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A General Theory of Love
I'm reading this book, and will post my thoughts about it here, piece by piece.
LJ is such a versatile medium. :-)
Chapter One
"Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding -- and so does the bulk of emotional life." Makes me want to try my hand at poetry! Wonder how badly I'd do. Some of my prose might be poetry if I just put lots more line breaks in it... Not sure. But I think of myself as someone with lots of reasoning ability and lots of emotions :-) so maybe the art would work once I gained some skill at the craft.
"If we only knew where and how to look, we should be able to find emotional laws whose actions a person could no more resist than he could the force of gravity if he fell off a cliff." I like the idea of looking for these laws. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that? Were we all so sure that emotions had no governing laws? What then did we think governed emotions? I love it when I ask myself a question like this and I find I don't even know what I think. It's like asking what color I see in my blind spot.
[no specific quote] I am relieved by how little they respect Freud's structure. I think the dude was a crackpot. A pioneer, to be sure, since he thought the psyche was studiable -- but he didn't study it with rigor. He discarded any data not fitting his theories. (He discarded an entire sex because they didn't fit his theories.) Thank goodness SOMEone else out there (three degreed psychiatrists, no less!) thinks so too.
"Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." -- Bertrand Russell. Hmm. How often do I do this?
"In the 1990s, the collision of pharmacological efficacy with psychoanalytic explanations all but reduced the latter to flinders." Hmm. I'm not going to be satisfied with a wholly chemical answer here. But I suspect that's not what they're going to give...
"As neuroscience unlocks the secrets of the brain, startling insights into the nature of love become possible. [...][I]f that's not the secret of life, then we don't know what is." Great quote. :-) The nature of love as the secret of life. Well, I guess I don't think it's EVERYthing, but it sure is a big chunk of what I might call the secret of life. If life had a textbook, love should have a couple thick chapters.
LJ is such a versatile medium. :-)
Chapter One
"Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding -- and so does the bulk of emotional life." Makes me want to try my hand at poetry! Wonder how badly I'd do. Some of my prose might be poetry if I just put lots more line breaks in it... Not sure. But I think of myself as someone with lots of reasoning ability and lots of emotions :-) so maybe the art would work once I gained some skill at the craft.
"If we only knew where and how to look, we should be able to find emotional laws whose actions a person could no more resist than he could the force of gravity if he fell off a cliff." I like the idea of looking for these laws. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that? Were we all so sure that emotions had no governing laws? What then did we think governed emotions? I love it when I ask myself a question like this and I find I don't even know what I think. It's like asking what color I see in my blind spot.
[no specific quote] I am relieved by how little they respect Freud's structure. I think the dude was a crackpot. A pioneer, to be sure, since he thought the psyche was studiable -- but he didn't study it with rigor. He discarded any data not fitting his theories. (He discarded an entire sex because they didn't fit his theories.) Thank goodness SOMEone else out there (three degreed psychiatrists, no less!) thinks so too.
"Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." -- Bertrand Russell. Hmm. How often do I do this?
"In the 1990s, the collision of pharmacological efficacy with psychoanalytic explanations all but reduced the latter to flinders." Hmm. I'm not going to be satisfied with a wholly chemical answer here. But I suspect that's not what they're going to give...
"As neuroscience unlocks the secrets of the brain, startling insights into the nature of love become possible. [...][I]f that's not the secret of life, then we don't know what is." Great quote. :-) The nature of love as the secret of life. Well, I guess I don't think it's EVERYthing, but it sure is a big chunk of what I might call the secret of life. If life had a textbook, love should have a couple thick chapters.
no subject
I can understand that. And I don't necessarily disagree. I have a limited knowledge of Freud. I've always felt I should learn a bit more about his theories. Until I read AGTOL, that is. Now, he would simply be interesting to study from an historical perspective, to understand the impact he's had on thought and society, but not from a scientific perspective.
I've got a lot of other things to do these days, however :-)
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no subject
:-)
(why do most of my posts have some weird characters appended to them? I'm ending this comment with a right parenthesis)
no subject
What a coincidence! :-)
why do most of my posts have some weird characters appended to them?
I don't know. Are you updating directly from the web page, or using some kind of client? (Can you even use the client for comments?)