On Love

For the last 10,000 years, up until around the late 1800s, an individual’s environment was composed of “things” that were generated according to the following principle: an individual would leave their “house,” find a stone or a piece of wood that could be of use, bring it home, and from it create a chair, a tool, a shelf, etc. In other words, the initially found object was not discovered in its completed form but only as potential. The world was unfinished for a long time, and the completion of our immediate surroundings required our constant participation and activity. This is the principle of Refinement.

As history shows, this principle of relating to the other went so far that even people, at the beginning, connected in unfinished (unknown) qualities since marriages were largely predetermined. The lack of knowledge provided only the first contextual potential upon which love relationships were built. The possibility of this future love was given by that general perspective of developmental potential (anti-entropy).

Passive Consumers Instead of Active Participants

Today, things are different. Our immediate environment comes to us in its most “perfect” (intentional pleonasm) form, and through further handling (consumption), it only deteriorates. From houses and chairs to friendships, and even relationships with lovers, our first contact is an ecstatic obsessive state of intoxication with the perfection and “completeness” of the other. More precisely, we feel that the “otherness” is necessary to complete our emptiness, whereas before we saw the need for our actualization in the completion of the other. Here we recognize an inversion of our inner attitude toward the external world.

The Ideal Image

Problem plus Solution. This is the foundation of the ideal image. A symbolic process.

The ideal as a principle is of a driving nature. It translates Chaos into Order, and that is its basic algorithm. In line with the human romantic spirit, the history of civilization depicts the Ideal as a static, finished, harmonious image that requires no further movement. In such an illustration, we notice that it lacks the fundamental driving force. Given the level of completion, the “Ideal” image is not ideal but merely (illusorily) finished. However, since this “static image” has stood as the definition of the ideal for many years, it has left consequences on our definitions of reality. The ideal is one side of the compass needle from which our ethical and aesthetic laws are constituted. When that needle does not move and is portrayed as a static moment, it leads to problems and a loss of direction.