Como não esquecer de viver o presente: um ensaio sobre a espiritualidade do amor

Abstract

Pierre Hadot shows us, in his interpretations of Goethe and the tradition of spiritual exercises, that true love has a transforming potential, since it corresponds to an exercise of the spirit capable of revealing the ideal that surrounds and constitutes the reality of lovers. Differently, Foucault explains, by Baudelaire and the culture of the aesthetics of existence, that the transfiguring practice of love propitiates the creation of the present time 'as if through fiction' and not by the presence of the ideal in the real. Therefore, perhaps we can affirm that the spirituality of love, conceived by Hadot, would reside in the eternalization of the present moment and in the universalization of the soul, whose beauty articulates the lovers ideally to the Nature. On the other hand, in the case of the foucauldian aesthetics of existence, the spirituality of love would concern the fictional violation of the condition that binds the self, the others and the world to the nostalgia for the past or to the anxiety for the future. Thus, in this essay we envisage (a) to point out the differences between Hadot and Foucault regarding the experience of the present time and the spirituality of love in order to (b) indicate how both would understand the historical movement of the self and the others in the world.