What is love?
What is affection?
Let us explore them — through literature, philosophy, and myth. I have always been fascinated by the concept of affection. It is, perhaps, the most explored emotion in art and literature — the eternal muse of poets, painters, and philosophers alike.
When I first heard Don Juan by Mozart — that opera of seductive rebellion — my eyes filled with tears. I was twenty-three then: young, feverishly alive, and stepping into the vast, trembling landscape of philosophy and literature.
Don Juan does not love the woman; he loves the act of loving. In that sense, he is the opposite of Dante's Beatrice. His love is existential — an assertion of freedom through seduction. Later, when I read Camus, I began to see affection from another angle.
Like Camus' Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus, he knows his pursuit is meaningless, yet he continues — because passion, even futile, gives form to the void.
"To multiply what you can't keep is to triumph over nothingness." — Albert Camus
I have never fallen for the illusion of affection.
I have always loved the passion of desire.
Sometimes, I wonder — what kind of passion or affection am I still waiting for?
When I discovered Greek myths, one legend pierced my heart like a divine wound — the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus descends into Hades for love; he is the archetype of the artist-lover. His failure to save Eurydice becomes the essence of human longing — love reaching for eternity and falling short.
Orpheus' backward glance is fatal — the gaze of memory and desire. Eros as nostalgia for the lost.
And now, I find myself looking back too — knowing it may hurt, yet yearning to catch that divine glimpse. Perhaps that is love. Perhaps that is affection. Perhaps it is the Platonic ascent toward beauty itself, as Plato so bravely imagined.
When I began one of my essays on love in my book The Outsider, titled "On Love", I sought not to romanticize the sentiment but to excavate its metaphysical depths. I am not a passionate lover; I am too flawed, too inward for ordinary affection. So, I turned to philosophy — Kierkegaard, Artaud, Rilke — to elevate love from mere sentiment to metaphysical inquiry.
I have always leaned toward metaphysical love, not the skin-bound affection of common hearts.
Even my love for philosophy has been that — an erotic hunger for words that enter the bone, not ideas that merely skim the mind.
When I first read Dante, I was mesmerized by Beatrice — she is Theophany, divine revelation. Dante's love is Platonic, mystic — eros transfigured into theology. Through her, the poet ascends toward God. Love becomes a ladder from the finite to the infinite, echoing Diotima's teaching in The Symposium. I was captured by this woman — or perhaps by what she represented: the possibility of transcendence through longing.
In Works of Love, Kierkegaard transforms romantic love into agapē — unconditional, faith-rooted love. Unlike eros, it asks for nothing in return. I seek not love that must be reciprocated, but that Nietzschean love — cosmic and revelatory, blazing within the heart of man.
During my years of studying philosophy — or rather, during my own Le Gray Bastion Period — I encountered Schopenhauer. He struck me deeply, as he once struck Nietzsche (before Nietzsche outgrew and abhorred him). For Schopenhauer, love is merely the trick of the Will — nature's cunning illusion to make us reproduce. Lovers believe they seek happiness, but they are only serving the blind Will to Life.
Thus, his lover is tragic, not romantic — a puppet of metaphysical lust.
Yet in The Outsider, I tried to make that puppet alive again, to ask:
"Do you think that you love a person?"
Do you think — how can you love that person's bewilderment? It's all about affection — the affection we must show toward our fellow humanity.
I am a devoted reader of Dostoevsky, though at times I drift toward other philosophies and literatures. I've always admired how Tolstoy portrays Anna as the tragedy of eros against society. She represents what Kierkegaard called the aesthetic stage — love that burns without ethical grounding. When her passion collides with moral law, she disintegrates — crushed between desire and the world's hypocrisy.
Even now, writing about Anna Karenina, I feel goosebumps.
The love between Anna and Vronsky remains one of literature's most tragic meditations on love. Kierkegaard, in Either/Or and Works of Love, describes three stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
Anna lives entirely in the aesthetic stage — she seeks beauty, passion, immediacy. Love for her is not moral duty but existential intoxication — the feeling of being truly alive for the first time. Your love, perhaps, is like that too: metaphysical, beyond human territorial affection.
Thus, Anna's suicide is not mere despair — it is the metaphysical breakdown between the aesthetic (individual desire) and the ethical (social order).
She is crucified on the contradiction between freedom and duty.
"The greatest unhappiness is not to be unloved — but to be loved and still enslaved." — (in Kierkegaardian spirit)
I am reminded here of the Katha Upanishad, which says:
"When all desires that dwell in the heart are destroyed, the mortal becomes immortal."
Anna, however, embodies the opposite — she is the mortal overwhelmed by desire.
Her love is the Ātman forgetting itself, mistaking passion for essence.
Another beauty I have always sought in art is the myth of Eros and Psyche — the union of soul and desire, divine love and mortal curiosity. My most beloved depiction of this divine couple is by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
