Love Letters

Je t'aime (2015)

Soph Laugh

Private Collection

Love Letters  in Sensuous Human Activity

The role of the Love Letter

What is the role of the love letter?  Is it that the love letter serves as an emancipatory instrument intended to serve a pre-objective domain? In other words, love letters free our minds beyond the ordinary or mundane toward those plaisirs de l'isle enchantée, spilling over (in classical baroque fashion) into the realm of the fantastical. 

Philosophers warn of the dangers of writing love letters for as instruments they fail to reconcile human subjectivity with actual life. Edmund Husserl warned that objective knowledge endangers our commitment to subject agency. 

I would argue that writing love letters reconciles language, negates empirical thinking, and revolutionizes human consciousness.

Love letters are the language of liberation 

Love letters fail to give an adequate account of how the negation of empirical thinking enables a sultry word to convey us to the proposed state of liberation. Sensuous letters do not give us practical life information, their purpose is not to convey a moral judgment. 

They are more similar in nature to a rebellious consciousness, which is pertinent to the salvation of human consciousness dwelling within. Love letters ignite a human being to the immediate, natural basis of primary perception. 

Love letters are more than the realities expressed in our empirical understandings, and it is this difference, or this excess, that enables love letters to show the contingency of objectifying concepts and empirically evident relations. Specifically, sensuous letters offer us access to a "fictitious world" that the realistic-conformist mind rejects. The love letter thus represents abstract truth relative to the facts of production because it helps to emancipate the senses and unshackle the instinct.

The inwardness of Love Letters

Love letters facilitate a sense of inwardness. They influence actual human lives for the better. Ultimately love letters are of practical significance; hence, by reconciling our desires with natural life we transcend social relations and enter into an imaginary realm; here we acquire an awareness that radical change is possible within actual practical activities. Thus, love letters retain a practical significance, even if they are far different from what we know about ordinary relations and conditions. 

It becomes difficult to explain how any literary discourse would finally result in the promised liberatory effects. If love letters participate indirectly in some realm of the spirit, then it is difficult to find any remaining excess that would motivate a liberation with practical activity. 

Love letters take us outside the realm of actual life. They are, in a way, more than the reality expressed in our empirical knowledge. 

How can an encounter with a love letter restructure consciousness in a way that impacts actual activity? A critic might restrict the answer for social cohesion. This explanatory lacuna provides us access to an inward or subjective domain, one that interchanges fact and fantasy.

The Ideal Love Letter

Our actual lives are defined objectively, that is, by a collection of real human events known through observation of the natural world and our encounters. When the encounter is limited to ontological limits of objective imagining, the sensuous love letter serves as an antidote to the domination of social norms by rationalism. This is why so many relationships flatten, they suffer from the disenchantment attributed to empirical thinking. 

Once empirical thinking connects the love letter to actual life-activity, the language is just what we expect it to become in ordinary life -flat.

Love letters create an alliance between the people exchanging them because there's a negation of the empirical thought, which restores subjectivity. 

Our awareness of the empirical flattening process is a significant advancement in the consideration of the love letter as a human sensuous activity. Making plausible the claim that love letters negate practical life, as we understand it, that is, as a reality contingently represented in the understanding by means of empirical concepts. 

Love Letters as Sensuous Items

As soon as love letters proceed to give empirical reality a sensuous claim, the whole of the sensuously presented context that gives an individual actual contact with the object of their imagination which metamorphosizes into a new set of determinate objects and relations. 

What we need, then, is an understanding of how love letters remain in the actual world, even as they negate forms of social context expressed within objective systems of thought. The liberatory function of writing love letters must remain within the actual life situation of the individuals exchanging them. 

So, if we were to defend our ideal love letter or our process of liberation, we must find some way to associate love letters with mediating sites of personal uniqueness that would reacquaint us with our peculiar life-worlds in a way that is never quite expressed within the objective languages of empirical knowledge and common social discourse. 

We could argue that sensuous love letters provide each individual with a dimension of embodiment beyond encapsulation by empirical concepts. We could claim that love letters, as sensuous items, literally exemplify natural bases of actual life that are inalienable and immediate.

The Nature of Love Letters

Love letters do not belong to the flesh of one's own body, but they serve as markers of an external world of things subjectively processed in human life. Love letters ignite one's own peculiar, sensuous embodiment and serve as a gateway for personal contact with all contingent things that are actual. 

This sensuously presented literary world is indeterminate from the standpoints of perception, thinking and measurement expressed in rational knowledge. 

Love letters are sensible in themselves, a life-world with incarnate subjectivity beneath the objective historicity of truth imposed by ordinary life interactions. The body life is isolated, unless acted upon. This does not indicate that love letters do not evoke actual sensations in the individual, but the experience is one of sense-perception and sensuous need, in other words it comes from nature. 

Sensuous Elements

Sensuous nature is the starting point of a love letter, it's one's own sense-experience that is shared. It could be that natural life as it is empirically known through sense-experience is witnessed subjectively in a sensuous way that hints at a presence of a non-objective, natural content that love letters display. 

The new language forms elements in the flesh of the body and opens the possibility of an arena of immediate acquaintance that is pre-perceptual and not expressed in any of the object languages of the natural world. Love letters function as life-enhancing bulwarks against the objectification that arises when communication is only used to control and manage real resources. 

What develops from the love letter is a sensuous awareness of flesh that remains separate from the contents of cognitive consciousness. It is an exemplar of illusion that narrates its own nature from the invisible flap of a wing to the personally exhibited context of flesh that serves as the hallmark of the visible absence.

Hence, the love letter shifts from being literary in the strict sense to an awareness of a pre-cognitive, an inner life-world of sensuous wholes, and then subsequently from the evidence of sensuous flesh feasting upon itself, to an awareness of unity with the received love letter. 

Understanding Love Letters

It is surely perplexing to reconcile human subjectivity with natural life by means of a descriptive aesthetics that depends upon the principle of the flesh's response to literature. This path confounds this writer's reason of what is peculiar and personal in finite human life. 

Aesthetic sensual experience, as described herein, arises from contact with the love letter, not from some escape through the supernal through a consciousness that transcends. Natural philosophers focused on the mind-body oppositions of the modern era, will find it odd to speak of a natural context beyond empirical knowledge. 

Confronted with a love letter, however, the natural philosopher recognizes the interruption of empirical thinking that leads to an awareness of actual life, a series of events that restore our belief in autonomous human activity.