stonebridge on arendt on st. augustine's notions of love

i’m a bit behind on catching up to my post stubs for the lyndsey stonebridge episode of on being (which i listened to back in july), but it’s really good. i’m gonna try to catch up over the next few days.

today’s thoughts are about the section of the interview where they discuss arendt’s thoughts on love. as most of my friends know, i think a lot about love from a few different angles. i was raised in the church so love from a christian perspective has always been around. that lead to thinking about love from the greek perspectives and they define (at least) 6 types of love. and most recently, i’ve been getting into bell hooks’ writings on love. mostly in her book all about love, but it some other places, too.

well, apparently hannah arendt wrote her dissertation on st augustine’s thoughts on love.^‡ as i look back at the transcript for the episode, i see that the section i marked to look back at is pretty jumbled, but i think i wanted to point out two things from that part.

first, stonebridge mentioned at least three types of love that arendt discussed. one was worldly love: appetite, desire, a love of the future (in my words - a want for what has yet to come). another was transcendant love, which is the love of God, the love of the past (which i don’t really understand). and then another was neighborly love, which is neither transcendant nor worldly. it’s the love that says “i want you to be.” this seems like a good type of love to know about and have around.

second, is that there are actually different types of love required in different spaces. it seemed to me like arendt proposed that all love needn’t been in all spaces. for example, neighborly love is what’s needed in political spaces, but desire and also transcendant love are not.

there’s a lot more elaboration needed to make any of this make real sense, but that’s all i’ll put out for now. too much else to do today!

‡ writing a dissertation on love wasn’t a thing i thought one could do, but now that i hear that, maybe i shouldn’t be so resistant to getting a phd… i could totally see myself writing a dissertation about love as it relates to urban planning.

words / writing / post-processing
395w / 16min / 17min