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. 

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