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The Altruism Reader
Selections from Writings on Love, Religion, and Science
By Thomas Jay Oord Templeton Press
Copyright © 2008 Thomas Jay Oord
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59947-127-3
CHAPTER 1
The Core Meaning of "Love"
* * *
STEPHEN G. POST
Defining love is difficult. Stephen G. Post rises to the challenge in this essay from his book Unlimited Love: Altruism, Compassion, and Service. Part of the difficulty of defining love is deciding how we ought to think about acting for our own good in relation to the good of others. After addressing this difficulty and the various facets of love, Post explores positive self-regard in relation to positive other-regard. This material is ideal as the first reading in an anthology of readings on love and altruism from religious and scientific perspectives, because Post closes the essay by briefly addressing the importance of studying and practicing love.
"[L]OVE" IS A word with many meanings. In this consideration of unlimited love, our interest is in love for neighbor as a pervasive affirmation of the very being of all others, including self. This affirmation includes as background a thankfulness for the gift of life, a humility in the context of a fundamental human equality, and a deep acceptance and patient tolerance of others that is not thwarted by the inevitable imperfections, both internal and external, in which we all share. It is an affirmation that leads us to take interest in others, to be attentively present to them in a manner that is undistracted and respectful, to be actively concerned with their well-being, to listen to them with care, to be loyal to them in life's journey, to act on their behalf with courage and fortitude, to delight in their successes, and to require nothing in return. Depending on states of need, love is appropriately manifest in compassion, forgiveness, service, companionship, and a sage response to behavior that is destructive of life and its potentialities.
All true virtue and meaningful spirituality is shaped by love, and any spiritual transformation that is not a migration toward love is suspect. We are busy being reborn into lives of love, or else we are busy losing ground. Many perceive that growth in love is a universal law of life without which no meaning or lasting purpose is possible. It is also widely perceived that the journey of love is pulled along by the alluring nature of God, who assists us along the way.
A useful example of transformation in love emerges from the Russian tradition of the ars moriendi ("art of dying") literature, as represented for modern readers by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych. Ivan is a remarkably unloving individual, callous and cold even toward family members; before his death, he realizes that his life has been all wrong. He rather suddenly feels that his schoolboy son has a life that is as meaningful as his own, or more so. This full emotional transformation away from solipsism toward the other enables Ivan to love the child. Sometimes it is only the great equalizer, imminent death, that must be the mother of love.
Pure Love and Love of Self
The love that interests us here is not predicated on reciprocal response. It makes no bargains and does not keep track of who reciprocates and who does not. It is pure in the sense of affirming the other as other, rather than for some ulterior motive. In reaching out to help others, new connections and relationships may unfold as a secondary effect, but these will have a uniquely unselfish tone because they are not entered into for personal gain. Deep community may emerge around helping behavior, but this must be distinguished from the self-interested, contractual relationships that only mimic true communion. Even if connections and relations do not emerge, the helping behavior continues unphased.
Moreover, the love that interests us here is not predicated on some internal growth or new level of well-being in the agent of love. No sense of enhanced self-esteem is directly sought. Yet paradoxically, in its effects such love usually contributes to the development of the self in profound ways, and will often enhance one's sense of purpose, meaning, and well-being.
Love for others includes caring for self with others in mind, and in the process discerning higher levels of dignity. "Love thy neighbor," and thereby discover the paradox of happiness in the forgetting of self. The self who has forgotten self-centeredness and lives close to Unlimited Love will take care of self, motivated not by self-interest but by a totally different level of being. Those who approach Unlimited Love will never be self-indulgent, yet they will be good stewards of their minds and bodies as instruments of love. Good self-stewardship remains obligatory, lest the agent of love undergo unnecessary emotional and physical deterioration, such that care for others becomes impossible. The agent of love is also the object of divine love and has a responsive duty to tend to his or her dignity.
Self-stewardship requires us to pause and step away from the mode of constant "doing." Kirk Byron Jones, a theologian and Baptist minister at Andover-Newton Theological School, writes that we need to see value in simply being, rather than measure our worth through a calculus of activity: "Before you are a pastor, before you are a parent, spouse, or friend, you are a child of God, a person whom God loves unconditionally." In a useful distinction, Jones asks that we not "discard legitimate personhood along with the garbage of selfishness and egoism." A great deal of the care of the self, argues Jones, involves taking the necessary time for silence, meditation, contemplation, and prayer.
To a large degree, true love of self is captured under the rubric of inner peace. The Dalai Lama, for instance, writes of spirituality as "those qualities of the human spirit—such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony—which bring happiness to both self and others." While he speaks of a "radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self" that gives rise to helping behavior, this does not result in self-immolation but rather in self-discovery.
I would hypothesize that living a life of love will, in the generalizable epidemiological sense, reduce morbidity and enhance longevity. Good care of the self for the sake of God and neighbor is probably more effective and enduring than care of self for the sake of self, which is less than fully meaningful. But longevity should not be counted on, and there will always be those who die young and well for loving purposes—think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr. We should have no illusions about the costs of a love that confronts malice. Many people discover inner peace and self-worth in loving others. The struggle to achieve self-esteem is often monumental and claims the lives of growing numbers of adolescents. Their lives are diminished, ruined, or lost in the cycle of anomie and self-destruction. The best way to achieve a sense of self-worth is through genuinely loving and serving others. As many admissions officers at outstanding schools will attest, the finest applicants typically have some significant experience in a voluntary association or faith community that teaches the joy of service to humanity. People who find meaning in love for others have found meaning for their lives, and they are thereby liberated from unnecessary suffering. They are released from the malaise of despair and the grip of peer pressure. They will discover new talents and abilities because they have something worthwhile around which to focus their energies. Paradoxically, then, those who lose themselves will find their truer selves (Luke 9:24). Let us "apply the whole measure of self love in love for neighbor," loving others with the same fervor with which we naturally love ourselves, thereby inverting self-love. We will find again that there is a universal law: in the giving of self is the unsought discovery of self.
The description of love that I have provided thus far is consistent with that of the "radical love" discussed by the Jesuit Jules Toner, whose writings established an important school of thought in the last three decades of the twentieth century. His work The Experience of Love is considered a classic in the field.
Toner's description of the experience of love draws on the fullness of the human agent:
In the full concrete experience of love, our whole being, spirit and flesh, is involved: cognitive acts, feelings and affection, freedom, bodily reaction—all these are influencing each other and all are continually fluctuating in such a way as to change the structure and intensity of the experience.
By "cognition" Toner means memory, judgment, imagination, conceptualization, insight, and perception. By "affection" he means the experiences of joy and sorrow, love and hate, desire, hope, fear, and the like. By "freedom" Toner means the "power of self-determination by choice which is not determined by any condition or cause whether extrinsic to the agent or intrinsic to the agent but extrinsic to the act of choosing. It is the power by which a man can responsibly approve or disapprove, affirm or negate, his spontaneous affective responses." By "bodily reactions" he means everything from heartbeat to facial expression. (It is important to keep this full picture of the agent in mind, for it suggests that love can and should be empirically studied with all these psychic and somatic aspects of the person in view.) In all of this concrete experience the self discovers itself.
Toner goes on to ask whether love is simply the composite of a number of affections, or whether it is unique. He sees the importance of empathic care for those in need, leading to the desire to assist altruistically, and appreciates why some will think of this as the root element of love. But such thinking is erroneous because love precedes and is wider than care: "And so, if love is basically caring or taking responsibility for someone, then it is never possible to love anyone unless I think he is in need. Nor is it even possible to love one whom I know is in need unless I am here and now considering his need." Love includes such things as a mother loving her child "in a moment of joyful security and careless playfulness," for love as "affection toward someone as a radical end without regard to need has a priority over care." In essence, "when care and need cease, love does not cease. If all need were to be fulfilled in the loved one, that would not mean the death of love. Care is only the form love takes when the lover is attentive to the beloved's need." The object of love is the actuality of the person whether or not he or she is in need.
If radical love is not to be equated with care, what of the affection of joy? Toner sees joy as an essential constituent of love: "joy in the happy actualization of the one rejoiced over for and in himself." Other-regarding love involves joy in a deep and broad sense. But love is not to be equated with joy, for joy is inappropriate when the other is suffering or grieving. In the final analysis, argues Toner, "radical love" is "a response to the fundamental actuality of the beloved, to his [or her] radical act of personal being." Radical love does respond to lovable qualities and actions. Yet "love fails to be radical love of the other if in the other's qualities the lover fails to love the person for and in himself." In a brilliant summary, Toner offers the following description of love:
It is a response to the beloved's total reality. It is directly and explicitly a response to his actuality, fundamentally and in every instance to his fundamental actuality as a personal act of being; secondarily, to his qualitative actuality revealed in his acts and partially revealing his act of being. It is indirectly and implicitly a response to his potentiality, dynamism, and need. This response is experienced as liberation of the subject's energy for love and liberation from the confinement of individual being. It is at the same time experienced as a willing captivity to the beloved.
Throughout, Toner emphasizes that love is a liberating experience for its agent, unlocking energy and creativity. Love for others sets us free from a myriad of limits.
Empathy and Compassion
Love is not reducible to empathy, although empathy has a role in love. The innate and evolutionarily complex empathic capacity is an emotional feeling into the experience of the other that will often result in helping behavior. But the capacity to sense the experience of the other has no inherent moral or loving direction, and it is well recognized that some persons with developed empathic abilities may use them for manipulative or even nefarious purposes. Compassion, on the other hand, does clearly contain a morally beneficent direction, and can be understood as empathy linked with goodness.
Compassion is a vitally important modulation of love in the context of suffering. As Anne Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard University, defines compassion, "It is a process of external and internal reorientation that softens our sense of individuality by bringing it into a felt relationship with the pain and needs of some other." Compassion requires empathy and seeks to achieve good in the context of suffering, and implies a readiness to be of help. Compassion is, therefore, moral in a sense that empathy is not; it affirms the goodness of the other as other, rather than as a means to further the interests of the agent.
Yet the very core of love includes a grateful affirmation of the other's very existence that has no particular correlation with suffering. Love is a radical affective affirmation of the other that is manifested by a desire to be with, and a willingness to participate in the life of, the other. This definition of love does not attempt to elevate compassion above all other manifestations. Instead, following more closely the insights of Buber and Levinas, I identify the core of love with an almost sacramental appreciation and affirmation of the other. This foundational disposition precedes any of love's other manifestations or modalities. Thus, love is to person as compassion is to person-in-suffering. Compassion means literally "to suffer with." It is always an impressive expression of love, and it is probably the case that in the context of evolution, compassionate love on the parent-child axis provided a beginning point. But unless we are all suffering all the time, love must take different forms and expressions than compassion. Miguel de Unamuno, in his classic work entitled The Tragic Sense of Life, mistakenly pictures all love (other than carnal) as a form of pity and compassion born of suffering and sorrow: "To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most." Unamuno continues:
Men aflame with a burning charity toward their neighbors are thus enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied them and loved them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Altruism Reader by Thomas Jay Oord. Copyright © 2008 Thomas Jay Oord. Excerpted by permission of Templeton Press.
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