LOVE CONNECTION HOW TO

Philosophical accounts of love often overlook the importance of community and conviviality. It is about how our communal relationships with each other quiver with life and feeling: with desire, with hope, with difficulty, with love and sometimes with hate. It may of course involve feasts and carouses (who doesn't like the odd feast, or the occasional carouse?), but at the heart of conviviality is the question of what it means to live together ( con-vivere). In everyday use, вЂњconvivialityвЂќ might conjure images of living it up, or feasting and carousing. In their edited collection of essays The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia, Overing and Passes use the idea of conviviality as a way of exploring what they call the вЂњaesthetics of community.вЂќ I'm taking this idea of conviviality from the work of two anthropologists, Joanna Overing and Alan Passes. So in this piece, we're going to think instead in terms of community, and we're going to be asking what makes a human community convivial.

LOVE CONNECTION HOW TO

This can open up a rift between the question of how to live in society, and the more intimate questions and issues we face in our everyday lives: the poking and prodding and tickling and cuddling and annoying and soothing and arguing and gossiping and loving and hating. We imagine society as something out there, a coolly rational public realm at odds with the hot and messy private world of our domestic sphere. Our biology makes us social.Д«ut what does it mean to be a social animal? One way of asking this question would be by asking вЂњwhat is society?вЂќ But the idea of вЂњsocietyвЂќ can seem rather abstract. But the biological machinery of love is not just about the mechanics of our individual bodies, or about our individual desires. We saw in the previous article how love involves both ancient biological machinery and the various roles we assume within the society of which we are a part. When seen in the context of our evolutionary heritage, it is not surprising the philosophy of love is so very complex. Throughout history, human beings have conjured wildly diverse ways of answering this question, and managing all the complex dynamics of living in society. And the question any self-aware primate one day has to ask themselves is this: How do you best manage all of this complexity? There's a lot to think about, a lot to process. It's a complicated business being a social primate. And through all this, we try to live as best we can. We snuggle and cuddle, struggle and quarrel. We manage the competing demands of living out the lives we want, and living alongside the others on whom we depend.

We like play and mutual grooming and sex.

One of the fundamental questions for human life is this: how can we live well with our fellow human beings-and with the other beings (animals, gods, spirits, strangers, the dead and so on) with whom we share our lives and our worlds?ДЄt root, we are social primates. So one way to make inroads into thinking about love is by thinking about what it means to be live alongside others. Love is not so much personal as interpersonal.

It is about how we feel about others, how we think about them, how we connect with them, what we do with them. Whatever else it might be about, love is about connection. In this week's class, we are exploring Amazonian social philosophies of love and community, and how for social primates, community is fundamental to how we live and love.

Love connection