To See Truly: Love and the Essence of Thinking

 

"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

— Iris Murdoch

 

Here are some passages from literature that I believe reveal the essence of thinking.

 

     Dostoevsky’s amazing character Father Zosima (a monk and a saintly character) from The Brothers Karamazov embodies the standard as he reflects on guilt, parenting, and seeing others in truth:

 

“I ask myself more and more, what did I want from them? From the children I taught, from the monks I counseled? To be like me? To believe what I believe? And now, when I look into their eyes, I wonder if I ever saw them, really. If I loved them as they are, not as I wished them to be.”

“I remember a father who once came to me. He wept for his son, who was wild, and drank, and shamed him. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ he asked. And I asked him in return: ‘Have you ever looked at him without judgment, even once? Have you ever seen him not as your failure, or your grief, but as a man in pain, a child still learning to walk upright before the Lord?’ And he said nothing. And I wept for him, for I too have done this.”

“We are always ready to love those who reflect our own ideals. But true love is harsh and holy – it demands that we see the other as they are, not as we would have them be. If you cannot do this for your brother, you cannot do it for God.”

 

 

     Another passage from another of my favorite novels, The Bell (1958) by Iris Murdoch. Michael Meade, a lay leader at a religious community, has complex relationships with several younger people. His reflection on Nick, who has fallen into despair and self-destruction, is one of the rare places where a character struggles to see another without ego or defense:

 

“He had seen Nick so much as someone to be rescued, to be drawn toward the light, that he had not seen him at all. Not really. He had seen a soul in distress, but not a person. He had loved, but in a way that made the other into a cause, or a trial — and not simply someone to be borne with, as he was.”

“Now he wondered: did Nick want saving? Did he even believe he could be saved? And was it my place – ever – to make him like me, or to want what I wanted for him?”

 

Murdoch’s gift is in showing how love can be contaminated by control, even when it's well-meaning, and how real love requires attention, humility, and release. And how it distorts thinking, distorts reality.

 

 

      In Marilyn Robinson’s Jack (2020), the fourth novel in the Gilead series, focuses entirely on Reverend Jack Boughton, the “lost” son. While earlier books showed the father struggling, this novel gives you Jack’s own inner life, and his longing to be known. But Reverend Boughton himself, late in life, tries to understand:

 

“He had imagined Jack coming home penitent, cleaned up, docile — a miracle of grace. And then he saw him: tired, kind, a man who carried his shame like a coat he could not take off. He realized he’d never asked what his son feared, what he loved, what he needed.”

“Jack did not want forgiveness – he wanted to be seen. And that was harder. Boughton had to lay aside his theology, his pride, his grief. Just to see the man.”

 

This is a slow, heartbreaking process. The entire novel is almost a meditation on the impossibility and necessity of being known.

 

 

      One more example from another writer very important to me, Wendell Berry, from his novel Jayber Crow (2000). Jayber, a barber and quasi-monk of a small Kentucky town, is not a father, but he watches people with the eyes of someone who is learning to love without possessiveness. His quiet observations of fathers and children – and his own unrequited love for a woman married to someone else – are moving.

 

“What I began to understand is that love is not wanting to make someone yours. It’s wanting to let them be. Let them be good, let them be in pain, even. Let them be themselves. That’s the hard part.”

 

Berry is interested in how love matures from desire and control into recognition and service.

  

What do all these passages – that are about the failing of love – have to do with thinking well? (Bear with me for starting with father-son as a central paradigm – it is what I am closest to, and that is not a bad principle for starting a reflection. You would start with what you are closest to.)

 

     We often associate thinking with logic, critical analysis, problem-solving. But I think these are surface ripples of thought, refinements – not its essence. The deeper question is: What is it to think at all? Or more precisely: What is it to begin to think truly about someone or something?

 

 

Thesis I: The Father Who Begins to See 

     In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima sees the beginning of thinking happen when someone – probably through suffering – no longer sees the other (the subject of thought) in relation to themselves, their wishes, desires, fantasies, preconceptions, but as someone or something independent of the thinker.

 

 

Thesis 2: The First Act of the Mind 

     In classical logic, the first act of the mind is simple apprehension – understanding what something is. But what does it take to see someone – or anything – as it is? It requires attention (Simone Weil). It requires humility (to set aside our preconceptions). It requires openness (to be teachable by what appears). And these are not just cognitive virtues. They are moral and spiritual postures. In all the passages above examples a father or father-like character projects onto his son what he wants, fears, or expects. It is only when these projections break on reality – sometimes through suffering – that he begins to see. (Reality is that which resists our projections.) This breaking of our preconceptions against reality is the real beginning of thought.

 

 

Thesis 3: Thinking as a form of love

       Critical thinking is not merely spotting fallacies or organizing arguments. These are important. But the root of critical thinking lies in a deeper courage: The courage to face reality as it is – not as I wish it to be. The real obstacles to clear thought are often not intellectual but moral: pride, fear, self-deception, the desire to control. And therefore, as strange as it may sound: Love is a condition of clear thinking; clear thinking can be a form of love. Because love, rightly understood, is not indulgence or sentiment; it is the will to let the other be, to give space, to serve what is real. 

    I need to qualify this claim. Love does not mean affirming all things equally or accepting all things without judgment. There are realities such as cruelty, exploitation, or pornographic art that do not call for our embrace, but for our clarity. To "let something be" does not mean to approve of it. It means to see it as it is.  In the case of what is harmful, to see clearly why it is harmful, how it distorts the good, and how it appeals to us falsely. Love still plays a role as a desire to see truthfully and respond justly. To think well about something destructive requires neither hatred nor naive acceptance, but moral clarity rooted in love for what is truly good.

     And love must be distinguished from its counterfeit forms. Sentimentality is perhaps the main counterfeit. Anthony Savile defines sentimentality as involving two key elements:

1.              Idealizing or falsifying the object, and 
2.               Doing so in order to generate a self-gratifying feeling.

 Sentimentality, then, is a failure of thinking. It clouds perception by overlaying the object with illusions that comfort the self. It is a form of self-centeredness masquerading as concern.

    [A clear example of sentimentality might be found in the film Titanic, particularly in the romanticized portrayal of Jack and Rose's love affair. The narrative frames their brief relationship as life-changing while avoiding many of the real complexities such a bond would entail. The social and historical backdrop of the sinking is emotionally leveraged to intensify the romance but in ways that often prioritize spectacle and emotional catharsis over psychological realism. Jack is portrayed with a near-mythic simplicity – selfless, fearless, endlessly affirming – while Rose's liberation from a villainous, suffocating mother and class wholly depends on Jack as an idealized antithesis of both. The viewer is encouraged to feel deeply, tapping into their own romantic fantasies, identifying with one character or the other. But these feelings are generated by a highly curated and idealized version of reality. Perhaps there is nothing dangerous about this, perhaps it is a form of harmless daydreaming. But it is not a form of thinking or love in the sense meant here.]

       The love that clears the way for thinking is a discipline of realism. It does not falsify; it purifies. It strips away the projections and faces the beloved or the object in the light of what it is. It is not self-indulgent but self-effacing. It bears the pain of seeing truly and still remains faithful. The realism of love is thus the antithesis of sentimentality. Love desires truth, even when the truth is difficult or not self-serving. Sentimentality avoids truth, for the sake of ease or emotional reward.

 

 Thesis 4: The Child as a Symbol of Any Being 

   Why a child – besides the fact that I have three of them. Because a child is both one of the most loved figures, and one of the most projected upon. But “the son” in these stories stands for any being – even Being itself. The question of good thinking, then, is also the question of metaphysics and theology: Can I see this tree, this face, this pain, this person – as they are? Can I let them be? To think well is to ask, as Aquinas would: “What is this?” [or “Who is this?”] But in such a way that the answer is not dominated by me.

 

 Thesis 5: A Literary Example –  Loving a Place 

    Take another example, from Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter. The narrator, Hannah, reflects on the farm and land she and her husband cared for through decades of hardship. Over time, she realizes that many people, even her own children, only see the land as potential, as future, as profit or burden. But for her, the land is not a means. It is a presence.

 

"This place has shaped me. I have shaped it. I came to it thinking it was my inheritance. I have come to see it as a gift. To love it rightly is not to wish it were something else. It is to know it, to work with it, to let it be what it is." 

This too is thinking: not calculating, but dwelling with, abiding, learning the grain of the world. The same dynamic: projection must give way to presence. Love becomes the condition for knowledge.

 

 Thesis 6: The Method of Truth

    

"Der Sinn einer Frage ist die Methode ihrer Beantwortung."— Ludwig Wittgenstein("The meaning of a question is the method of its answer.")

 

What does it mean to ask a real question? 

    When a father asks, “Who is my son?”, he may think he's asking something simple. But the method of answering determines the depth of the question. If he answers with memory, expectation, fear, or pride – then he's not really asking at all. He's reinforcing an illusion. If he attends without trying to control, if he suffers or rejoices with his child, if he really listens . . . then the question becomes real. 

     Wittgenstein implies that we do not just speak questions; we enact them. And the way we ask determines what can be seen. To ask “What is this being before me?” – a child, a stranger, a place, a work of art or craft – requires a method: one of careful attention, truthfulness as a spiritual demeanor.  This, I think, is the method of love exemplified in the passages above, an attending to the independent presence of the other. And therefore, love is not the enemy of clear thought, but its very form. Not a distortion of truth at its deepest level, but its most faithful way of approach. 

 

Thesis 7: On Realism and Hope 

    There is a deep tension in the life of the mind, reflected in two apparently contradictory statements, both of which seem true to me:

 

“The courage to face reality as it is — not as I wish it to be.”

“Madness is seeing the world as it is and not as it should be.” — Man of La Mancha

One speaks for realism, the other for a vision beyond it. I think that ‘thinking well’ requires this tension.

 First: good thinking is to see things as they are in all their particularity and brokenness. This is the foundational. But realism is not cynicism. To see clearly does not mean to accept passively. You start from what is real so that what ought to be can arise in response to it.

 Second: I can only see what anything or anybody is from a perspective of what they ought to be. That can and usually does involve projection. But it can also be informed by love – willing the good of the other, even if that means just letting it be (as in the Jayber Crow passage). It need not be informed by fantasy. Therefore, hope must not be understood as a projection onto the world but as a response to the world – a longing that what is should flourish precisely as that which it is. Realism is not the negative pole to hope's positivity. It is the grounding of all genuine hope, and hope is the fruit of realism when it is married to love.

     In all my examples a father or father-figure projects onto his son what he wants, fears, or expects. This often includes a desire that the son become 'a good man' or 'a successful man,' but the danger is that such ideals, however noble in language, may still be rooted in the father's own image of goodness or success. This is subtly but importantly different from desiring that the son become what he truly ought to be. The first is a projection shaped by personal aspiration, pride, or fear of failure. The second is a response to the reality of the child himself: his nature, his particularity, his needs, his vocation. It is grounded not in the father's will, but in attentiveness to what is already there, waiting to be known and loved.

  

Tentative Conclusion

      The essence of thinking is not the control of an object. It is the welcoming of what is not-me, the letting-be of being. In this, philosophy, theology, and literature converge. Zosima names it with tears. Murdoch describes it as vision washed clean of ego. Robinson depicts it as a slow awakening, through fatherly sorrow. Berry shows it through long companionship with a place. Wittgenstein frames it in the very structure of questioning. Cervantes gives us the ache of the world as it ought to be.