Tuesday, 6 March 2007

Love, Marriage & Sex

OK just a note but here are the 3 quite different entities.

Romantic Love evolves from belief in a unique and special self. Brought to its zenith during the bourgeois period along with the Romantics. Ownership and the glorification of individuals on the one hand matched by the great struggles to achieve union with equally unique and special partners. The cult of celebrity today replacing the days of heros, no suprise that celebrities are expected to find "love" with each other. There are 2 partners because the structure of consciousness places entities as objects of the subject. A "love partner" is the objective reflection of the subjects own belief in their uniqueness. I am king and you are queen.

Sex is the biological component. It involves all the emotions and feelings, the sensuality and joy at being with a member of the appropriate sex. There is selection here on a biological level, some partners being more chemically and gentically suitable. It strives for sex and pleasure in sex. It is not especially selective and is automatic if no restraint is applied. Obviously its goal - unknown to the protagonists is reproduction. There 2 sexes are a reflection of the evolutionary advantage of genetic mixing. By recombining genetic combinations in sex a much greater diversity is created for selection to work upon and so speeds up the evolutionary process so that organisms are more robust in th face of environmental variation. There are not 3 sexes because the increased problem of finding a mate would ofset the advantage of mixing.

Marriage is the social component. It provides a closed system of financial inheritance. It provides a limited system for spread of sexual disease. It reinforces the responsibilities of parents for their children. It encourages the conscious dynamics over the biological dynamics. Married couples are encouraged to limit their awareness to their partner only

Love again... Now given these understandings it is clear how a reproductive union should work. It is actually quite boring and nothing like the celestial dramas of romantic fiction, or the fiction i have involved myself with. A sexual union is born of sexual desire which has its culmination most likely in childbirth - unless restraint or incapacity intervene. It is mediated through marriage which provides the stable social bond. The proper love to be reflected then is between 2 quite ordinary people who do not idolise one another or view one another as particularly special, who simply agree to respect one another for the duration of the mutually satisfying encounter of reproduction, and who understand the pleasure that they give one another and are happy to offer that to their partner unconditionally.

Holy Matrimony. So what the place of God? In a world of self interest it is remarkable that humans do not end up fighting in a Hobbsian way. Indeed at times of social collapse they do as in civil wars. It seems that practically the only thing that keeps people from each others throats are the extraordinarily complex systems of allegiance and selfish compromise that divide peoples energies between a miilion factions and attitudes. The human world is indeed divided and it is that division that slows human endevour to almost a stand point - see the slow process of enriching Africa. So to with a sexual union. If the partners are in it for their own interests then it is simply a freak of coincidence that they are together at all. As soon as they start fighting the bond will break. The stabalising influence of marriage is that the bond or contract is viewed as more important than the selfish interests of the parts. This is the power of Law, that we have no choice but to submit to that greater force. This is the stabalising force of God, the ultimate force, below which we have no right to anything that is not given. So there is Holy Matrimony a force greater than anything i said above, a contract in the eyes of the most powerful, that will maintain respect and duty within a partnership even after the emotions, thoughts and body have withered. This is truely beautiful and a hark back to the Romantic idea that people are made for one another. However here it is by the grace of God that we are together, and not because I have found my perfect match.

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