Question On Love (After 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and 'Intimacy')

Over at Dialectic, Michael has been posting on the philosophical usefulness of love (among other things) – this is slightly irrelevant to the rest of this post, but why not litter posts with pointless links? Isn’t that the reason for the ‘web’ being web-like?

During my recent reading – trying to make some headway into the small library that has collected over the course of the year – I came across the following question:

“Is it possible that any two human beings can really love each other when they have said practically not a word to one another about any subject at all except copulation?”

It was asked of Cecil Day-Lewis during Regina v. Penguin Books Limited (1960) (See: Rolph, C.H. [Ed.]. Lady Chatterley’s Trial (London: Penguin, 2005), p.37), regarding the characters of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The question called to mind the Patrice Chéreau film Intimacy (2001), which left open the question of whether two individuals who don’t speak (or communicate, more broadly considered) to each other can be in a relationship that can be labelled philia?

With fleetingly brief reference to Plato (Lysis) and Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), it does not seem to correct to label purely physical relationships philia ...