperate people who make insane gestures "for love", thus contributing to fuelling a confusion of ideas that appears great (and dangerous). We often listen to this news with an ill-concealed tabloid taste, without asking ourselves how love can lead to such extremes and if it makes sense to discuss love in such cases: in short, without posing any questions, as if it were normal and obvious.
In a society of appearances, where the categorical imperatives seem to be gossip for its own sake ("chatting" on the Internet), forced entertainment, filling life with colourful merchandise, it is inevitable that the general attitude towards the significant existential problems becomes more uncritical by the day.
A trivial clue: the broadcasts that "have the most audience" are precisely those that have as their object trivial exhibitions of elementary feelings and boorish chatter of people who do not know precisely what they are saying but express themselves in clichés and "hearsay".
Won't it be time to start asking ourselves what we are talking about again?
The Greeks, to distinguish the various feelings that we generically define as "love", even used four different words, and certainly not out of nitpicking: some of these feelings are profoundly positive, others are nefarious and destructive and we should learn to beware of them, something that absolutely no one teaches us to do, least of all school, which is inexorably starting to be a place of "cold" and bureaucratic transmission of apparently neutral knowledge (the which, incidentally, is in our opinion a severe error, as well as a pedagogical nonsense, as anyone who has read Quintilian well knows).
From these observations I was born the desire to give a meaning, or rather, a literary basis on which to be able to exercise our concept of love, and, in our case of homosexual love, "this unknown", in a historical literary context, which transcends both recent scientific evidence and the vulgarities and preconceptions of people, but addresses the motions of the soul, as only poets and writers can express.
In this sense, Plato, the philosopher who reserved a leading role within his philosophical system for love, can offer us insight.
He dedicated two dialogues specifically to love: the Symposium in its entirety and the first part of the Phaedrus.
The necessary premise for understanding the discourse is the Phaedo, dedicated to the nature of the human soul. If the latter is not understood, it is not even possible to understand what love is, which for Plato is precisely an affection of the soul.
We publish an excerpt from "The Symposium", referring to other sites for reading the Phaedo and the Phaedrus.
It would be exceedingly long to report all the dialogue that takes place through different narrators, with various opinions; we will limit ourselves to reporting some fascinating ones on homosexual love.
The dialogue, like those of Plato's maturity in general, has a narrative "framework": the reconstruction of the banquet held in 416 BC in the house of the tragic poet Agathon, in which the theme of love had been addressed by 6 of the most illustrious exponents of the cultural elite of Athens, is entrusted to Apollodorus, the "narrator" of the dialogue, who in turn, in a curious game of mirrors, relates the speech heard by Aristodemus, who was present at the banquet.
This is Chapter 1. The following will be published weekly and dedicated to subscribers, for those interested in following the entire "plan of the work." I invite them to subscribe to a monthly or annual subscription.