CC BY
189
Section 8. Psychology
Sergienko Irina Aleksandrovna, Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, postgraduate student, the Department of Philosophy, Higher School of Psychology, graduate E-mail: Sergienko.bi.rey@gmail.com
Platonic love or loneliness: existential choice
Abstract: This article describes the emergence of sensual love in the context of the existential fear of loneliness and realize the inevitability and irreversibility of human existence. Analysis of the crisis phenomena and accompanying changes of the personality by means of experience of love is offered. Also the problem of freedom and choice is reviewed, as the main preconditions for a dependent partner. The impact of loneliness on the understanding of personality, its values and way of thinking are analyzed.
Keywords: existential analysis, loneliness, individual existence, creative self-realization, wisdom, the meaning of love.
Introduction
Each person endures losses in his life. Inevitability and irreversibility of existence put pressure upon mentality. The existential fear of loneliness can appear without being recognized, and then there is a feeling of forlornness and emptiness. Love appears as attempt to avoid loneliness, so, it preserves our mentality against indelible awareness of futility of our attempts to unite with those who are similar to us. Emergence of love isn’t caused only by desire to escape from loneliness, it supplies the person with belief and force, introduces a storm of new impressions, develops quality of cognitive processes. Does it cause increasement in socialization? Probably, but it isn’t unambiguous. If a person seeks to make an impression on other person to whom he or she has feelings to cause jealousy or to recreate a sociability aura around himself, then love goes on advantage of socialization. But there is also such course of love when there is no desire to communicate with someone else besides an adoration subject. We will talk about this kind of love further.
Love as prerequisite of changes
As Marlene Dietrich said, only the ugly duckling is happy. It has time to think alone over meaning of life, friendship, to read a book, to help other people. This is his way to becoming a swan. Only the patience is necessary! Don’t we think over ourselves when we are in love? Love promotes thoughtfulness and a constant flow of thoughts. Such judgment introduces wisdom.
There is a tendency to changes. This tendency depends on subjective experience at the moments of nostalgia, the highest point of sensuality, experience of a close and dear subject. What forces us to rethink the settled vision, to take other understanding of things into account?
Wisdom is gained eventually, but first of all it comes in connection with shocks and crises. It would
be a big mistake and delusion to think that all people are subject to such changes. The longer we trust in something, the stronger it becomes in us, becoming the carrier of values and a factor by which we are guided on life. For some people an adventure means a slight daily stress, for others each day doesn’t introduce anything new, life becomes similar to a conveyor, the mechanisms, which are a cornerstone of maintenance of passivity, disappearing in a depth of maintenance of the habitual way of life which isn’t involving numerous power costs and is not bringing a personality in area of discomfort.
What does force us to change the relation to life? It has to be something strong, igniting from within, devouring when it emerges and poisoning when in disappears.
One could name many reasons which would take place at each change ofpersonality, but none would be as strong as feeling of true love. The true love generates incomparable extent of life at which a person feels strength to realize himself according to what he would like to be. It is possible to tell that the feeling of love has self-actualizing character because it was granted to a person to represent his hidden desires, to embody undercover hopes and to sublimate passionate aspirations.
Love in the context of an existential analysis
Love, if it is not the Platonic feeling, wants to be realized. Without vital embodiment, it forever remains illusion, fiction. Each time, feeding ourselves with this lethargic invention, we move away from reality, giving opportunity to a seductive dream to carry us away afar deep disappointment and gloomy loneliness. Feeding on this fantastic veil, we can experience desire to express this love somehow, and here the creative self-embodiment takes place.
Our existence isn’t reduced only to receiving happiness, it demands sense and even if a person feels pain, he will keep the chosen path because this way represents
106
Platonic love or loneliness: existential choice
sense, giving the importance and necessity to individual existence. “Even if significance which we attach to life, is deeply wrong even if our approach to problems and tasks constantly attracts on us misfortunes and sufferings, we never easily give up on it" [1].
Aiming to be embodied in reality, love takes the steps which are represented in meetings. Meetings provide opportunity to see another person as an identity. One becomes interested in what excites another person, what is important for him, at the same time enforcing us to share information about ourselves, involving us into a dialogue. Feeling can vary through every meeting. Depending on force of the relations, quantity of meetings plays significant role. Strong relations remain invariable despite rare meetings because, while meeting the person, we get to know each other in what that we mean for each other. Relations can remain, but they aren’t authorized without the moment of meeting [3].
Specificity of love is that we experience positive emotions, we fall into a certain activity, a process of feeling, we endure value, we worry about another person and about the fact that we care about him, we feel coherence and belonging towards him or her. Such feelings arise to a favorite book and music as well. Listening to music, we feel that we understand that music wants to tell, what it means to us. While having feelings, we experience extreme degree of openness and desire to allow something to affect us. To feel means to give one’s internal life to someone’s service, to allow something to approach our heart. Life starts moving when we have feeling, feelings set in motion, awaken life. Love has to occur at the level of feelings, in love we concern that other person touches us. It is not sentimentality, but deep acceptance of somebody’s relation to our own life. Thus, love is experience of value, and sensual value is always existentially relevant.
When loving people relate to each other, their separate “I" enter into resonance with each other and somewhere deep it forms in certain “you”, forming relationship. The feeling of relation with the loving person represents deep phenomenological vision of essence of other person.
Reflections about love in the context of loneliness
The Russian philosopher V. S. Solovyov wrote about sense of love. In his opinion, the feeling of love has back opposite tendency with reproduction. He explains it with the following fact. The strong love has three options of development: remains unanswered, comes to a tragic end, or remains fruitless [6]. Soloviev also allows the option of realization of the extraordinary strong mutual
love, giving “the most ordinary” posterity, but such cases the extremely rare.
Why mutual and long-lasting love having extraordinary force is so rare? There is a tendency to allow existence of desire to suffer from anguish by means of feeling of love finding a way out in unique creative manifestations. Dante Alighieri’s love to Beatrice Portinari can be a striking example of such love. The young nine-year-old poet met love of all his life during the holiday in the house of her father, and it became the main event of his life. “It seemed to me, — the poet wrote, — she is rather a daughter of God, than a mere mortal .. .Since that minute I saw her, love seized my heart to such an extent that I didn’t have the power to oppose to it and, shivering for excitement, heard a secret voice: “Here is the deity which is stronger than you and will own you””. The feeling towards Beatrice was too loftily and touched the deepest strings of poetic soul. Exactly thanks to Beatrice, according to Dante Alighieri, he stopped being the ordinary person. His known poem “Divine Comedy” is impregnated with the most gentle and touching notes ofPlatonic love to Beatrice. The collection “New Life” is devoted to a short love story of Dante, the sad print of a presentiment of death of his darling impregnated with tragic motives in view of Beatrice’s death [8]. Such love is impregnated with loneliness, as if it was created to remain an unembodied playful whim representing all forbidden desires and never giving an occasion to be offended.
Romantic natures endowed with ardent imagination, possessing sublime nature, directed to an ideal of love, knowledge and truth are inclined to extraordinary Platonic love. Apparently, this strong feeling feeds such natures from within, introducing meaning to existence and leaving an indelible trace forever. The feeling of loneliness can be both a consequence and a reason of manifestation of Platonic love.
Today the binding of Platonic love to absence of physical desire of a partner is found. In this article it turns out that Platonic love arises owing to understanding of impossibility of physical intimacy between partners for any reason, and it may not be the lack of desire of one of the partners. So, the Platonic love often happens to be an unfortunate fate of two lovers.
The reasons for understanding of impossibility of intimacy can come from the partner’s own conviction or belief in inadmissibility of manifestation of instinctive behavior, as well as owing to being guided by principles proclaiming a prohibition of demonstration of intimacy. All specified elements can occur at the unconscious level. Since childhood we learn to understand the world in
107
Section 8. Psychology
a certain plane. If a feeling of denial of demonstration of instinctive desires to our love object is cultivated in us or a prohibition on possession of love object is imposed, a partner can distort perception of reality, bringing events into a certain sequence conducting to a situation where demonstration of mutual sexual feelings will be impossible.
Is experiencing strong love feelings an attempt to stop awareness of irreversibility of life? In this case unfortunate love is a kind of outpouring acceptance of existential loneliness.
Whether love is one of the secret spells which is thought up only not to feel lonely? It is a deceptive side oflove, but it is very interesting when you look deep into of sensual experiences, since if love is a production of fear of experiencing existential loneliness, then is love not a protective mechanism against lonely pathetic existence? And why do we fear loneliness so much? “Loneliness became some shameful illness. Why does everyone avoid it? This is because it forces to think. Today Descartes wouldn’t write: “I think, therefore I am”. He would say: “I am alone, thereforeI think”. Nobody wants to remain alone: it allows too much time for reflections. And the more you think, thy cleverer you become — that is, more sad” [2].
Ability to think enters us into a human dilemma; without having instinctive abilities for adaptation to the fast-changing world, a person is capable to choose, create a choice, and misleads himself by means of this choice ... “Endowed with consciousness and self-awareness, a person learns to allocate himself from the environment, understands the isolation from nature and other people. It leads then to understanding of his own ignorance, the helplessness in the world and, at last, to understanding of an extremity of life, certainty of death” [4].
Love is represented as a choice not to endure completeness of existential loneliness, it urges to soften understanding of a complete freedom of action and a need to work one’s way of life for isolation and non-interference from others. It is impossible to define where freedom comes to an end and love begins, and it is even more difficult to tell, what part of loneliness carries love in it. We are born with feeling of loneliness and we can’t overcome it. “Certainty of death and emptiness of our life
are absolutely incompatible with that raised statement of identity of oneself and another one, which is carried by feeling love” [7].
The freedom of choice frightens and makes a person vulnerable in relation to dependences. Love, thus, can be considered as a sort of dependence at which the person feels need in other person.
To become a healthy person, it is necessary to come at first to existential questions, and then to find the answer to them. Erich Fromm wrote about the existential dichotomies shrouding our existence and through one of them he pointed to a question of loneliness. On the one hand, we are absolutely lonely and have to decide whom to be and what to do, we have to realize that we work our way of life in deep loneliness, we die and we live individually, but also it is necessary to remember that finding happiness depends on communications with those who are similar to us and, in particular, from association with similar people, having feeling of an evidence of one’s living. “Taking this step, he crosses the limits of his isolation, the individual existence, becoming part of something bigger than he is, and realizes himself in the context of the power to which he submits” [5, 160].
Living with someone by means of the allied relations, according to Fromm, we lack confidence and the internal force which are necessary for freedom and independence. Love is “a union with someone or something being outside of the person on condition of preservation of isolation and integrity of one’s own I” [5, 3].
A choice made for association with a similar person is overcoming egoism. “The sense of human love in general is a justification and rescue of identity through the victim of egoism” [7].
Giving an individual particle and finding a burning feeling of unification with similar ones, a person comprehends truth of reasonable consciousness and inexpressible experience at the same time, the power of freedom and attachment, weakness before greatness of feeling and inviolability before destruction of this feeling. Love is, without doubt, more, than an attempt to avoid loneliness because it contains a solution to insoluble dichotomies of existence and a sense of an individual embodiment in a creative exaggeration of consciousness.
References:
1. Adler A. Practice and theory of individual psychology: Lectures on introduction in psychotherapy for doctors, psychologists and teachers. - M.: Publishing house of Institute of Psychotherapy, 2002.
2. Beigbeder F. Love lives three years. - M.: Azbuka, 2013.
3. Lengle A. Life, filled with sense. Applied logoterapiya. - M.: Genesis. 2008.
108
Formation of creative abilities of students in the process of socialization
4. Fromm E. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. - New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
5. Fromm E. The art of loving. Research of the nature of love. Translation by L. A. Chernyshyova. - Moscow: Pedagogics, 1990.
6. Soloviev V. S. Philosophy of art and literary criticism. - M.: Art, 1991.
7. Soloviev V. The meaning of love./V. Soloviev. - M.: Contemporary, 1991.
8. Tatarinov V. Divine comedy. Preface. - M.: Eksmo, 2007.
Holnazarova Matluba Kholbutaevna, Ph. D., Associate Professor, Department of Pedagogy and Psychology, Gulistan State University of Uzbekistan E-mail: Babajanova-69@mail.ru
Formation of creative abilities of students in the process of socialization
Abstract: The article describes the factors that influence the formation of creativity and socialization of the individual, which is an important component in the long process of the formation of personality in certain social conditions. The process of assimilation of human social experience in which a person has transformed social experience, personal values and orientations, selectively introduced into the system of behavior, the norms and patterns of behavior, which are accepted by society or group.
Keywords: behavioral norms, moral norms, beliefs, human factors of creativity, intellectual development, and socialization.
Холназарова Матлюба Холбутаевна, Кандидат психологических наук, доцент кафедры педагогики и психологии Гулистанского государственного университета Узбекистана
E-mail: Babajanova-69@mail.ru
Формирование творческих способностей личности в процессе социализации
Аннотация: В статье описываются факторы, влияющие на формирования творческих способностей и социализация личности. Они являются важным компонентом в длительном процессе формирования личности в определенных социальных условиях, процесс усвоения человеком социального опыта, в ходе которого у человека преобразуется социальный опыт, личностные ценности и ориентации, избирательно вводится в систему поведения те нормы и шаблоны поведения, которые приняты в обществе или группе. Нормы поведения, нормы морали, убеждения человека определяются теми нормами, которые приняты в данном обществе.
Ключевые слова: нормы поведения, моральные нормы, верования, человеческие факторы творчества, интеллектуального развития и социализации.
Знания, которые дают образовательные учреждения, призваны воспитывать в молодежи преданность высоким нравственным идеалам, а также способствовать развитию страны. Эти требования в полной мере соответствуют концепции образования в целях устойчивого развития, принятой в Узбекистане.
Выступая на Международной конференции «Подготовка образованного и интеллектуально развитого поколения — как важнейшее условие устойчивого развития и модернизации страны», состоявшейся
в нашей столице, глава государства подчеркнул, что в Узбекистане за последние годы проделана огромная по масштабам и глубине работа по кардинальному обновлению и реформированию сферы образования. В этом выступлении также отмечено, что принципиальная особенность реализуемой в республике модели заключается в том, что после девяти лет учебы в общеобразовательной школе следующие три года учащиеся обучаются в специализированных профессиональных колледжах и академических лицеях, где каждый из них
109
