BBC
A History of Ideas: Sartre on Love
Aidan Turner on Sartre and Love
Does love compromise our freedom? Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre certainly thought so. To him, love wasn’t a blissful merging of freedoms, but a constant struggle. When two people are together, they will naturally objectify each other, each constraining the other. The result is that in a relationship we either become submissive to the other’s notion of us, or dominate them. Either way, freedom is lost. Imagine what it must have been like to be a fly on the wall in his and Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship!
Want to hear more on this topic?
Here’s the whole episode from A History of Ideas – Psychotherapist Mark Vernon on Freud.