A Septic Sceptic

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love. This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself. The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.

Any true feeling cannot in reality be expressed. To do so is to betray it. To express it, however is to conceal it. True expression conceals what it exhibits. … For this reason an image, an allegory, a form disguising what it means to reveal, has more meaning to the mind than the enlightenment brought about by words or their analysis.

In other words, Husserl wanted to explore how thinking can be thinking of thoughts - and, to extend this style of questioning, how perceiving can be perception of perceived objects, how imagination can be imagination of imagined objects, and so forth. […] these are precisely the questions that drive phenomenological enquiry. In each case, the same ‘mystery’ announces itself: that consciousness is consciousness of something transcendent to itself.