The Lovable, the Good, and the Real

    There are deep conceptual relations between ‘love’ and ‘real’ - the thought I started this series of reflections with. A conception of ‘real’ that is restricted to physical objects makes no sense in general; many things (love included) are real without being physical objects. Love can be real or not, but as we normally speak, we mean that can be (more of less) genuine, lucid, pure verses counterfeit, sentimental, or distorted. 

   It sounds odd to wonder whether in general all experiences of love are unreal (e.g. illusory), as do some people who want to reduce everything spiritual to something evolutionary. Mothers don't really love their children; they are programmed to behave in certain ways because it promotes the survival of the species. Rubbish. 

  Sartre thought that loving someone was like ‘giving them permission to be.’ I would probably curse the day I was born if I didn't see myself as loved by someone or if I had never been loved by anybody such that it wouldn't even make sense to me that someone could love me. I think this is true of all people. 

    Another connection: love does cognitive work – it shines a light on reality. To pity someone suffering, for example, tells us something deep about the nature of a human being and what it means to suffer: pity is a form of the conviction that someone is suffering (Ludwig Wittgenstein). Being pitiless is a way of making the ego a tyrant over reality; of building walls around the ego to shut the reality of suffering out – like Scrooge. [How pitiless my country has become as a whole.] Grammatically, logically connected to human suffering is the intelligibility of pity – that pity is the natural reaction to suffering –  and we understand what suffering is (and thus means) through our pity. We don’t cognitively determine, like a scientist, whether someone is suffering, and then add the emotions on (or not).  

    Also loving someone lucidly, profoundly, you may know them in much deeper ways than, say, a stranger armed with a PhD in psychology might know them – which is why I don’t put much stock in therapy without completely disparaging the “professional” view outside of intimate acquaintance and love. Love is a form of the conviction that the person (or whatever) is wonderful - that it is "good, very good" that they exist. 

    So if emotions are like thoughts in that they relate us to a world outside our ego, reaching out to what we can't reduce to abstract or purely scientific categories, then forms of writing or art that connect us to true, genuine emotions will connect us more directly to reality than abstract words like mine here. That is what Dickens does in A Christmas Carol. That's what great literature does - as opposed to many pop versions that sentimentalize reality in order to make possible self-gratifying fantasies and emotions. A Christmas Carol is great therapy to me. Some - not all - of the movie versions are counterfeits of the real thing.