The philosophers Andrew Kaethler and George Grant have been two of my primary formative influences, so I thought that for today I would share their philosophies with you. Both of these Canadian philosophers propose that love is not a sentiment or a feeling. As Kaethler said more times than I can count in the two classes I took with him, "Love is the acknowledgement of otherness." (I believe this is a quote from Grant, but I've never read much Grant so don't take that as fact.)
In other words, love is an active process in which we say of another, "You are not me and I am not you; you are completely separate from me, your thoughts are your thoughts, my thoughts are my thoughts, and while they may agree they are never the same." The essence here is that when we love people we are acknowledging that we must relate to them, we must communicate with them and we must seek to understand what they mean to tell us, not what we want to hear. We avoid objectification of another soul by acknowledging that they think differently than us, know differently than us and come to different conclusions than we do. Then, we begin the difficult process of relating to one another and trying to bring our genuinely different, distinctly separate selves closer to one another by relating to them.
This process is painful, and it involves, on our part, the willingness to allow others to see us as they really are, and the more important willingness to see others as they really are. This is, I think, what Sartre means when he famously says, "Hell is other people." The process of genuinely relating to another human being the reality of the self is among the more painful (though rewarding) processes available to mankind. Nonetheless, the painfully vulnerable center, where the real self resides and our darkest impulses sit next to our most elevated desires, is the only place where we can really ever get to know one another.
I believe that it is genuinely possible to really relate to people in a conversation about pretty much anything. For example, if you and I sit and talk for two hours about how well we like chicken nuggets, it's true that we really could have a great conversation. While the subject matter is trivial, ithe surprising reality of human communications is that the little things are more important than we could ever know. Besides, although we are unlikely to have touched upon the particularities of Plantinga's theory of properly basic beliefs, a careful observer can, in a conversation about chicken nuggets, observe the conversational patterns of their parter, how dominant or submissive they are in conversation, how ardently they feel about cuisine, their general sentiments on the industrialized food system, how they feel about the loss or cheapening of genuine American culture, and a plethora of other matters.
My basic point is that once you really start listening to someone, once you acknowledge that they are not you and take their position as completely original from your own, there is a great deal of room to genuinely get to know that person.
Working into my last post, a major problem here is honesty. If you're a vegetarian and you go on and on for two hours with me about how awesome we think chicken nuggets are, you've presented a self to me that does not really exist. From thereon out, I will base my knowledge of you from a set of propositions, inflections and positions which you do not genuinely hold, which is distinctly likely to cause both of us some level of awkwardness or displeasure in the future.
So there you go, that's today's lesson: let other people be themselves and don't tell lies. If you do both of these, life will probably be a lot better for everyone.
It's been wonderful,
-J.R.M.C.
In other words, love is an active process in which we say of another, "You are not me and I am not you; you are completely separate from me, your thoughts are your thoughts, my thoughts are my thoughts, and while they may agree they are never the same." The essence here is that when we love people we are acknowledging that we must relate to them, we must communicate with them and we must seek to understand what they mean to tell us, not what we want to hear. We avoid objectification of another soul by acknowledging that they think differently than us, know differently than us and come to different conclusions than we do. Then, we begin the difficult process of relating to one another and trying to bring our genuinely different, distinctly separate selves closer to one another by relating to them.
This process is painful, and it involves, on our part, the willingness to allow others to see us as they really are, and the more important willingness to see others as they really are. This is, I think, what Sartre means when he famously says, "Hell is other people." The process of genuinely relating to another human being the reality of the self is among the more painful (though rewarding) processes available to mankind. Nonetheless, the painfully vulnerable center, where the real self resides and our darkest impulses sit next to our most elevated desires, is the only place where we can really ever get to know one another.
I believe that it is genuinely possible to really relate to people in a conversation about pretty much anything. For example, if you and I sit and talk for two hours about how well we like chicken nuggets, it's true that we really could have a great conversation. While the subject matter is trivial, ithe surprising reality of human communications is that the little things are more important than we could ever know. Besides, although we are unlikely to have touched upon the particularities of Plantinga's theory of properly basic beliefs, a careful observer can, in a conversation about chicken nuggets, observe the conversational patterns of their parter, how dominant or submissive they are in conversation, how ardently they feel about cuisine, their general sentiments on the industrialized food system, how they feel about the loss or cheapening of genuine American culture, and a plethora of other matters.
My basic point is that once you really start listening to someone, once you acknowledge that they are not you and take their position as completely original from your own, there is a great deal of room to genuinely get to know that person.
Working into my last post, a major problem here is honesty. If you're a vegetarian and you go on and on for two hours with me about how awesome we think chicken nuggets are, you've presented a self to me that does not really exist. From thereon out, I will base my knowledge of you from a set of propositions, inflections and positions which you do not genuinely hold, which is distinctly likely to cause both of us some level of awkwardness or displeasure in the future.
So there you go, that's today's lesson: let other people be themselves and don't tell lies. If you do both of these, life will probably be a lot better for everyone.
It's been wonderful,
-J.R.M.C.
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