Drawing on the information provided in the sources, the human experience of Love and Desire is presented as complex, multifaceted, and deeply intertwined with aspects of self, otherness, consciousness, and the transcendent. **Defining Desire** Desire, as explored in the sources, is fundamentally characterized as an inclination for something one lacks, a state of need. It is an agitation or emotion of the soul that impels it to wish for something. Unlike instinctual needs which can be satisfied, such as hunger for food, desire is directed towards a specific object or range of objects, and its satisfaction in the instinctual sense might not fulfill the desire itself. A true knowledge of good and evil necessarily gives rise to desire. Desire is defined by its transcendent object rather than merely the desire for pleasure or the cessation of pain. According to Kierkegaard, desire and its object are like twins, neither existing without the other, yet their coming into existence is marked by separation, not unity. This separation plucks desire from repose and causes the object to split into multiplicity. Desire, in this sense, is awake but not yet specified, potentially manifesting as dreaming, seeking, or desiring depending on the stage. Desire can be seen as a drive outwards, an unwillingness to yield in the face of obscurity. Desire involves a relation with a concrete existent in the world, aiming at appropriation. However, it can also be understood ontologically as a desire of being, characterized as the free lack of being, seeking to be a certain ideal being. The desire to know, no matter how disinterested it appears, is presented as a form of appropriation, mingling with sexual and alimentary currents, a penetration and a superficial caress, a digestion and distant contemplation. It is an attempt to apprehend one's thought as a thing and a thing as one's thought. In a psychological context, particularly within Lacanian theory mentioned in one source, desire is not driven by a fundamental sexual imperative, but by the loss of the real, leaving an incompleteness or lack. Sexual relationships come to "occupy" this field of desire due to their lyrical signifiers and sensitive organism, but they are neither its source nor its solution. Desire is also seen as the dynamism that most infallibly brings the unconscious to light. The romantic-passionate impulse can be characterized as a thirst for pleasure, experience, and sexual conquest. Desire, as discussed in the sources, can be excessive, overcoming other actions and desires. It can be quenched or checked by other desires. Descartes suggests classifying desire by its objects, leading to species like curiosity, desire for glory, or vengeance. The most important and strongest desires arise from attraction and repulsion. Longing is described as an intense desire, sometimes painful, yet the wanting itself can feel like a delight. This longing can be a mysterious desire for the transcendent or perfect. **Defining Love** Love is distinct from mere desire in several sources. Ortega y Gasset emphasizes love's lasting, unsatisfied nature and its productive effect on inner life, constantly driving towards the Other and self-transcendence, describing it as activity where one goes out of oneself. Descartes defines love as an emotion impelling the soul to join willingly to agreeable objects, leading to benevolence and a desire to possess or be associated with the object. Love is experienced when something is thought of as good and beneficial to us. Historically and culturally, love has been understood in varied ways. Ancient Greeks distinguished six types of love, including Eros (sexual passion), contrasting with the modern focus on romantic love centered on a single person. Eros was viewed as dangerous, irrational, and involving a loss of control. Arab love traditions included the idealization of women and the fusion of souls. Romantic love is viewed, at least in part, as a cultural and historical invention. Chivalrous love was seen as love of the soul, inherently faithful, in contrast to sensual love's faithlessness. Love is described as a relation with alterity, with mystery, with the future. It involves an admission of the other's freedom. Love requires humility, courage, faith, and discipline. It is a centrifugal impulse, the wish to care for and preserve the beloved, valuing the other for their otherness. In love, the self expands by giving itself away to the loved object. Love is about self's survival-through-self's-alterity, an urge to protect, feed, shelter, and also possibly possess. True and deep love requires loyalty and feeling, commitment, lasting ties, and sacrifice of other possibilities. It demands unconditional trust and absolute surrender, similar to religious faith. Love is a force of destiny, reaching from heaven to hell. It can be as frightening as death, masking this truth with desire and excitement. Love is presented as a path to spiritual growth, defined as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. This definition highlights that love is much broader than romance, marriage, or parenting, and can be practiced by individuals in various walks of life, such as monks and nuns. Love also involves a deeper, potentially spiritual intimacy alongside physical and emotional intimacy. True love requires mindfulness, concentration, insight, mutual understanding, and communion, making physical intimacy meaningful, healthy, and healing. It involves opening one's heart and sharing sacred zones with someone capable of deep understanding, requiring reverence and respect for the other's mind and body. **The Relationship Between Love and Desire** The sources reveal a complex relationship between love and desire, sometimes presented as distinct, sometimes as siblings, and sometimes with one incorporating the other. Ortega y Gasset sharply contrasts desire (which leaves after satisfaction) and love (which remains unsatisfied and drives movement towards the Other). He also criticizes theories that identify love with the sex instinct, arguing that love's choice is based on different factors than sensual choice. Sartre distinguishes sexual desire, characterized by a troubled consciousness and an attempt at incarnation, from love. He argues that the desire to appropriate an object in the world should not be confused with love. For Sartre, love as an enterprise is the project of making oneself be loved. This contrasts with how love is demanded from the other – as a pure engagement, not reducible to the project of being loved. Levinas, as interpreted in the sources, distinguishes between lowercase 'desire' (which can be satisfied, linked to need and enjoyment) and uppercase 'Desire' (metaphysical, directed towards transcendence, inherently unsatisfied). Erotic love ("eros") is presented as equivocal, simultaneously involving need (concupiscence) and transcendence (desire). It is a paradoxical space where the other appears as an object of need while retaining alterity. The desire animating the caress in erotic love is a lowercase desire that feeds on its failure and is reborn even in satisfaction. This desire is distinct from metaphysical Desire. Eros itself is seen as different from possession and power, characterized by an insurmountable duality of beings. The touch of the caress in erotic love is a search, soliciting what constantly escapes, never finding what it is looking for and gaining impulse from this failure. Bauman describes desire and love as siblings, sometimes born as twins but never identical. Desire is the wish to consume and annihilate alterity, driven by the presence of otherness as an affront, seeking to close the gap and disempower the other. Love, conversely, is the wish to care and preserve, valuing the other's alterity, a centrifugal impulse to expand and give. Desire is contaminated by a death-wish, while love is about self's survival through alterity. From a more positive perspective, Socrates/Plato's view of love involves desire ("eros") aroused by beauty. This desire can ascend from the physical to the spiritual, leading towards a love of truth, goodness, and eventually God. Sexual desire is seen as carrying the seed of its spiritual opposite, being indistinguishable in a profound sense; love allows finding the highest in the lowest. The quest-romance is described as the search of the libido or desiring self for fulfillment. Jung notes that love, in the sense of _concupiscentia_ (desire), is the dynamism that brings the unconscious to light. An unconscious Eros expresses itself as will to power, but where love reigns, will to power is lacking. Eros is described as the principle of relatedness, while Logos is the principle of discrimination. For a man, whose ruling principle is Logos, realizing his Eros (psychic relatedness) is difficult and requires a fair amount of the feminine in him. Some sources suggest that love incorporates or transcends desire. Love involves a transcendence toward discourse with the Other, and also opens to an ever more future future beyond the face, discourse, and Desire – the Desire of Desire. While love gravitates toward need and immanence (lowercase desire), it also involves transcendence. The caress can be understood as language, a "gesture-word" of love and respect, transcending silent exploration stemming from desire. The deepest desire can be awakened by experiences of superabundance, opening humanity to the transcendent. **Self, Other, and Transcendence** Love and desire are fundamentally relational, involving the self and the other. Desire seeks to appropriate and assimilate the other. Sartre describes seduction as risking one's object-state to make the other look at you and be fascinated, aiming to constitute oneself as a fullness of being and make the other recognize their nothingness. The caress, in Sartre's view, is an appropriation of the Other's body, causing their flesh to be born and realizing one's own incarnation, a mutual reciprocal incarnation. However, pleasure leads to a reflective consciousness focused on one's own incarnation, forgetting the other's and causing desire to miss its goal. Levinas offers a contrasting view, where erotic love's intentionality is not disclosure or possession, but search for what escapes. The caress is structured as a yearning and an incapacity to grasp. The other in erotic encounter is described as gentleness, embodying hospitality and opening an exilic dimension of vulnerability. Encountering the other genuinely in eroticism requires an inversion of the caress from exploration based on the self's desire to a gift of the self unto the other, where discourse is introduced. This suggests a move from a self-centered desire/exploration towards an other-centered gesture of love and respect. Love involves the recognition of the other as a subject. Duties of love, according to Kant, involve making persons as such one's end, having an actual effect in their lives. This is distinct from a self-absorbed pursuit of desire-fulfillment. Respect for the absolute value of persons provides a non-desire-based point of view for governing desires. Genuine love involves recognizing one's own estrangement, lack, and need, suggesting that one is not truly "home" until finding the other. Transcendence is a recurring theme linked to both love and desire. Ortega y Gasset sees love as making one actively move toward the Other and transcend oneself. Love is akin to transcendence, a creative drive fraught with risks. Eros is a relation with alterity, mystery, and the future – that which is absent from the world. Love of God or divine beauty is the highest form of love and knowledge, involving an ascent from the physical to the spiritual. Desire for divine beauty awakens an eros for the divine and a longing for self-transformation. Union with God is presented as the ultimate good for human beings, where love of human beings converges with the desire for union, leading to the perfection of one's true self and deepest heart's desire because God loves in return. Longing itself can be an innate desire for the transcendent, the perfect, the "more". Humanity, at its limit, opens itself to the transcendent through awakened desire and imagination. Surrealism sought to escape constraints and recover liberty through love and the world of dreams, where the promises of love and beauty might be kept. **Complexities and Challenges** The experience of love and desire is not without its difficulties and paradoxes. Love, striving to foreclose on uncertainty, meets defeat at the moment of triumph. It struggles to bury its precariousness, wilting if it succeeds. Love hovers on the brink of defeat and will never gain enough confidence to stifle anxiety, being a mortgage loan on an uncertain future. The difference between love and death is sometimes questioned, with love's promises often less ambiguous than its gifts. Desire, in its essence, is presented by Bauman as an urge of destruction, and obliquely, self-destruction. The temptation to fall in love is great, but so is the attraction of escape and seeking a "rose without thorns". Romantic love, in its modern form, is critiqued for compelling the belief that all varieties of love can be found in one person, the unique soulmate. This myth stands in the way of cultivating the different varieties of love. Idealization and fusion, strains in Arab love that influenced Europe, are seen as remedies for the world's hypochondriac phase, ultimately failing to satisfy the longing to understand partners as they are or maintain independence, leaving love ephemeral and loneliness expanding. The conflict between love and the will to power is noted, suggesting that where one reigns, the other is lacking. Love, while requiring care and preservation, can also manifest as expropriation and seizing of responsibility. There is a thin boundary between a gentle caress and a ruthless grip, as a hand that can caress can also clutch. Sartre highlights the contradiction in love where each lover is captivated by the other while demanding a love that is pure engagement, not the project of being loved. The pursuit of sensual pleasure and sexual desire is distinguished from love, and when sought in isolation, can lead to more suffering and be destructive. Companies organizing society to prioritize sensual pleasure use craving to sell products. Sensual pleasure and sexual desire are not love, though sexual intimacy can be beautiful when rooted in understanding, communion, and respect. Psychological perspectives touch on potential difficulties, such as the challenges for a rational man in admitting his Eros. Trying too much to understand another person can lead to resistance and defensiveness, as people often prefer not to examine their darker sides. Despite these challenges, love and desire drive much of human activity. The acceptance of the "folly of love" can lead to a "promesse de bonheur," while scoffing at love out of conceit is a perverse form of self-love. The pursuit of passion and excitement is integral to the erotic experience. The vulnerability inherent in the human condition, perhaps highlighted by exile, reminds us of the need for deep connection and love.