"The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular, that is, spearately, as single individuals."
The quote goes on to explain how the speaker feels about individuals. This quote is particularly fun:
"As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate even the best of men..."
I read The Brothers Karamazov something like three years ago, but this is the kind of thing that just haunts you. I wonder who in the world wouldn't own to at least some of the statements in these quotes. Whether our behavior is as overt as this character or only attitudinal, I think the vast, sweeping majority of us, if we're honest, have seen this in ourselves.
Can we love one another selflessly? Is all our goodwill toward our fellow humans just a way of covering up our interpersonal failures and hiding behind generalities? I can't really think of the last time I really got my hands dirty helping someone out without expecting them to do the same for me or injecting my own filth. I was recently talking to a couple of friends on separate occasions, each confiding serious struggles, and all I could really do was try to "relate," which meant refocusing their situations on my own experiences and being pretty much powerless to help. It makes me feel ridiculous, and maybe it's as simple as "yeah, you are ridiculous."
I've been thinking about this for a while now. One of the primary paradoxes of love (in the widest sense) is that, in psycho-social terms, it is a matrix of interactions and cognitive/affective responses that generates a level of shared meaning and experience between individuals. In short, it brings us "closer." But that shared meaning is always evaluated (i.e. assigned value) in relation to each individual in the love-relationship. So it's pushing us outward (the shared meaning) and inward (the value assigned the shared meaning).
Example: Let's say you volunteer to serve "the poor" in some capacity (soup kitchen, salvation army, giving the guy on the corner a dime), most would consider this a certain kind of "love." Many would talk about this in terms of self-sacrifice, because the people you are helping probably can't "pay you back." The interaction in view is a giving-receiving relationship: you are the giver. Now evaluate being a giver. See where this is going? When you evaluate your role as giver, suddenly the outwardly-focused giver-receiver relationship takes on personal value. Most of the time this is a general feeling of benevolence, though occasionally gratitude due to contrasting situations of giver-receiver or a sense of guilt result from the evaluation.
"Inward" and "outward." They are directly proportional. The more shared meaning, the more evaluation. The closer I get to another individual in a love-relationship, the more I am evaluating that relationship on my own terms. In relation to myself. about 90% of the time, in my own interests.
This is about as far as I go, for now. I'm out of steam on this one...more to come...
