Short Abstract
:
Stendhal’s well known observation that romantic love is analogous to a dead branch covered with glittering ice crystals implies that romantic love is an illusion. I would add, that it is a necessary illusion. Camus argued that there is no meaning to life except the one an individual makes. This seems to me another more encompassing “necessary illusion.” Rimbaud ultimately rejected meaning and love, after a full psychic immersion in both. Rimbaud, from my perspective, represents what happens when necessary illusions fail. It seems to me impossible to study romantic love from a purely academic perspective. How can we use the insights of poets and philosophers to stimulate our own more academic, insights? In this presentation I wish to explore through cognitive cultural theory and methods, how love makes meaning possible and how the necessary illusion of both love and meaning hinge on the dynamic relationships between change “writ large,” and stasis. I will briefly lay out a theory of love and meaning as dependent on the external dialectic between change and stasis in social and cultural systems.
