Do We Love the Person or Only Her Attributes?

Substack latest.

Gleanings from a passage from Pascal.

This supplements and deepens the recent discussion of subjective and objective views of death.

Comments

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

Your mention of the saint and the leper as an exception to the claim that “we never love anyone, but only qualities,” leads me to consider the more common cases of ordinary people, less exalted in holiness, whose behaviors indicate a love for someone beyond whatever attributes that person may now possess. I am thinking of a person tending to the needs, emotional and physical, of a terminally ill beloved who has, with the progressive onslaught of disease, lost all or most of the attributes that once made him or her the object of love. Now, I suppose that one could argue that the selfless devotion revealed in these instances is the consequence of the provider’s memory of the former state of the beloved, one in which the attractive attributes were still present. In other words, although now extinguished, the recalled attributes are the real magnet for enduring love, but given the daily lived experience--with all the sensual messiness of materiality--of accompanying someone in the process of dying from a ravaging disease, this is unlikely. Rather, in the process of loving someone over time, there are moments in which the qualities that adorn the self are stripped away and something more ontologically basic is experienced, if only instinctively, by the one who loves.

Vito

[Vito B. Caiati]

Correction: I wrote this too quickly, meaning to use "sensuous," as in affecting the senses, and not "sensual."

Vito

[Tom T.]

>> Rather, in the process of loving someone over time, there are moments in which the qualities that adorn the self are stripped away and something more ontologically basic is experienced, if only instinctively, by the one who loves.<<

Vito, this is very good and I think you've made an important point. It's in the realm of the philosophical distinction between existence and essence, a subject I have been reading and mulling over of late.

As I'm sure you are aware, the existence/essence distinction can be traced back centuries to Thomas Aquinas (and beyond?) wherein he made the distinction between ens\esse and essencia. However, existence/essence is to be distinguished from the Thomist formula, in that it is a modern formulation that by and large is secular in nature. Thomas's was in service of his larger theological aim to explain the relation of God to His creation. As such, ens\esse is an active principle of creation/participation of particulars in being. The modern notion of existence is more the static "fact of existence" (Cornelio Fabro) rather than an active principle causative of ontological particular beings. (Please excuse the imprecision of this exposition; I know there is a lot more to Thomas and the existence/essence distinction).

Your notion that in some sense we might have an experience of the loved one that is more ontologically basic than her adornment of qualities is consistent with the existence/essence distinction. But I think it elevates existence into something like an active principle. If we do have, in some sense, an experience of another as an ontologically real existent apart from her qualities, then it is also fair to say that such an experience would be of something that has value in and of itself - the truth of her real, ontological, particular being in the world - that can then be a ground of our own love response, as well as things like the Kantian "treat another human being as an end in itself," the Christian commitment to the absolute value of each person, and the John 13 love commandment. Not to mention, Bill's own "uniquely, unique" thesis, which you all were discussing just a few days ago.

Compare, Immanuel Levinas on the other and ethical actuality (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/#toc).

This brings the modern existence concept (or non-concept, as Bill would have it) closer in spirit to the Thomas ens/esse thesis. In other words, this suggests that an essentially empirical experience of another's existence can eo ipso ground a whole world of qualitative values we human beings seem to need but have long been denied on rationalistic, empiricist, or materialistic grounds.

I'm afraid I am coming across as a bit too exuberant about all this. I am really presenting this as a mere suggestion of a draft of a spare outline of a thought. Further reading and mulling will continue.

But I thank you for your comment.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Tom T.,

Thank you for your thoughtful, erudite philosophical response. I particularly appreciated this part of your comment: “If we do have, in some sense, an experience of another as an ontologically real existent apart from her qualities, then it is also fair to say that such an experience would be of something that has value in and of itself - the truth of her real, ontological, particular being in the world - that can then be a ground of our own love response…., since it captures my experience accompanying someone dearly beloved by me in the final months of her life. It is the memory of that time and what I learned from it that prompted my initial comment.

Best wishes,

Vito