The notion of an all-encompassing love has been dragged through the dialectic, sullied so many times by a false dichotomy between hard-nosed realists and starry-eyed romantics, used as a plot device in sappy romance novels and hackneyed children's fare so many times that I can't but evoke a million cliches when speaking of one of my fundamental spiritual truths.
The foremost culprit: the very word love. While its linguistic history is a fascinating look into how we view these concepts as related, the Greeks had it right when they subdivided the concept in their language. Our word can be used for Eros, erotic love, Philia, the love of friendship, Agape, romantic love, and finally, from the Latin, Caritas, the root word of charity, denoting that all-encompassing love for mankind.
It is the last one I'm concerned with here.
I'm not abandoning my materialist bona fides (at least, not yet). I'm not positing a metaphysical conception of love that has the power to affect the world and change things apart from the self-moved actions of individuals who feel this love. My outlook is still fundamentally secular, at least for now.
Mind over matter, it really don't matter--Bad Religion, Materialist
If the street's idle chatter turns your heart strings to tatters
Flatter hopes don't flatter and soul batter won't congeal to mend
a life that is shattered into shards
Was it in the cards?
This is a sentiment I still largely believe, at least as far as practical matters go. Love does not exist independently of humanity, and if we wish to create a loving world, we must turn to our own devices, not a phantasmal spirit.
For me, philosophy has always been an expression of love. Love requires understanding; its foremost expression in the thinker has always been the interest in understanding another's point of view. The love of ideas is the love of people, for people are nothing more than the ideas through which they experience the world. By far the most satisfying part of my education has been, when studying an author for months at a time, the subjunctive tense is dropped. When the thought becomes not, This is how Plato would view it, but when your understanding of an author becomes so complete that your natural affections cannot but be influenced by what you have read, when you have internalized that person's philosophy into your own.
This is love. This is sex, for exactly the same reason that eros and caritas can be encompassed under the same word. This is sex, because it is a meeting of two souls, separated perhaps by centuries and millenia but no less profound for the separation.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.--Galatians, 3:28
This is the love that the Christians used to smash Aristotelian aristocracy. This is the love that refused to buy the dichotomy between virtue and caring for our fellow man, the love that found virtue in the weak. This is the love that refused to accept that dignity belonged perforce only to the great, that virtue is a competition, that only the refined and powerful deserved the title of good.
For someone living after the transformation, this fact seems unremarkable, and it is difficult for us moderns to know just how different it was before Christ. It was in fact the greatest shift in thought Western Civilization ever underwent. One need only see what contempt Aristotle held the merely good-natured man in, and the contempt with which most pagans greeted humility, to see that it is so.
Finally, and most to the point, this is the love of feminism and queer theory, of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, of this blog and my companion blogs. Progressiveness is nothing more than applying that all-encompassing caritas to ever widening swathes of the population, who had heretofore been denied the dignity that is the birthright of everyone with a human soul.
Here I will do my damnedest to express myself and make myself understood, and will seek to understand others. For it is only in this way that me and my fellow BDSMers can be loved, and be welcomed back into the fold of that caritas that ought to be all-encompassing.
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