Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 An Eye for Truth and Beauty: A Metaphysical Preface to Middle English Literature of Love and Knowledge
- 2 A Two-fold Symbol of Knowledge: Sight in Natural Philosophy
- 3 The Hostility of Love and Knowledge: Sight in Medieval Love Poetry
- 4 The Hospitality of Love and Knowledge, I: The Shared Language and Shared Ideas of Erotic Love and Spiritual Love
- 5 The Hospitality of Love and Knowledge, II: Erotic Love and Natural Philosophy Revisited
- 6 The Interference of Self-reflexiveness: The Poet and the Parasitisme of Love and Knowledge
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The Interference of Self-reflexiveness: The Poet and the Parasitisme of Love and Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 An Eye for Truth and Beauty: A Metaphysical Preface to Middle English Literature of Love and Knowledge
- 2 A Two-fold Symbol of Knowledge: Sight in Natural Philosophy
- 3 The Hostility of Love and Knowledge: Sight in Medieval Love Poetry
- 4 The Hospitality of Love and Knowledge, I: The Shared Language and Shared Ideas of Erotic Love and Spiritual Love
- 5 The Hospitality of Love and Knowledge, II: Erotic Love and Natural Philosophy Revisited
- 6 The Interference of Self-reflexiveness: The Poet and the Parasitisme of Love and Knowledge
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But whenever the sentence ‘I see the tree’ is so uttered that it no longer tells of a relation between the man – I – and the tree – Thou –, but establishes the perception of the tree as object by the human consciousness, the barrier between subject and object has been set up. The primary word I-It, the word of separation, has been spoken.
(Martin Buber)Love itself cannot persist in the immediacy of relation; love endures, but in the interchange of actual and potential being.
(Marlin Buber)For he hath toold of loveris up and doun
Mo than Ovide made of mencioun.
(Chaucer)The relationship between love and knowledge in medieval poetry is a parasitic system comprising elements of hostility and hospitality. The poet's self-conscious awareness that in broaching the subject of love he somehow denies its essence contributes to the system. Martin Buber offers a helpful perspective on the functioning of relation and nonrelation when he appeals to the phenomenal epistemology of vision and integrates that into an analysis of what happens in other relationships, including those of love. Buber's theological philosophy ostensibly focuses on a problem of relation based on knowing, yet his epistemology finds application in the discourse of love: he transforms epistemology into a discourse rooted in social as well as cerebral reality. In doing so, he restates a late medieval concern: the tension between the immediacy of relation and the articulation of that relation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight , pp. 182 - 206Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 1995