The Road Less Traveled is the most important book that I have read since my reawakening. And the concept of "willing" was itching my cranium.
In the chapter Love Defined, M. Scott Peck goes harshheash on the concept of romantic love - a "dependency myth." He suspects "falling in love" to be "a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior." (Be still my heart!) "Falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage." But without this "temporary infantile regression" most of us would never develop familial bonds, and our species would be fucked.
So what, then, is love? "I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Say what?! What planet is this guy from?
How I unpacked and re-assembled this definition, which I have come to find about as good as any other, is beyond the scope of this note. I bring it up to go to a part of his explanation. "Love is an act of will - namely both an intention and an action."
Desiring is not loving. Attraction is not loving. It has just occured to me that that we should use the gerundive form "loving" when we talk about love. If there is no willing, no doing, there is no loving.
Kant talked about never treating people as means to an end, but as ends-in-themselves. There's your integrity. Integer. Whole. Loving you in your entirety, and that's it.
I didn't mean to talk so much about loving - I just needed to finish my thought.
What started all this was a focus on willing - in the active verb sense. I often hear about "self-will run riot." Schopenhauer called the will evil. Nietzsche's “Wille zur Macht” is just plain scary.
(I have to digress. I had so studied philosophies of will that, in a law school class, I had a question about a hearsay exception. The professor was mentioning how it was OK to allow into evidence utterances that were "evidence of a will." I asked: "How can we really know what someone was willing?" Everybody laughed, and the professor said "Will. as in last will and testament." My turn to laugh, and to reaffirm that I prefer philosophy to law.)
I've put away so many discussions on willing (especially "free will" Gawd. Angel, meet pin). Being willing is being human. Combine that with Peck's "will = intention + action." The intention, the choice, must be positive - concentrate on the one person in front of you (even, maybe especially, if it's yourself). No using people - no running over people to get to something else. And the action must true. Kant got it closest when he wrote that every action "must will a universal law" - that you assert by your actions that this is how everybody should act in this situation.
I would amend Kant's "universal law" towards the personal. Act as though your action wills an integral justification - not rationalization (ugh!) (equating the two is a pet peeve) - to every relevant being. In loving's case - one being.
In the chapter Love Defined, M. Scott Peck goes harshheash on the concept of romantic love - a "dependency myth." He suspects "falling in love" to be "a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior." (Be still my heart!) "Falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage." But without this "temporary infantile regression" most of us would never develop familial bonds, and our species would be fucked.
So what, then, is love? "I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Say what?! What planet is this guy from?
How I unpacked and re-assembled this definition, which I have come to find about as good as any other, is beyond the scope of this note. I bring it up to go to a part of his explanation. "Love is an act of will - namely both an intention and an action."
Desiring is not loving. Attraction is not loving. It has just occured to me that that we should use the gerundive form "loving" when we talk about love. If there is no willing, no doing, there is no loving.
Kant talked about never treating people as means to an end, but as ends-in-themselves. There's your integrity. Integer. Whole. Loving you in your entirety, and that's it.
I didn't mean to talk so much about loving - I just needed to finish my thought.
What started all this was a focus on willing - in the active verb sense. I often hear about "self-will run riot." Schopenhauer called the will evil. Nietzsche's “Wille zur Macht” is just plain scary.
(I have to digress. I had so studied philosophies of will that, in a law school class, I had a question about a hearsay exception. The professor was mentioning how it was OK to allow into evidence utterances that were "evidence of a will." I asked: "How can we really know what someone was willing?" Everybody laughed, and the professor said "Will. as in last will and testament." My turn to laugh, and to reaffirm that I prefer philosophy to law.)
I've put away so many discussions on willing (especially "free will" Gawd. Angel, meet pin). Being willing is being human. Combine that with Peck's "will = intention + action." The intention, the choice, must be positive - concentrate on the one person in front of you (even, maybe especially, if it's yourself). No using people - no running over people to get to something else. And the action must true. Kant got it closest when he wrote that every action "must will a universal law" - that you assert by your actions that this is how everybody should act in this situation.
I would amend Kant's "universal law" towards the personal. Act as though your action wills an integral justification - not rationalization (ugh!) (equating the two is a pet peeve) - to every relevant being. In loving's case - one being.
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