Dialogue on the Infinity of Love

"Not many people have heard of her. And yes, it’s a Platonic dialogue of the sixteenth century, between Tullia d’Aragona and her friend, Benedetto Varchi. It was published in 1547, but it was probably written a few years earlier. The preface includes a note from her friend Muzio who says that he hopes d’Aragona doesn’t mind, but he thought she was being overly modest in using a pseudonym. Muzio knew it was her voice and thinking, so changed the name in the dialogue to Tullia d’Aragona, and published it – all without her consent. Yes. D’Aragona takes a Socratic gadfly-style approach and provokes Varchi with questions about the nature of love. The key question in the dialogue is: is it possible to love within limits? To answer this question, they break it down into other questions: what is love? Is love a noun or a verb? Is it a cause or an effect? If love ends, was it really love? If it ends, does that mean it hit a limit? They propose that love is a desire to enjoy a union with someone who is beautiful, or who you think is beautiful. And the answer regarding whether love is infinite is that it is potentially infinite, but not actually infinite, because it’s impossible to love, or truly love, with an end in sight, or with a goal. No, d’Aragona’s saying that to love with a goal in sight – for example, to stop loving after seduction – is a vulgar form of love. It reduces love to a vile and sordid act. It’s still love, but not ideal or virtuous. She does talk about love as a merging of body and soul. Her dialogue partner, Varchi, theorizes about love, but she thinks he’s too abstract and tells him to “bow to experience,” which she trusts more than any reasons any philosophers can come up with. She jokingly hints that she should know – because love is her profession. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I wouldn’t officially categorize her as an Empiricist, since her approach is to suggest and question rather than decree, but she certainly proposes that experience can inform theory in important ways – which is especially important when it comes to thinking about love. It’s short. About 50 pages. I don’t agree with everything she says because, despite her interlocutor and friend being homosexual, she makes a few homophobic comments. I chose this book because it’s witty and fun, it raises some fundamental questions about the nature of love, and also it’s a fascinating insight into society at the time. Courtesans were among the few women who were educated, since they were expected to entertain with their mind and their body, but they still had to be careful with what they said. D’Aragona is very careful with her language in the dialogue. She is modest and self-deprecating, referring to her “lowly condition” and excuses herself at the beginning of the dialogue with statements like “I might blunder” and “I do not possess either sufficient learning or verbal ornaments…” but she’s also sassy and assertive, telling Varchi when he cuts her off that, “If you hadn’t interrupted me you might have understood better.” “The key question in the dialogue is: is it possible to love within limits?” Some people have suggested that we shouldn’t be including women in the history of philosophy because it’s revising history, but d’Aragona and other women were writing, and they were influencing people. She also wrote an epic poem, Il Meschino , which is currently being translated into English, and she wrote sonnets – some of which are available in a book called Sweet Fire by Elizabeth Pallitto. She hosted philosophical salons at her apartment, prominent authors attended, and they wrote about her as an intellectual character in their own works. She was influential, but she has just been overlooked. There are male philosophers, such as Plato, Rumi, Soren Kierkegaard, and Stendhal, who wrote extensively about love. Either/Or by Kierkegaard is one of my favourites because he addresses one of the key themes that we’ve discussed: the tension between passion and reason, between emotion and intellect. He – or I should actually say his pseudonym Victor Eremita – sets up the book as a choice between either the aesthetic or the ethical, but the question really at the end is can you have both/and, or is there something else? Stendhal wrote On Love to try to understand his obsession with a woman named Matilde, a political activist who he said was as beautiful as Luini’s Salome in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Stendhal wrote the book for himself, didn’t expect anyone to buy it, and warned that the precondition for reading it is to have been made miserable by love – which I suspect is most people, and why it has become a classic and I was really torn about whether to include it on this list. You’re right that women do seem to have taken the topic of love more seriously. One reason might be that it has played a more significant role in women’s lives. bell hooks said that men who have written about love have tended to stay at the theoretical end, and fail to explain the reality of love. While this might be true of Plato, it’s not true for Rumi, Kierkegaard, or Stendhal."