Philosophy | Love, from Plato to Disney

While psychologists and sociologists frequently express themselves in the media on love and couples, philosophical voices are less heard on this subject. However, since Antiquity, we have thought about it. Small reflections in the company of a philosophy teacher who knows well the thought of the heart.

Sylvain Sarrazin
The Press

“It’s probably the least romantic interview you’re going to have!” », announces Maud Gauthier-Chung, professor of philosophy at Lionel-Groulx college, who explored this question as part of a course offered at UQAM.

From the outset, rather than reducing it to a simple feeling, she wishes to approach love as “a world of meaning”, meshed throughout history by stories, mythologies and cultural products.

To shed light on the contemporary state of the couple, the teacher goes back to the Western roots of romantic love, inviting us to Banquet of Plato, where the poet Aristophanes declaims the myth of the Androgyne: the first humans, kinds of living balls encompassing two fractions (man-woman, woman-woman or man-man), were punished for their arrogance by the gods by being separated, and condemned to wander in search of their lost half. For me^me Gauthier-Chung, this mythology of the quest for a soul mate, a missing part with which we would fit in perfectly, remains one of the cultural cornerstones of our visions of love. “That idea still haunts our conception of love. It’s an extremely powerful mythology that stirs our collective psyche,” she says.

This ideal of love-passion has crossed time by tinting stories and representations, from medieval texts of courtly love to Shakespearean dramas, where love at first sight is presented as a kind of mystical phenomenon… to which we must add spice. .

The thinkers continued to discuss the theme, from Blaise Pascal to Roland Barthes, who leaned on the famous mythology of love-passion. “By virtue of this myth, Barthes explains that the language of love is necessarily vague. To quantify or qualify love is already to weaken the expression of feeling: one wants to love and be loved in an atopic way, that is to say without classification, by virtue of a singularity which would make one unclassifiable; this missing half could not be anyone else”, evokes the teacher.

Today, our perceptions would still be tinged with it, in our societies where the couple is held up as a goal, a success, a great achievement in life; a vision conveyed, for example, in popular culture, with old Disney tales, Harlequin novels or a slew of audiovisual productions where union makes the end. This mythology is not confined to the psyche, but interferes in social structures, explains Mr.^me Gauthier-Chung, materializing for example through family pressure, or even tax benefits for official duos.

Romantic love flayed

This design, so significant since the era of Plato, ended up wiping out a few arrows, and not those of Cupid. “On the current philosophical scene, we are witnessing the questioning of this mythology of the couple”, notes the teacher, quoting the psychologist and essayist Esther Perel, or the feminist philosophers Claire Chambers (Against marriage) and Manon Garcia, who highlight the pressures and injustices created by such idealization. Some voices also denounce passionate love as “an eroticization of relations of domination” (like the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, author of the essay The dialectic of sex).

The Swiss Denis de Rougemont had already criticized this mythology from mid-XX^and century, positing that it would only result in the destruction of those who succumb to it. “For him, what it hides is the exaltation of suffering, and there is a need for obstacles to exalt passion and continue to suffer; the ultimate obstacle being death, as in the great classic tales of love-passion: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult, etc “, indicates Maud Gauthier-Chung, recalling that passion comes from Latin patiomeaning “suffering”.

According to her, these challenges give rise to tangible changes, particularly in the ways of representing love – Disney, after having basked in love at first sight stories for a long time, has changed its mechanics and its heroines. Reflections rooted in polyamory or asexuality also contribute to breaking this dominant pattern. Moreover, she discerns a revalorization of friendship as an essential component of human life, dusting off the views of Aristotle and Montaigne, who attributed more value to it than to love.

“I think we are witnessing a kind of explosion, a diversification of stories about love, which should greatly enrich the ‘world of meaning’ around it,” concludes Maud Gauthier-Chung.