Dialogues of Love

...can we love children and health if we do not have them, even if we desire them? This makes me hold that love and desire are two contrary affections of the will, and you have told me that both can exist together; clarify this doubt for me.

PHI. If love is only for things that have being Italian: essere. In this philosophical context, "being" refers to actual existence or presence as opposed to potentiality or absence., why would desire not also be for those same things?

SO. Because just as love presupposes the being of things, so desire presupposes their privation Italian: priuatione. A technical term in Aristotelian philosophy meaning the absence or lack of a quality or thing that should naturally be there..

PHI. For what reason does love presuppose the being of things?

SO. Because knowledge must precede love, for nothing could be loved if it were not first known under the guise of good Italian: spetie di buona. This refers to the concept sub specie boni—the idea that the human will only moves toward things that the intellect perceives as being "good" in some way.; and nothing falls within our knowledge unless it is first actually found in being, because our mind is a mirror and example—or better said, an image—of real things, so that there is nothing that can be loved unless it is first found to really exist.

PHI. You speak the truth; but for this very same reason, desire cannot apply except to things that have being, because we do not desire anything except those things that we first know under the guise of good. And for this reason, the Philosopher A common title for Aristotle in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This refers to the opening of his Nicomachean Ethics: "The good is that which all things desire." defined the good as that which everyone desires, since knowledge is of things that have being.

SO. It cannot be denied that knowledge precedes desire; but rather, I would say that not only is every cognition Italian: cognitione. The process of acquiring knowledge or the knowledge itself. of things that are, but also of those that are not, because our intellect...