Introduction
What is love? As explained in the paper, Capellanus Andreas explained it as a all-powerful and complex emotional experience that involves changes in your torso, including neurotransmitters (brain chemicals). It impacts your social relationships in contrasting ways, affecting your contact with those around you.
There are many types of love – like the love you share with your partner, family, and friends – and each version you experience is unique. It can fill you with sentiments ranging from joy to grief. Capellanus has other written versions of love including “Law in the Court of love: Judgements of love,” “The Courtliness: Nature of Love” among others but for today’s research we shall look at his version of Courtly Love.
Love
Love is defined as a somewhat internal suffering that is derived from the sight of and extensive thinking about the beauty of the opposite gender. This later leads to someone wishing above all things that are embraced by the other person as they also wish and accept theirs. The suffering of love is always easy to deal with since the feeling becomes balanced on both sides although it causes pain in the fear that the love is not balanced and it lacked it desired outcome.
Love is derived from the word Amor which basically means capturing for the one who is in love is usually captured and entangled in the chains of things like desire and also wants to get others hooked up in his or her chains. It is said that love causes a normal man to be seen for his looks and it can humble even the person coming from very noble characters. Even though it is praised as much, love can also leave a man with the virtue of chastity since those who shine with the light from love do not think straight about embracing a woman, they know little or nothing about. Ovid, one of the most well-known Roman authors, might have easily laid the groundwork for Capellanus’ masterpiece with works like Amores (“The Loves”), Remedia Amoris (“The Cure for Love”), or Ars Amatoria, (“The Art of Love”) among others.
It is somehow not evident on what manner of love should be acquired. In the diversity of its definition, it is said that there are about five ways in which the act of love should or maybe acquired. The five ways include; taking it as beautiful thing, excelling in one’s character, being always ready in terms of speech, having immense wealth, and being always ready to give out what is always sought of you. Even though there are the five ways for acquiring love, it is believed that the first three ways are more likely to be considered than the rest (Robertson, 1968).
Love, however, cannot exist except between two people different genders. Between similar sexes, two male or two women, the art of love cannot find place for similar sexes are viewed as no well fitted to give each other the exchanges of the feeling or even practicing the natural acts that are associated with love. Anything that is forbidden by nature, love will always be ashamed to accept it.
Beauty
Beautiful figures always win love with minimal to no effort especially when those seeking out the feeling are simple. While that kind of love is not blamed as much, there is not that much and great approval for it since it cannot be concealed for long and so it fails to increase. When love becomes revealed, usually it does not help with the lover’s worthiness but it brands them with reputation for evil rumors and brings them grief.
A woman or man should not ask for beauty or even care for people from the high levels of birth since beauty does not fulfil or please if it lacks some goodness in it. The excellence of character usually blesses a man or woman with the act of true nobility and at the end makes them look good and flourish in beauty.
This is because all the human races come from the same stock and at some extent, we all claim to the same ancestor. Crown of love are diverse but character alone can be seen as the main one. Fluency of speech has many times given the incline to love the hearts of the one that do not love since the elaborative line of talk presumes the excellence of the speakers’ character.
The thought of love being gotten through earthly things lie money is somewhat wrong. That is because real love is not bought and it comes from the heart’s affection granted out of pure grace and genuineness. The precious gift of love cannot be paid for at any set or amount of money and if any being, man or woman, is possessed with greed and avarice by giving themselves to a lover for a certain pay, then that is not considered as real love but rather counterfeited love (Burns, 2014).
Some women pretend to be the finest ladies and the best bred different from others and force men to fall in their traps and languish in love for them. Men are unknowingly robbed off all their wealth since they are deceived by the women’s fallacious looks and are usually impelled by the women’s clever and deceiving demands.
The said women are always asking for more and more things as long as the man they have set eyes on looks like a rich person and responds to their demands. Eventually, when the mans’ substance and riches are gone and they become exhausted, the same women despise and hate them. Later they just cast them out and they now appear in their real selves.
Deceit. Any man who would go out searching and seeking the women’s love is seen as those classed out with shameless beings and does not deserve any help from anyone. Therefore, any love that seeks rewards should not be considered to be love anymore by anybody.
It should be seen as an act that is shameful and greedy since no man’s wealth or generosity can satisfy or mitigate it. Any firm man should keep himself away from the allurements of such kind of women for a woman who really loves rejects and hates it when her lover gives her gifts in exchange for love and is willing to devote herself in helping him increase the wealth instead (Newman, 1968).
For a man to keep his love for long, he should make sure that it is not known by an outsider since they always try to destroy it. Furthermore, lovers ought to appear to their beloved as wise in all the respects and restrains of conduct and should not do anything that might make their lovers angry. Moreover, every person is entitled and bound in times of need to go to the aid of their loved ones where they both sympathize with each other. Nothing is considered to be sweeter and praise worthy of a lover than being known to be a generous person and no matter how someone might be otherwise, avarice always destroys them.
As a lover, a man should always offer almost all his services and freely obey their women. They should also set aside his pride and become humble in her presence. He should give her attention and act well towards her in the sense that no one will be sorry to call him out for his good deeds since they always ensure that everything is done perfectly. Love between two opposite sexes may be retained by indulging themselves in the sweet and well observed delightful deeds of the flesh, but in a way and manner that the loved one may never seem worried. A good lover should always make the good and right attempts of always bring in the company of well-mannered men in order to avoid the wicked side if the society.
Morals. Association with bad deeds and vulgar makes the lover look like some sought of contempt to their beloved. There are diverse ways to increase love between lovers after it seems consummated. It is said that in order for it to increase, each lover should see their opposite as rare and difficult to find. That way, the greater and difficulty in exchanging solaces increases their desire and love for one another. Other cases that tend to increase love is when one lover is angry at the other. This is because the other tends to fear losing him or her if the anger increase. Love also tends to increase after it is made public; normally it does not last and begins to frail away (Boase, 1977).
If one of the lovers is to be unfaithful, and maybe the unfaithful is a man, he renders himself as unworthy of the woman love and she should completely deprive him of her warm embraces because the feeling she once felt is now gone. With research and good reason, it has been found that a man is possible of continuous and excessive thinking about a woman in order to bring rise to a new form of love without having to get rid of the previous feeling of love. Therefore, if a woman finds out that her lover did anything of the sought and came back asking for her embraces, she should decline and forbid him from the house as well as treat him as if he was a complete stranger.
We all understand that there are other arguments on other types of love where we do wrong to our neighbors as told in the divine mandate where it is stated that every man is to be self-bidden and love himself. But even if new exclude what is told in the divine mandate, we are bond to live well and love our neighbors since no one can say that they always get along with their neighbors even for the shortest time. As a result, courtly love can be seen as the complex end result of multiple causes, particularly social, erotic, religious, and philosophical ones (Moore, 1979).
Kant (enlightenment’s approach). The 13th century saw the creation of the Roman de la Rose, a long allegorical poem that expresses the concept of a lover vacillating between happiness and despair. The 13th century also produced his one of the few medieval uses of the word courtly love, referring to Amor her Cortes, in the Occitan (Provençal) Romance Flamenca. (Occitan her Fin’amor and French amour fine are closely related terms, also used in medieval texts.)
Kant and Kierkegaard stated in their book: Hidden Debt demonstrated to Ronald Greene how Kierkegaard’s effort to obscure the effects of Kant’s analysis of the existence of evil in religion on his mind. Greene Kant was the first to investigate the part that anxiety (fear) plays in the feeling of ethical guilt. Kant’s theory, according to Kierkegaard, offered no methods for overcoming double dread. For Kant, the moral code was the highest norm he could appeal to, so he called it despair. But moral laws are impersonal norms that bind imperfect humans to the inflexible limits of pure reason.
Kant and Kierkegaard. It would be interesting to point out that love doesn’t seem to play a major role in human life, which is the real issue in Kant’s philosophy in this regard. The essay explores how Kant and Kierkegaard view love in their respective field of work. Let’s start by looking at Kant’s moral metaphysics’ account of love. Then, it concentrates on Kierkegaard’s works of love and the significance of love in his philosophy (Holman, 1951).
As is well known, Kant considered not only saving the empirical science represented by Newton’s physics, but also making room for faith in his critical philosophy. Kant also gave Hope a significant role in his major project. His third major question in critical philosophy is, “What can I expect?” However, his third of the traditional theological virtues stands out because it is absent from Kant’s thought. We must consider whether a philosophy that is unable to locate the center of love is humanly satisfying.
For charity in Kant’s philosophy, his attitude is directed toward the human inclination on ethics. Kant’s self-centered conscience often despaired with self-love as a form of disposition. Kant squabble that moral law requires that we act out of duty rather than impulse. As a result, love must simply be confounded to the ethical requirement of respect for others. As Kant argues,
- Anything that advocates self-love should be forsaken from moral philosophy, and only something worthy of respect should be offered, e.g., Obligations to Self, Justice, and Conscience. These things may not make us love objects, but they can lift our heads and look people straight in the eye, if not defiantly.
According to Kant, love and respect are feelings that come with accountability to others. With love comes the obligation to demand commitment on others. Respect includes obligations that we do not oblige to others. They may exist separately, but are always lawfully united in their obligations, one being dominant in a distinct case and the other accompanying it. In Kant’s ethical theory, the union of love and respect is what makes the concept of love so burdensome that it cannot function as a source of spiritual enlightenment, as Kierkegaard did (Kelly, 1978).
Kant goes on to say that the demand for justice is superior to the claim because it is a principle that limits. Can we apply this to men’s love? For Kant, it looks like respect for men is more valuable than love because it limits. Kant treats gratitude as the manifestation of this accord. Gratitude is honoring someone for something they have done for us. The associated feeling to this judgment is respect to the benefactor (mandatory), while the benefactor is seen only in a loving relationship towards the beneficiary.
As Kant asserts, “thus man’s love requires itself, to portray the world as a delightful moral whole with all its perfection, even if one does not take into account the benefits of happiness.” But then, the moral order must be incomplete because of our inability to achieve mere friendship, let alone justice.
Kant considers noble friendships doable, although rare. Moral friendship is described as “the total confidence of two persons in the mutual disclosure of their private judgments and feelings, to the extent that these findings are compatible with normal respect. This type of friendship that is not dependent on affection may not be suitable as time goes on. The friendship offered by someone fulfills our need to express our most intimate thoughts to someone.
Nietzsche (Nihilism approach). Nietzsche uncovers love’s least alluring impulses, undercutting every false illusion about it. Nietzsche asserts that love “may be the plainest expression of selfishness,” challenging romantic ideals of sensual love. Love, in his opinion, is similar to greed and the drive to possess. Since love is an instinctual force rooted in our biological and cultural dynamics, it cannot be seen as a morally upright behavior. Additionally, socializing these tendencies frequently results in discrimination and even psychological anguish, particularly in women.
However, he doesn’t seem to be trying to persuade his readers that love, in its self-serving manifestations, has to be transformed, nor does he imply that even the most widespread love fantasies require correction. Instead, he noted that for this love to work, there must be a strong human inclination toward sensual love, and he applauded some of the ingenuity of the art of love and roles. the part each person plays. These roles are played differently by men and women, and Nietzsche spends a lot of time emphasizing the massive differences between the sexes’ responses to romantic love.
Aphorism 14 exemplifies Nietzsche’s attempts to reveal the more self-centered reasons that encompass sensual love. Here, Nietzsche asserts that the sensation of both love and avarice is driven by the need to own and assimilate, to transform “something new into oneself.”
Nietzsche writes, “Greed and love: what different feeling these two terms evoke! However, it’s possible that the same instinct is at work and has two different names – once deprecated by those who have, and who are afraid of their possessions, and the other time seen from the point of view of those who are not satisfied but still thirsty (O’Donoghue, 2006).
The experiences of greed and love are the same drive or instinct, but depending upon the level of satisfaction one has achieved, this drive will be alternatively named ‘greed’ or ‘love’: people who feel their possessions (their lover for example) threatened by others will name other’s instinct for gain greed or avarice, whereas those who are still searching out something new to desire will impose a positive evaluation on that instinct and call it love.
Love is really a desire to possess something else. This has been exaggerated and glorified by those who seek to gain something else through love. In this essay, the authors question the meaning of love, specifically its altruistic and greed-based aspects. Nietzsche’s larger project is to destabilize the alleged state of moral opposites.
Nietzsche discusses how instinct manifests differently in the different sexes in aphorism 363, “How Each Sex Has Its Own Prejudice About Love”. Nietzsche claims that men and women do not have “equal rights to love” because they each see love as a different thing. They do not have the same expectations about the opposite sex and the romantic experiences they will share with each other.
Conclusion
Since Nietzsche’s writings on love have had a large impact on feminist reflections on sexuality/gender, there is a lot of discussion about what he means by love. Although he does not make any elevated assertions about how one should fall in love, his discussion of the difficult impact of erotic and romantic relationships on women, as well as commentary his book about the ironies that both sexes encounter in love, force readers of both sexes to examine their roles in love. It’s hard to read these statements without wondering if you’re doing things wrong in your romantic relationships.
Reference
Boase, R. (1977). The origin and meaning of courtly love: a critical study of European scholarship. Manchester University Press.
Burns, E. J. (2014). Courtly love undressed. In Courtly Love Undressed. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Delahoyde M and Capellanus A: The Art of Courtly Love.
Holman, C. H. (1951). Courtly Love in the Merchant’s and the Franklin’s Tales. ELH, 18(4), 241-252.
Kelly, D. (1978). Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love. Univ of Wisconsin Press.
Moore, J. C. (1979). ” Courtly Love”: A Problem of Terminology. Journal of the History of Ideas, 40(4), 621-632.
Newman, F. X. (1968). The Meaning of Courtly Love: Papers of the First Annual Conference of the Center for Medicine. State University of New York Press.
O’Donoghue, B. (2006). The reality of courtly love. In Writings on love in the English middle ages (pp. 7-24). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Robertson Jr, D. W. (1968). The concept of courtly love as an impediment to the understanding of medieval texts. The meaning of courtly love, 1-18.