Simon Critchley, What Is a Philosopher?

There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture… is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.

Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense – that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.”

What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.

But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim.

But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like to peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them.

By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at your back. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.

A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect for social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks.

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”

Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XLVII [48] (True Philosophy and Empty Rhetoric)

What I should like those subtle thinkers – you know the ones I mean, my peerless Lucilius – to teach me is this, what my duties are to a friend and to a man, rather than the number of senses in which the expression ‘friend’ is used and how many different meanings the word ‘man’ has. Before my very eyes wisdom and folly are taking their separate stands: which shall I join, whose side am I to follow? For one person ‘man’ is equivalent to ‘friend’, for another man ‘man’ and ‘friend’ are far from being identified, and in making a friend one man will be seeking an asset while another will be making himself an asset to the other; and in the midst of all this what you people do for me is pull words about and cut up syllables. One is led to believe that unless one has constructed syllogisms of the craftiest kind, and reduced fallacies to a compact form in which a false conclusion is derived from a true premise, one will not be in a position to distinguish what one should aim at and what one should avoid. It makes one ashamed – that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game.

‘Mouse is a syllable, and a mouse nibbles cheese; therefore, a syllable nibbles cheese.’ Suppose for the moment I can’t detect the fallacy in that. What danger am I placed in by such lack of insight? What serious consequences are there in it for me? What I have to fear, no doubt, is the possibility, one of these days, of my catching a syllable in a mousetrap or even having my cheese eaten up by a book if I’m not careful. Unless perhaps the following train of logic is a more acute one: ‘Mouse is a syllable, and a syllable does not nibble cheese; therefore, a mouse does not nibble cheese.’ What childish fatuities these are ! Is this what we philosophers acquire wrinkles in our brows for? Is this what we let our beards grow long for? Is this what we teach with faces grave and pale ?

Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity? Counsel. One person is facing death, another is vexed by poverty, while another is tormented by wealth – whether his own or someone else’s; one man is appalled by his mis­ fortunes while another longs to get away from his own prosperity ; one man is suffering at the hands of men, another at the hands of the gods. What’s the point of concocting whim­sies for me of the sort I’ve just been mentioning? This isn’t the place for fun – you’re called in to help the unhappy. You’re pledged to bring succor to the shipwrecked, to those in captivity, to the sick, the needy and men who are just placing their heads beneath the executioner’s uplifted axe. Where are you off to? What are you about? The person you’re engaging in word-play with is in fear – go to his aid… All mankind are stretching out their hands to you on every side. Lives that have been ruined, lives that are on the way to ruin are appealing for some help; it is to you that they look for hope and assistance. They are begging you to extricate them from this awful vortex, to show them in their doubt and disarray the shining torch of truth. Tell them what nature has made necessary and what she has made superfluous. Tell them how simple are the laws she has laid down, and how straightforward and enjoyable life is for those who follow them and how confused and disagreeable it is for others who put more trust in popular ideas than they do in nature. All right if you can point out to me where those puzzles are likely to bring such people relief. Which of them removes cravings or brings them under control? If only they were simply unhelpful ! They’re actually harmful. I’ll give you the dearest proof whenever you like of their tendency to weaken and enfeeble even eminent talents once applied to such quibbles. And when it comes to saying how they equip people proposing to do battle with fortune and what weapons they offer them, one hangs one’s head with shame. Is this the way to our supreme ideal? Do we get there by means of all that ‘if X, Y, or if not Y, Z’ one finds in philosophy? And by means of quibbles that would be shameful and discreditable even among persons occupying themselves with law reports? When you’re leading the person you’re questioning into a trap, aren’t you just making it look as if he has lost his case on a purely technical point of pleading? The praetor’s court, however, restores litigants losing in this way to their rightful position, and philosophy does the same for the people thus questioned. Why do philosophers like you abandon the magnificent promises you have made? After assuring me in solemn terms that you will see to it that my eyes shall no more be overwhelmed by the glitter of gold than by the glitter of a sword, that I shall spurn with magnificent strength of purpose the things all other men pray for and the things all other men are afraid of, why do you have to descend to the schoolroom A B C? What do you say?

Is this the way to the heavens?

For that is what philosophy has promised me – that she will make me God’s equal. That’s the invitation and that’s what I’ve come for; be as good as your word.

Keep dear, then, my dear Lucilius, as far as you can, of the sort of quibbles and qualifications I’ve been mentioning in philosophers. Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness. Even if you had a large part of your life remaining before you, you would have to organize it very economically to have enough for all the things that are necessary; as things are, isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short !

Hannah Arendt, Dedication to Karl Jaspers (Forgiveness and Auschwitz)

What I learned from you and what helped me in the ensuing years to find my way around in reality without selling my soul to it the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil is that the only thing of importance is not philosophies but the truth, that one has to live and think in the open and not in one’s own little shell, no matter how comfortably furnished it is, and that necessity in whatever form is only a will-o’-the-wisp that tries to lure us into playing a role instead of attempting to be a human being. What I have personally never forgotten is your attitude-so difficult to describe-of listening, your tolerance that is constantly ready to offer criticism but is as far removed from skepticism as it is from fanaticism; ultimately, it is simply the realization of the fact that all human beings are rational but that no human being’s rationality is infallible.

Back then, I was sometimes tempted to imitate you, even in your manner of speech, because that manner symbolized for me a human being who dealt openly and directly with the world, a human being without ulterior motives. I had little idea at that time how difficult it would be at a later one to find people without ulterior motives, little idea that a time would come when what reason and clear, illuminating at­tentiveness required of us would appear to be presumptuous, even prof­ ligate, optimism. For among the facts of this world we live in today is a fundamental mistrust between peoples and individuals that did not and could not disappear with the Nazis because it is rooted in the over­ powering evidence of our experience. It is consequently almost impossible for us Jews today not to ask any German we happen to meet: What did you do in the twelve years from 1933 to 1945? And behind that question lie two unavoidable feelings : a harrowing uneasiness at placing on another human being the inhuman demand to justify his existence and the lurking suspicion that one is face to face with someone who worked in a death factory or who, when he learned something about the monstrous crimes of the government, responded with: You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. That a person didn’t have to be a born murderer to have done the first of these things, or a hired accomplice, indeed, not even a convinced Nazi, to have said the second is precisely the unsettling reality that can so easily tempt us to generalize.

The factual territory onto which both peoples have been driven looks something like this: On the one side is the complicity of the German people, which the Nazis consciously planned and realized. On the other side is the blind hatred, created in the gas chambers, of the entire Jewish people. Unless both peoples decide to leave this factual territory, the individual Jew will no more be able to abandon his fanatical hatred than will the individual German be able to rid himself of the complicity imposed upon him by the Nazis.

The decision to leave this territory completely behind us and to renounce completely the laws that it would impose on our actions is difficult to make. It arises from the insight that something has happened in the past that was not just bad or unjust or cruel, but something that should never under any circumstances have been allowed to happen. That was not the case for as long as the Nazi regime remained within certain limits and as long as a Jew could shape his behavior according to the rules that apply under the conditions of a normal and understood hostility between two peoples. At that time there was still a factual basis on which one could rely without becoming inhuman. One could defend oneself as a Jew because one had been attacked as a Jew. National concepts and national membership still had a meaning; they were still elements of a reality within which one could live and move. In the context of such a world, a world still intact despite all the hostility in it, the possibility of communication between peoples and individuals remains. We are spared that blind and eternal hatred that inevitably seizes us if we accept the consequences of the facts the Nazis created.

But the fabrication of corpses goes beyond hostility and cannot be comprehended by political categories. InAuschwitz, the factual territory opened up an abyss into which everyone is drawn who attempts after the fact to stand on that territory. Here, the reality of the politicians of Realpolitik, under whose spell the majority of the peoples always and naturally falls, has become a monster that could only urge us to per­petuate annihilation the way the Nazis continued to produce corpses in Auschwitz.

If the factual territory has become an abyss, then the space one occupies if one pulls back from it is, so to speak, an empty space where there are no longer nations and peoples but only individuals for whom it is now not of much consequence what the majority of peoples, or even the majority of one’s own people, happens to think at any given moment. If these individuals who exist today in all the peoples and in all the nations of the world are to reach understanding among themselves, it is essential that they learn not to cling frantically any longer to their own national pasts-pasts that explain nothing anyhow, for Auschwitz can no more be explained from the perspective of German history than from Jewish history-that they don’t forget that they are only chance survivors of a deluge that in one form or another can break over us again any day, and that they therefore may be like Noah in his ark; and finally that they must not yield to despair or scorn for humankind but be thankful that there are quite a few Noahs floating around out there on the world’s seas trying to bring their arks as close together as they can.

As you said in Geneva, “We live as if we stood knocking at gates that are still closed to us. Today something may perhaps be taking place in the purely personal realm that cannot yet found a world order because it is only given to individuals, but which will perhaps someday found such an order when these individuals have been brought together from their dispersion.”

With that hope and with that intent, I feel the publication of this book in Germany is justified. And in any case, your life and your phi­losophy provide us with a model of how human beings can speak with each other, despite the prevailing conditions of the deluge.

Dave Chappelle, CBS This Morning Interview (Success and Baboons)

Gayle King: It’s so much bigger than money though, Dave…

Dave Chappelle: Oh it was so much bigger than money, but you know… I watched one of these nature shows one time, and they were talking about how a bushman finds water when it’s scarce. And they do what’s called a salt trap. I didn’t know this, but apparently baboons love salt. So they put a lump of salt in a hole, and they wait for the baboon. The baboon comes, sticks its hand in the hole, grabs the salt, salts makes its hand bigger, and he’s trapped, he can’t get his hand out. If he’s smart, all he does is let go of the salt. Baboon doesn’t want to let go of the salt. Then the bushman just comes, takes the baboon, throws him in a cage and gives him all the salt he wants. And then the baboon gets thirsty, the bushman lets him out the cage, the first place the baboon runs to is water, bushman follows him, and they both drink to their fill. And in that analogy I felt like the baboon, but I was smart enough to let go of the salt.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass. – William Faulkner, Paris Review Interview, 1956

All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide. I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing. – William Faulkner, Paris Review Interview, 1956

Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano (Leonard Price), Nothing Higher to Live For: A Buddhist View of Romantic Love

The love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man is often the floor to which people fall after the collapse of other dreams. It is held to be solid when nothing else is, and though it frequently gives way and dumps them into a basement of despair, it still enjoys a reputation of dependability. No matter that this reputation is illogical – it still flourishes and will continue to flourish regardless of what is said in any book. Love, or possibly the myth of love, is the first, last, and sometimes the only refuge of uncomprehending humanity. What else makes our hearts beat so fast? What else makes us swoon with feeling? What else renders us so intensely alive and aching? The search for love – the sublime, the nebulous, the consuming – remains sacred in a world that increasingly despises the sacred. When the heroic and the transcendental are but memories, when religious institutions fill up with bureaucrats and social scientists, when nobody believes there is a sky beyond the ceiling, then there seems no other escape from the prison of self than the abandon of love. With a gray age of spiritual deadness upon us, we love, or beg for love, or grieve for love. We have nothing higher to live for.

Indeed, many take it on faith that romantic love is the highest thing to live for. Popular literature, movies, art, and music tirelessly celebrate it as the one truth accessible to all. Such love obliterates reason, as poets have long sweetly lamented, and this is part of its charm and power, because we want to be swept up and spirited out of our calculating selves. “Want” is the key word, for in the spiritual void of modern life the wanting of love becomes increasingly indistinguishable from love itself. So powerful, so insistent is it that we seldom notice that the gratification is rare and the craving relentless. Love is mostly in anticipation; it is an agony of anticipation; it is an ache for a completion not found in the dreary round of mundane routine. That we never seem to possess it in its imagined fullness does not deter us. It hurts so bad that it must be good.

Practically nobody questions the supremacy of romantic love, which is good enough reason to do a little poking around the foundations of its pedestal. Who is entirely satisfied with the romance in his or her life? Who has found the sublime rapture previously imagined? And if one has actually found such a thing, does it last, or does it not rather change and decline from the peak of ecstasy? And if it declines what becomes of one’s purpose in life? If a purpose is achieved it is no longer a purpose; it can no longer guide or sustain us. Does one taste of nectar satisfy us forever?

When we tire of crass, material goals we may go searching for love instead of, say, religious insight, because love seems both more accessible and more urgent, and because so much of institutional religion in our time has degenerated into insipid humanism. Some claim refuge here but many more, longing for authentic and moving experience, turn to the vision of the “lover,” that source of wonder, joy, and transcendence, who, it is thought, must be pursued and if captured perfected and if perfected then enjoyed forever — or until some other lover lights up the horizon. Love is its own justification, especially for the young who have no other inspiration or no career or responsibilities to dull themselves with as their plodding elders do. Longing bursts through this one channel that seems open, dizzily insisting that the life of unreflecting passion is the highest they can aspire to. They do not reason, but fall. Their elders do reason — obsessively — but fall all the same, thereby admitting that, with all their thought and experience, they find, when driven to extremity, they have nothing but love to live for.

This is not to say that such a surrender must be bad, only that it happens out of instinct and uninformed passion. Love is sweet and it is our nature to give way. But why do we worship it so ardently and why do we break off our search for fulfillment here? Perhaps because we see no other gods. Yet if love is the highest thing to live for then this is a hopeless universe, because we should see in a calm hour that Cupid’s arrows not only thrill us but make us bleed.

“Man Kills Estranged Lover, Then Self.” “Wife Stabs Husband in Domestic Quarrel.” “Love Triangle Leads To Shooting.” So read the headlines with depressing regularity. The stories behind these are only the most shocking of countless tales of passion, but they do forcefully suggest that romantic love is not always a blessing. One might object that hate, not love, spawns such tragedies, but where has such hate come from if not from a prior attachment now broken? We should know from experience how easily what we call love can turn to bitterness, jealousy, and malice, and though we protest that this is not the fault of love, we ought to notice that where one passion arises another is likely to follow. Passions are unreliable, volatile, dangerous, and a poor foundation for happiness.

Divorces, suicides, dissipation, violence, depravity, fanaticism, and other miseries great and small follow from passion, and yet passion is still, in the public mind, considered commendable, a mark of vigor and liveliness. Though everybody will admit that passion gone awry is dangerous, few realize that passion is by its nature likely to go awry. Romantic love is a chancy passion that may result in the opposite of what is desired. It may have happy consequences, too – else it would not have so many votaries – but it raises the stakes in the gamble of life and makes us more vulnerable both to our own weaknesses and to unpredictable fortune. As most of us count the joys of successful love (however we define it) worth the pain involved in its pursuit, we must learn to step lightly and with intelligence. We believe, with some reason, that love can ennoble and redeem us, and call forth our purest energies, but we are slower to see that when the lamp of love flickers out, as it tragically tends to do, we might lose our way in a fearful labyrinth of suffering.

Granted that few will shun the pursuit of romance out of fear of unhappy consequences, what can be done to ameliorate those consequences? If we really have nothing higher to live for, nothing to fall back on, the lugubrious truth is that nothing much can be done to ameliorate them, given the volatile nature of human affections, so it would be wise to make sure there really is no superior, sustaining ideal before committing ourselves exclusively to the chase.

Buddhism, of course, teaches such an ideal, which is nothing less than deliverance from all sorrow, called Nibbana. While worldly joys are mutable and fleeting, Nibbana is established, sorrowless, stainless, and secure. While worldly pains are piercing, unpredictable, and unavoidable, Nibbana is altogether free from pain. It is the end of suffering, the supreme refuge, the ultimate emancipation. The Buddha himself applied many terms of praise to it while recognizing their essential inadequacy. Nibbana cannot be grasped by language or concept, but it can be known and realized by one who makes the right efforts. This is a critical point.

Nibbana is not something that happens to us through an external agency; rather it is something that we ourselves may achieve. The Buddha certainly never would have troubled himself to teach had he not understood that his own realization was not fortuitous but rightly won and that those who followed his instructions could win realization for themselves. That understanding, passed down, has sustained the Buddhist religion to the present day. The diligent are not powerless. Suffering can be overcome.

Still, knowing ourselves to be sunk in confusion and beset by myriad defilements, we might regard Nibbana as too remote to do us much good here and now. We persist in seeing an unbridgeable chasm between saints and ordinary people like ourselves. We think practically everybody is like us (or worse) while maybe there are one or two genuine saints in the world, they presumably having just been born in that condition or with the exceptional good luck to get themselves elevated – who knows how? Yet the human condition is not, according to Buddhism, a fixed sentence to this or that level of wisdom and virtue. Beings are living at all stages of attainment, and they do not stay in the same place. They rise through their own good efforts, and decline through their own negligence in the endless action and reaction of intentional deeds (kamma) and results of deeds (kamma-vipaka).

The Buddha did not teach the Dhamma for the entertainment of those already perfected; he taught it for the benefit of fallible people like us who were struggling to avoid pain and make sense of the world. Even to those who came to him with no intention to scale high spiritual summits he imparted the progressive training of giving, morality and mental development. Why? Because there is always scope for improvement and because the human alternatives are not limited to holy wisdom or cloddish ignorance. Suffering lessens and happiness increases when we make an effort to follow the Noble Eightfold Path, whatever our present condition.

…

What then does this have to do with the problems of love? Simply this. The Dhamma puts the delights and torments of love into perspective, so that we can break the illusion of love as the highest of aspirations and most essential of desires. Henry Thoreau wrote (when young): “The only remedy for love is to love more.” We might amend this to say: The only remedy for love is to love better. The understanding and the practice of the Dhamma do not destroy our capacity to love or enjoy love — far from it. The Dhamma purges the grasping, selfish qualities from our love and makes it purer and nobler.

As we come to understand through personal experience the rightness and goodness of the path of Dhamma, we may discover – slowly or suddenly – that the consuming passions we previously thought to be the only reasons for our existence are really not so, and that something of wondrous value overarches them – indistinct as yet but flashing out now and again from the clouds of possibility. What do our heaving emotions matter compared with that? When we lean hard, out of passion, we will fall hard – such is the nature of attachment. But when we do not lean, when instead we stand upright with an eye to the heights, then the love we bestow flows out of us without weakening us, like a superabundance of vigor. This is metta – loving-kindness devoid of selfishness. It becomes purer to the extent we realize it is not the purest; it becomes happier to the extent we realize it is not the happiest. Nibbana surpasses all.

If, through our own ripening knowledge, we appreciate that our ultimate and highest purpose should be Nibbana, the absolute end of sorrow, then all goals beneath that are cast in a new light. When we have something to live for that is higher than fame, honor, friendship, or health – higher even than love – we can never be utterly impoverished or ruined. We are in fact in a much better position to enjoy whatever may be achieved in worldly life, because we no longer depend solely on changeable circumstances for our happiness.

Love cools, friendships wane, calamities carry off the good and the beautiful. Who can deny it? If we are to overcome despair and grief we must not invest ourselves obsessively in what is perishable. We need to keep our minds, and consequently our actions, as free as possible from craving and attendant defilements like covetousness and possessiveness:

Our actions are all led by the mind; mind is their master, mind is their maker. If one acts or speaks with a defiled state of mind, then suffering follows like the cart-wheel that follows the foot of the ox. Our actions are all led by the mind; mind is their master, mind is their maker. If one acts or speaks with a pure state of mind, then happiness follows like a shadow that remains behind without departing.

— Dhammapada vv. 1, 2

While nobody can cut off craving simply by an act of will, we can certainly loosen its frightful grip on us by following the path and paying attention to the ultimate deliverance that shines at its end.

Love is never the poorer for being accompanied by wisdom. It is not harmed by being deprived of a crown. The agonies we endure and inflict in the name of love come from making love bear too heavy a weight. While we are in the world and engaged in the life of a householder we will naturally form attachments to family, job, friends, and lovers, but the suffering produced from these attachments will vary according to our wisdom and maturity. If we see nothing higher at all and abandon ourselves to the lottery of gaining and losing, we will surely suffer great pain, but if we keep the ideals of the Dhamma before us we will gain a measure of insulation against worldly inclemencies.

…

Even without understanding of the Dhamma most of us will distinguish in theory between love and infatuation. We think of infatuation as capricious, irresponsible, and shallow, and true love as mature, serious, and steady – though in practice it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. At least we recognize some advantage to clear sight and reflection, and this recognition grows sharper with actual experience of the Dhamma. We become less likely to throw ourselves at the feet of the adored object and more likely to stand erect, honest, and mindful, ready to meet our fortune with bravery. To a world that knows nothing loftier than the convulsions of craving, this may seem a loss, but to one who truly experiences the refreshment of wisdom there comes no narrowness but rather a loosening of the bonds of fear and selfishness. One can love without compulsion, out of free will. How gratifying when affection is given, or received, without a bill for services rendered!

Even under promising circumstances there is no guarantee that love will be returned in equal measure, or that it will last long, or that it will provide unalloyed joy. When we depend on it entirely for our happiness we must dwell in the shadow of pain, however bright our amorous interludes. What if we should lose our heart’s support tomorrow? We’re okay as long as we have each other, we assure ourselves dreamily. But we will not have each other long. Quarrels, time, distance, changes, or finally death dissolve all unions of friends, lovers, and relatives, plunging the unwary into despair and meaninglessness; and if we have no wisdom we too may go creeping about the lonely streets with our eyes staring hungrily into other eyes and seeing the same hunger there.

But in the way of the Buddha there is relief from distress and exile. In wisdom there is security. Because love is fragile and temporary it cannot protect us forever, but if we relax our grip it may bloom even better, allowing us to give and receive without encumbrance, frenzy, or fear, offering to each other our strength instead of our weakness.

In a sense the practice of Dhamma is like gradually filling the abyss of ignorance with knowledge until that terrible vacuum is appeased and neutralized and the heart no more cries for unknown succor. The perfected one, clinging to nothing here or hereafter, asks nothing and requires nothing, so he is wholly free. His loving-kindness is just the over-measure, the overflowing of his goodness quite purified of the need, the visceral wanting and the vacillation of ordinary attachment.

While we cannot all at once purify our sentiments of their dross, we can raise the aim of our thought and conduct, and reflect on – indeed, contemplate – the virtues of the Buddha and the noble ones who are free from taint. Their achievement is an image to set before our inner eye, something higher to live for, within and beyond the motions of our conventional life. No good thing prospers in ignorance. The more we understand this flawed universe the more skillfully we can live, and the happier we will be. We love best when we do not love out of desperation.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/price/bl124.html

Louie, Season 4, Episode 10 (Heartbreak and Love)

Dr. Bigelow: So you took a chance on being happy, even though you knew that later on you would be sad.

Louie: Yeah.

Dr. Bigelow: And now… you’re sad.

Louie: Yeah.

Dr. Bigelow: So… what’s the problem?

Louie: I’m too sad… Look, I liked the feeling of being in love with her. I liked it. But now she’s gone and I miss her and it sucks. And I didn’t think it was going to be this bad, and I feel like, why even be happy if it’s just going to lead to this, you know? It wasn’t worth it.

Dr. Bigelow: You know, misery is wasted on the miserable.

Louie: What?

Dr. Bigelow: You know, I’m not entirely sure what your name is, but you are a classic idiot. You think spending time with her, kissing her, having fun with her, you think that’s what it was all about? That was love?

Louie: Yeah.

Dr. Bigelow: THIS is love. Missing her, because she’s gone. Wanting to die…. You’re so lucky. You’re like a walking poem. Would you rather be some kind of a fantasy? Some kind of a Disney ride? Is that what you want? Don’t you see? This is the good part. This is what you’ve been digging for all this time. Now you finally have it in your hand, this sweet nugget of love, sweet, sad love, and you want to throw it away. You’ve got it all wrong.

Louie: I thought this was the bad part.

Dr. Bigelow: No! The bad part is when you forget her, when you don’t care about her, when you don’t care about anything. The bad part is coming, so enjoy the heartbreak while you can, for God’s sakes. Pick up the dog poop, would you please? Lucky sonofabitch. I haven’t had my heart broken since Marilyn walked out on me, since I was 35 years old. What I would give to have that feeling again… You know, I’m not really sure what your name is, but you may be the single most boring person I have ever met. No offense. Give me my dog. Come here. You… Don’t fall down.

“[Chess] was a game that was born during a brutal age when life counted for little, and everyone believed that some people were worth more than others, kings and pawns. I don’t think that anyone is worth more than anyone else. I don’t envy you, the decisions you’re going to have to make. And one day I’ll be gone, and you’ll have no one to talk to. But if you remember nothing else, please remember this: chess is just a game, and real people aren’t pieces, and you can’t assign more value to some of them than to others. Not to me, not to anyone. People are not a thing that you can sacrifice. The lesson is, that anyone who looks on the world as if it was a game of chess deserves to lose.”- Person of Interest, Season 4, Episode 11

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1 (To Be or Not to Be)

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action…