Crystallisation
Crystallisation; the Salzburg branch; Stendhal on love
Passionate love rests on an operation of the imagination: the lover loves, in large part, the image he has himself built of the loved one. Stendhal sees its source in nature, which commands us to enjoy, and in the idea "she is mine".
The lover keeps adorning the loved one with perfections he invents, like crystals covering a twig.
"Crystallisation" is an argument by Stendhal (Henri Beyle) (On Love (De l'amour), 1822, ch. II "Of the Birth of Love", 1822) on the question "What is love?" (answer: a useful illusion). Its claim: Passionate love rests on an operation of the imagination: the lover loves, in large part, the image he has himself built of the loved one. Stendhal sees its source in nature, which commands us to enjoy, and in the idea "she is mine". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.
In the salt mines of Salzburg, a bare branch is thrown into the depths of the mine. Two or three months later it is taken out covered with sparkling crystals: the branch can no longer be recognised. Stendhal sees in this the image of what happens in a lover's head. Starting from admiration and hope, the mind sets about adorning the loved one with a thousand perfections, drawn from everything that comes along. He calls this "crystallisation". Passionate love would then be less a meeting with a person than a work of the imagination on her.
click a premise to reject it
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where the lover adorns the loved one with perfections by a work of the mind, and yet these perfections are all real: the lover's attention has only seen what others did not look at.
Objections
3Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.
JJosé Ortega y Gasset 1926 · attacks premise 2In an essay on Stendhal ("Amor en Stendhal", published in 1926-1927 and later collected in Studies on Love), Ortega judges the theory of crystallisation false: it is more concerned with explaining disenchantment than the birth of love. He presents love as a form of attention and knowledge: to love is to give the other an attention that indifferent people do not give, and not to invent qualities for them.
no reply
In an essay on Stendhal ("Amor en Stendhal", published in 1926-1927 and later collected in Studies on Love), Ortega judges the theory of crystallisation false: it is more concerned with explaining disenchantment than the birth of love. He presents love as a form of attention and knowledge: to love is to give the other an attention that indifferent people do not give, and not to invent qualities for them.
MMarcel Proust 1913 · attacks the conclusionIn Swann in Love, Swann finds that Odette looks like Botticelli's Zipporah. He puts a reproduction of the painting on his table, sees in it merits that he congratulates himself on finding assembled in a woman he might possess, and his desire grows from this image. This is crystallisation turned into a novel. But at the end, when Swann no longer loves, he cries out that he wasted years on a woman who was not his type: the narrator calls this a fatuity that returns as soon as Swann is no longer unhappy and his morality drops. The cold look that denounces the illusion is therefore not presented as truer or better than the lover's.
no reply
In Swann in Love, Swann finds that Odette looks like Botticelli's Zipporah. He puts a reproduction of the painting on his table, sees in it merits that he congratulates himself on finding assembled in a woman he might possess, and his desire grows from this image. This is crystallisation turned into a novel. But at the end, when Swann no longer loves, he cries out that he wasted years on a woman who was not his type: the narrator calls this a fatuity that returns as soon as Swann is no longer unhappy and his morality drops. The cold look that denounces the illusion is therefore not presented as truer or better than the lover's.
Michel de Montaigne 1580 · attacks the conclusionIn the essay "Of Friendship", Montaigne says that if he is pressed to say why he loved La Boétie, he can only answer: "because it was he, because it was I". This attachment does not rest on a list of qualities, real or lent. He contrasts it with affection for women, whose fire is "more active, more cutting and more bitter", but "rash and fickle", like a fever.
no reply
In the essay "Of Friendship", Montaigne says that if he is pressed to say why he loved La Boétie, he can only answer: "because it was he, because it was I". This attachment does not rest on a list of qualities, real or lent. He contrasts it with affection for women, whose fire is "more active, more cutting and more bitter", but "rash and fickle", like a fever.