Understanding the thoughts of Bertrand Russell “To fear love is to fear life and those who fear life are already three times dead » Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Russell focuses on this line of thinking to define love through his analytical philosophy which gives a logical and more complete meaning to love. This chapter aims to give a brief overview of Bertrand Russell's philosophy of love. The concept of love The concept of love has been formulated since man thought. Since Antiquity, Socrates, a great philosopher, said that love was the perpetual possession of good. In the notion of “perpetual possession” of the Good, that of the Socrates Symposium modifies its previous definition: to love beauty is to want to give birth in beauty. To possess it perpetually would be to recreate it infinitely. Therefore, love must, by its very nature, be the love of immortality as well as of Beauty. This explains why love is associated with the reproduction of the species. Love results in a desire to procreate because procreation is our closest approach to perpetuity. We cherish our children because thanks to them we can participate in the future. Also the sacrifices of heroes proceed from a love of glory, which is none other than the love of immortality. However, the philosopher's love brings him as close as possible to immortality. When we contemplate absolute beauty with a free soul, we are in contact with the eternal in a way that guarantees perpetuity. We can never give birth to children, or create works of art, or even perform any act of great importance. Nevertheless, the philosopher's work will be supreme: "he will have the privilege of being loved by God and of becoming, if ever a man can, himself immortal." (Plato, 1951, p. 95) He is described in The Republic as follows: He contemplates a world of immutable and harmonious order, where reason governs and where nothing can do or suffer harm; and like one who imitates an admired companion, he cannot fail to fashion himself in his image. Thus the philosopher, in constant company with the divine order of the world, will reproduce this order in his soul and, as far as man can, become like God; even if here, as elsewhere, there will be room for denigration. (Plato, 1941, p. 208) Also in Phaedrus, the search for absolute good or beauty is considered in terms of the problems the soul faces in becoming immortal. According to Plato's dualistic view of human nature, the soul is immaterial and indestructible, therefore in itself immortal. But once descended into the natural world, he is enclosed in the material envelope of a material body. In its original state, the soul lived among the gods, enjoying the true being of the Eternal Forms. In becoming human beings, most souls forget their divine origin. Immersion in matter dulls awareness of their spiritual source. Nevertheless, this past remains as a state of totality to which all men secretly aspire. Although it may act with confusion, the soul desires to reunite with the realm of essences, especially with that absolute good or beauty which sparkles in the world of the senses but can only be properly appreciated in its own realm. The human being is twofold, an unstable composition of body and soul, each governed by conflicting impulses. Each part struggles to move the human being in its own direction, both driven by the precepts of love, but also by love for different types of objects. The body allows itself to be dragged by carnal temptations into the mud of sensuality. The soul wants to risetowards its abode among the eternal Forms. The latter only cares about achieving excellence, through a pure and noble spiritual relationship which allows the lover and the beloved to improve in the search for virtue. Yet human nature finds it easier to follow the lure of the flesh. In the Symposium, love generally appears calm and serene, like the character of Socrates and like the orderly march towards absolute beauty. In the Phaedrus, it is sufficiently turbulent and overwhelming to deserve the name “divine madness”. Madness can be pathological, resulting from human infirmity. Or, like all creative inspiration, “a divine liberation of the soul from the yoke of customs and conventions”. True love is a folly of the latter type and is highly desirable. When the enlightened mind finally tears itself away from the demeaning but omnipresent influence of the body, it seems to lose all sense of balance. In fact, it is only a question of rediscovering the freedom and true reason of man. The sight of beauty, which the soul encountered in its former state but soon forgot, stirs the mind anew each time it appears before the lover. Plato vividly describes the excitement of the lover who sees in another person an expression of divine beauty: At first a shudder runs through him, and again the old fear invades him; then, looking at the face of his beloved like that of a god, he reveres her, and if he were not afraid of appearing like a true madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as in the image of a God ; then, as he looks at it, there is some sort of reaction, and the shivering turns into an unusual heat and sweat. (Plato, 1937, p. 225) We can interpret the reaction as a sexual response, but that is not what Plato has in mind. He explains through the language of emotion how the soul grows wings. For Platonism, such worship is the beginning of love. As he climbs the ladder of love, the true lover possesses the good by allowing the Good to take possession of him. When this happens, the lover attains knowledge of reality.Concept of LifeIn Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study (Metz 2013), my overarching goals are to articulate a new theory of what would give meaning to life a human person and to argue that she is more justified than the competitors found in the analytical philosophical literature of the last 100 years. This project inherently has certain limitations. In focusing on the meaning of an individual's life, I left aside the question of what, if anything, might confer meaning to the human race in general. In evaluating theories of meaning in a person's life, I address fundamental principles that are thought to capture what all meaningful conditions have in common, and therefore do not explore particularistic, phenomenological, strictly personal, or other approaches. philosophical approaches that one could adopt. By considering mainly analytical texts, that is to say those of the Anglo-Saxon Anglo-American philosophical tradition, I do not discuss in depth those of other traditions such as the Continental or East Asian tradition. Finally, in thinking primarily about philosophical work, I bracket out considerations of how research in other fields such as psychology or religion might be revealing. Given such an orientation, I have found more than enough authors, works and ideas with which to grapple with the meaning of life. . About half of the contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life chose to stay within the parameters of my project; they use the same type of lens as me, but see somethingsomething different from what I do. I am thinking here of the articles by Peter Baumann, David Matheson, Jason Poettcker, Yu Urata, Hasko von Kriegstein, Nicholas Waghorn, Mark Wells and Fumitake Yoshizawa. However, one of the main reasons for this special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life was to encourage reflective exploration of questions of meaning from an entirely different perspective. Such an approach characterizes the contributions of Christopher Ketcham, Minao Kukita, Masahiro Morioka, James Tartaglia, and Sho Yamaguchi, all of whom, with the exception of Tartaglia, work within the East Asian philosophical tradition. iii Usually, the latter critics maintain not only that their view is different and worth using with mine, but also that it is better and should be used instead. In my response to these contributors, I argue that this stronger view is implausible and that, at best, they offer a perspective that would usefully complement, but should not supplant, the one I use. I am not defending the claim that would mirror that made by these critics, namely that only my theoretical and analytical way of approaching questions of meaning is appropriate. At this point in my thinking, I am a pluralist when it comes to methodology, believing that it would be helpful to view meaning through a variety of lenses. In the remainder of this overview, I sketch the three main parts of Meaning in Life, reviewing just enough to make sense of the rich discussions that ensue. This special issue of the Review has advanced thinking on meaning in a truly profound and interesting way. I am honored and comforted that my book has been the occasion for such additions to the stock of knowledge. In the first major part of Meaning in Life, I analyze the category of meaning in a way that is intended to be largely neutral among competing theories of what meaning essentially is insofar as it manifests itself to some extent in the life of a human person. More precisely, I define what most Anglo-American philosophers understand by the expression "meaning of life" and related terms, I indicate who is the bearer of this value and I differentiate the meaning of happiness, interpreted subjectively . Regarding questions of definition, I ultimately maintain that a pluralistic, family-based model is the most defensible at this point. According to this view, talk of the “meaning of life” concerns ideas such as purpose, transcendence, the relevance of emotions such as admiration. and esteem, and narrative properties. Although each of these ideas reflects a wide range of theoretical work in the relevant literature, none of them captures everything on its own. I then consider what the bearer of the meaning of life is, that is to say what it is in a life which can have meaning or be meaningless. Is it just about life as a structured whole, just parts of a life considered in themselves, or both? I conclude in favor of this latter mixed point of view; I maintain that there are two independent dimensions of meaning in life, namely certain parts of a person's life at a given time, such as a particular action, project or stage (e.g. adolescence), and then also the life of the person considered as a whole. . A complete judgment of the degree of meaning in a person's life, which would ground a comparison with the lives of others, must weigh both dimensions and add them together in one way or another. In the remainder of Part One, I compare and contrast the pleasure and sense goods, focusing primarily on highlighting the important differences between them. I compare the pleasure and the sense in relation to sixfactors of the theory of values, among which: what are the logical sources of these values ​​in relation to their bearers, how luck can play a role in their realization of values, and what attitudes are appropriate in I conclude by suggesting that a a good life can plausibly be identified with a happy life, meaning that happiness and meaning are two distinct goods that can each independently contribute to making a worthy life choice. In the next two main parts of the book, I focus on defining and evaluating a wide range of theories about the meaning of life, basic accounts of what all the meaningful conditions of a life have in common. I evaluate theories largely on the extent to which they implicate and plausibly explain intuitions salient in the Anglo-American philosophical literature, particularly as they concern the meaning of good (morality, beneficence), true (knowledge, wisdom) and good. beautiful (art, creativity). Specifically, in part two, I critique supernaturalist theories of the meaning of life, according to which either God or a soul (or both), as generally conceived in the monotheistic tradition, is necessary for life to have meaning. I spend a lot of time focusing on the most influential version of supernaturalism, which holds that the meaning of a person's life is to fulfill God's purpose. I provide reasons to doubt the arguments for the purpose theory, and I also purport to offer a new reason to doubt this view itself. According to this latter argument, for God to be necessary to confer meaning on our lives, God would have to be qualitatively different and superior to anything that could exist in natural work would have to be a person who possesses properties such as simplicity and timelessness, properties difficult to reconcile with intentional action, which seems to be essentially complex and temporal. I also offer arguments against all supernaturalism, and not just its teleological version. The more original objection is that many of those who embrace supernaturalism have views that are at odds with each other. On the one hand, they claim to know that certain lives have meaning in them, but, on the other hand, they do not claim to know that something supernatural, like God or a soul, actually exists. Supernaturalists may have faith in these, but this of course does not constitute conclusive proof of their existence, as they implicitly assert that they have meaning in people's lives. In the third part of Meaning in Life, I present a new naturalistic theory. that I claim improves on existing versions of naturalism, the broad view that a life in a purely physical world could be meaningful. I first provide counterexamples to a wide range of existing naturalistic views, including theories that a life is only meaningful to the extent that it is creative, promotes welfarist or long-term perfectionist consequences. term, or connects to organic units beyond itself. I then advance my preferred view at this point, the theory of fundamentality, which is roughly the idea that a life is (particularly) meaningful to the extent that it exercises reason in a robust and sophisticated way and orients it toward the fundamental conditions of human existence, those that are largely responsible for or explain much else about it. Just as water is fundamental to water and being a CEO is fundamental to the functioning of a business (see Metz 2015), there are certain properties of human life that are,.