Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

39
Phenomenology of Lesson VII

Transcript of Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Page 1: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Phenomenology of

Lesson VII

Page 2: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

What

is

Page 3: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Foundational Premise: A philosophy of Man without a philosophy of Love is incomplete .

Page 4: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Common understanding of LOVE:

1. Equating Love with Romance

2. Love as Possession

I want you…

Page 5: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

3. Love as Sex

4. Love as Admiration

Page 6: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Popular understanding of LOVE:

As “Falling in Love.”3 Reasons:

1. Emphasis on being-loved than on loving.

Page 7: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

2. Emphasis on the object loved than on the faculty of loving.

3. Confusion between falling in love &

standing-in love…

Page 8: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

“It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without

love. This miracle of sudden intimacy

is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual

attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its

very nature not lasting.”

Erich Fromm

Page 9: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Phenomenology of LOVE

We need to apply first the Husserlian’s

Epoche approach. Thus setting aside all the

above concepts of love.

Page 10: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Phenomenology of LOVEFirst point: The experience

of Loneliness.

• Self-consciousness = self-awareness

• Who am I? Man searches & discovers his own identity & uniqueness.

• At times, he felt unwanted, alone…. LONELY.

Page 11: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Coping up with Loneliness1. Seeking out others for understanding & acceptance…

2. Resorting to other ways, e.g., drugs, alcohol, etc…

- But still one remains lonely amidst the crowd… until the experience of boredom…

3. Keeping oneself busy, occupied with all sort of activities…

Page 12: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

What is the Answer to

LONELINESS?

- It is only in love that I find atonement and still remain myself.

Page 13: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

The LOVING ENCOUNTER

A meeting of Persons

An “I-Thou” relationships

Page 14: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

•The loving encounter necessitates an APPEAL… An invitation to transcend oneself, to break away from self-preoccupation. This maybe embodied in a word, gesture, or a glance.•To be able to see the appeal of other, I need more than eyes & mind – I need an attitude, a heart that has broken away from selfishness.

Page 15: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

The Appeal of the Other:

• Not corporeal/spiritual qualities. Love is more than infatuation; more than liking such qualities of the other. Rather, love is the experience of this depth and mystery of the other and the firm will to be for him/her.

Page 16: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

The Appeal of the other:• Not an explicit request coming from the other (hindi pagmamakaawa). One heart is not in it.The Appeal of the other is the call to

participate in his subjectivity, to be with and for him.

Page 17: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• My reply to the appeal of the other, since it’s not his quality or explicit request cannot also be an outpouring of my qualities to the other…

• Compatibility or submission is not necessarily LOVE.

Page 18: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• My reply to the appeal of the other is MYSELF. His appeal to me means an invitation to will his subjectivity, to consent, accept, support and share his freedom.

• LOVE means willing the other’s free self-realization, his destiny, his happiness.

Page 19: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• When I love the other, I am saying “I want you to become what you want to be. I want you to realize your happiness freely.”

• LOVE is not only saying it, it is doing it. It takes actions… • LOVE implies awareness of the other’s destiny. It necessitates personal knowledge of the other…

Page 20: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• LOVE is not a domination. It must be balanced by respect. Respect doesn’t mean idolizing a person; it simply means accepting the person as he is, different from myself.

• The other as he is, is also in potentialities, in his becoming… his pace of becoming maybe faster or slower than my own. Thus, one needs patience…

Page 21: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Reciprocity of

If love is wholly concerned with the other,What happens to myself?

Page 22: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

•There is an element of sacrifice in loving the other… In love, I renounce the motive of promoting myself.

•I have to break the provisional structure I have given to my own life, and this is painful.

Page 23: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

The pain lies in abandoning my egotism… This does not mean the loss of myself. On the contrary, in loving the other I need to love

myself…

Page 24: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

What about Unreciprocated Love?

•When the other rejects the self one offers, no doubt, the experience is painful and will take time to recover… but the experience is an opportunity to examine oneself. In this sense, it could still be an enriching experience…

Page 25: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Union of Love

• The “we” that is created in love is the union of persons but not an objective union. It does not involve the loss of identities.

Page 26: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

The Gift of Self

A. The essence of gift-givingis that I give not in order to get something in return.

Page 27: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

B. The giving in love is not a giving up: I am not deprived of something when I give in lovebecause the self is not a thing…

C. To give myself in love is not somuch to give of what I have but of what I am and can become…

Page 28: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Love is Historical It is historical because the other

who is the point at issue in love is a concrete particular person. Love is not love if it is simply love of humanity in the abstract… Love is concrete.

Page 29: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Equality in Love

Love can only grow in freedom… Love is not a bondage but a liberation…There exist an equality of persons in love… as subjects.

Page 30: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Love is Total, Eternal & Sacred

Love is an undivided commitment to the other. It is offered from the totality of my being to the totality of the other’s being.

Page 31: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Love is eternal. The gift of myself to the other is not given only for a limited period of time, otherwise it becomes a loan and not a gift…. It is immortal.

Page 32: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

Love is sacred. Friends and lovers share secrets & intimacies not for public consumption. They have a common world that may include others but can never be made vulgar. It needs trust.

Page 33: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

SUMMARYWe experience love from the moment of conception until

death and even beyond. • Love is both a form of surrender and a form of transcendence. When we love and when we are loved we surrender ourselves to the other in the sense that we take the risk of being vulnerable in offering our heart, our being to the other person…

Page 34: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• Love is the other person’s appeal to us which we answer by abandoning ourselves to make ourselves available for the other. But this abandonment is not total because in the process we find ourselves in others. The other person allows us to see things which we would never have known are there.

Page 35: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• Love is an act, a way of life. More than words could freely express, love is manifested by actions for and from the other person. More than just looking outwards in the same direction as Antoine Saint Exupery put it, love is moving forward in a mutual course.

Page 36: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• Love is an acknowledgement that we are alone and an invitation to the other person to be with us so we would no longer be alone. It gives us the comfort that in our struggles we are not alone and we have someone else to share our joys with.

Page 37: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• Love is not always the bed of roses others think of it to be. In one way or another we will come to a point when we must make sacrifices. But such sacrifices are meant to strengthen the bond, the act of love even more.

Page 38: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

• Love time and again would remain one of the greatest phenomenon mankind will experience yet fail to comprehend. Paradoxically, this elusiveness is what prompts man to savor and cherish each moment spent in loving and therefore, gives essence to his existence.

Page 39: Common understanding of LOVE: Popular understanding of LOVE:

“So, faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest

of these is LOVE.”(NAV 1 Cor. 13:13)