Beauty Torn by a Prick of Thorn: Rumi’s Philosophy of Human Love

Abstract

Human self-conception is often reflected in arts, sciences, human institutions etc. concerning the human existence, its nature, potencies, its place in the universe occupied the philosophical debates more frequently than the questions related to “human sentiments”. Love as the most innate human sentiment was expressed frequently in traditional folklore, poetry, and other art forms. Rumi’s literary expressions of human love deserve analysis in terms of “philosophy of love”. More often than not, human love is explained in terms of self-love, egoism; sometimes reduced to self-preservation or sexual drives or simply praised as civic virtue contributing to a social unity. Love for Rumi seems to imply more than that consisting primarily of an ontological feature of human beings and as well as an aesthetic and ethical virtue. Against philosophical theories of his time, Rumi offers “love” as a way of knowing that brings epistemological and ethical integrity of human being to another dimension. In this paper, we will analyze how this unity of knowing and doing come together in human love. For Rumi, only the infinity of human love can overcome the difficult task of bridging the infinite distance between human beings, nature, and the divine.