The Erotic Phenomenon Book

140414: this is a later addition: i have upped the rating to a five, put it on my favoritephilosophy shelf, because it seems most immediately practical, that it is useful in ethical behaviour, i have recommended this to another who was reading kierkegaard, then have used this to understand my own motives, my fears, my doubts, when someone expresses apparently honest love for me. this is not skepticism of the other but of myself. this is a most conscious attempt to use philosophy to know real life. maybe this is the wrong situation, the wrong measure, or simply too intellectual. i read sections of this book attempting to understand, but it is the question of healthy emotional development that is perhaps not fully explored, the how rather than the that, which is engaged in emotional response. the 'question of being' that so absorbs heidegger, is here the 'question of love'...

first review: this is a four, as the entire experience of reading wildly ranges between 3 and 5, though indeed perhaps this changes more reading of this philosopher, more reading of this text. for I really doubted certain assertions through laying groundwork, psychological philosophy or philosophical psychology... that can be expressed in his style of rhetorical questions, even as the range of erotic phenomenon goes from self to other to child to god, and is characterized by moving from erotic reduction- recalling phenomenological reduction- of the chain of questions, from 'does anyone out there love me?', to the reversed claim of advancing 'I love you' first, to 'here I am', to denying self-hatred by learning 'another loves me more than I hate myself', but these seem to me based on shifting, uncertain, grounds of the way he defines 'ego'- is it impossible as he claims to love oneself? is the flesh of the other only activated through love? is it so very unusual to precede the other in saying 'I love you?'...

but this concept of 'erotic reduction', this idea that it is not 'I think therefore I am' but 'I love therefore I am', is greatly explored in describing the varied sorts of love we humans can create, can experience, can only in this way know infinity through our finite selves, even if I do not know if this psychic exchange or advance is truly so independent of any 'economy' or transcends and/or ignores 'reason', even whether there is ultimately the need for a third view to validate our love, a child borne of love, a god who insists in loving us, but his exploration, his movement, from love to fidelity, of how it is always the lover and not the beloved who gains the most existentially, blindly, completely, suffering- this stuff is great. this makes the act of love, the advance, transcend all reciprocity and reason, all infidelity or lying, this is the way some of us love to believe love is the final, the ultimate, the eternal or infinite gift, we humans may know...

so do not be frustrated by the first fifty or sixty pages, do not worry that your answers conflict with his rhetorical questions, it does get better, or at least more understandable. this is an 'application' of phenomenology, that best works if you have read a few phenomenological philosophers, this is the style I like to think, this is encouraging me to think, this ends on a high point, even if I do not see it or just do not find it necessarily leading to belief in god... well yes we would all like to be affirmed, erotically assured, in our lives, but I think most of us sort of muddle through without the low points of hatred of one to another, of one to oneself, of all to all- or the high points of being because we love, are loved, exist eternally in love... I think we are all, usually, somewhere between these extremes...

final note: I suggest the use of 'flesh' in Marion's work is very different from Merleau-Ponty, in that it is not ontologically defined as what we and the world are both styled of, but this flesh is only activated, found, in human to human expression, interaction, and is clearly not simply of the world, of 'objects', hence there is subject/object, which is surpassed in his 'erotic reduction'...