Love and lust

✍ Scribed by A. H. Lesser

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1980
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 267 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5363
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00150371

✦ Synopsis

Martin Stafford's emphasis is on the difference between the two states and on the moral importance of marking this difference. Without disagreeing with his analysis or conclusion, I want to consider the consequences of the fact that, though different, they are also related.

This tension is obviously found throughout language and conceptual thought. Everything is both like and unlike everything else: the problem is to decide when to emphasise the resemblances and when the differences, when to use the same name and when to use a different one. It is well known that different languages and cultures use different classifications: stock examples include the number of words in Eskimo for different sorts of snow; and the absence in some cultures of a distinction between siblings and cousins.

With regard to love and lust, the problem is set out in two passages from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (H. T. Lowe-Porter's translation, Secker & Warburg, London 1928). The narrator, while describing a lecture of the psychoanalyst Krokowski, says "(He) employed the word love in a somewhat ambiguous sense, so that you were never quite sure where you were with it, or whether he had reference to its sacred or its passionate and fleshy aspect -and this doubt gave one a slightly seasick feeling" (p. 126). But later on he describes the kiss given by the Russian Claudia to the hero Castorp: "a Russian kiss, the kind that is exchanged.., at high religious feasts, as a seal of love. But when a notoriously 'deep' young man and a lady still young... exchange it, we are involuntarily reminded of Dr. Krokowski's ingenious... method of treating the subject of love in that slightly fluctuating sense... To try to make a clear-cut distinction between the passionate and soulful -that would, no doubt, be analytical. But we feel that it would also be inept... Is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kinds of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshy? All ambiguity is therein resolved: love cannot but be physical, at its furthest stretch of holiness; it cannot be impious, in its utterest fleshiness... In the most raging as in the most reverent passion, there must be Caritas. The meaning of the word varies? In God's name, then, let it vary" (15. 599).

Krokowski's "fluctuating" use of the word "love" followed from a patti-J. Value Inquiry 14 (1980) 51-54. All rights reserved.