You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper is part of an issue of the Rivista dealing with the theme of ‘Love’ as a general concept, as a philosophical existential problem and as an aspect of transference. The paper
unfolds as a description of the dialectic dynamics of the pair of opposites, love and death.
In Pignatelli's view love is the force which drives man towards self-realisation which itself involves a search for love. Man is born from desire and love, his parents making love, but being born implies at the same time being sentenced to death. Thus, in his view, love as a creative and life-generating force is inseparable from death and destruction.
Optimism and pessimism are, in Pignatelli's view, the two opposite psychological attitudes of man towards life and death. Man experiences life as an alternation between the polarities of joy and sorrow, success and failure, creativity and destruction, and so on.
There follows a description of two phases of love: falling in love and loving. Falling in love, according to the author, expresses the childlike aspect of man: it is the puer, the child within, who falls in love, whereas loving belongs to the realm of the adult, the grown up senex. Loving, he says, means being fully aware of one's own solitude and being able to bear and overcome it. Thus meeting the other is a true union and not simply a clinging.