Love's Work: Gillian Rose on the Value of Getting it Wrong

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July 14, 2023

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To be a philosopher you need only three things. First, infinite intellectual eros: endless curiosity about everything. Second, the ability to pay attention: to be rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself, the care of concentration--in the way you might look closely, without touching, at the green lacewing fly, overwintering silently on the kitchen wall. Third, acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement. Eros, attention, acceptance.

- Gillian Rose -

Love's Work: Gillian Rose on the Value of Getting it Wrong

""There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love," the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his classic on the art of loving. In some sense, no love ever fails, for no experience is ever wasted -- even the most harrowing becomes compost for our growth, fodder for our combinatorial creativity. But in another, it is indeed astonishing how often we get love wrong -- how, over and over, it stokes our hopes and breaks our hearts and hurls us onto the cold hard baseboards of our being, flattened by defeat and despair, and how, over and over, we rise again and hurl ourselves back at the dream of it, the delirium of it, the everlasting wonder of it. How to go on doing it undefeated is what British philosopher Gillian Rose examines in her part-memoir, part-reckoning Love's Work (public library), written in the final years of her prolific and passionate life, and published just before her untimely death of ovarian cancer." Maria Popova shares more. { read more }