Interlude 1.1 Love in Light of My Great Life -- "Loving another for his own sake is integral to the exercise of self-love."

So one of the advantages of doing this reflective work publicly is that you get advice.  In this case, you get advice from a colleague about the nature of friendships.  This is a passage from a book by Simon May, Love: A History."

May's book looks to Aristotle to challenge some of the contemporary visions of love:  that love is "unconditional, spontaneous, selfless, affirming of the whole person, and, in its very nature, constant."  Love, in May's understanding of Aristotle, is no such thing.

I have lots of thoughts about this essay, but I want to push one here:  that Loving another for his own sake is integral to the exercise of self-love.  I have believed this for all of my adult life -- that the love of another person can be a form of my own flourishing.

 

The essay claims that "Everything we do, including in loving others, should be our own flourishing. Not in the sense that we look for a return from every good thing we do for another person. Rather in the sense that we flourish precisely by loving her for whom she is 'in herself'... Her flourishing is also my own flourishing. And so in caring for her life I care for mine."

I have lived long enough to know how impossible it is to live quite this way... That there are people who will need or want our care in ways that can be counter to our flourishing. That some people will want to care for others in a way that can be counter to their flourishing and our own.  The most obvious forms here are co-dependency, and May has particularly sharp things to say about avoiding co-dependency, in favor of self-dependency.

Love "flourishes only between two self-dependent individuals."   I love the fact that May avoids the use of "independent," which resonates with a particular myth about how people work.  May avoids the myth.  We need to be self-dependent (as opposed to co-dependent, needy, unable to stand on our own) as we enter into loving relationships.  And at the same time, those loving relationships are the basis of our individuality.  "Individuality is fundamentally relational."

May says:  "our idea of who we are is formed through intimate, sustained relations with other, based on a sense of deep affinity which has stood the test of time."

"Individuality is fundamentally relational."

This idea is worth more thought, and I will offer it...  Later.

The Peak Performing Professor reflections will be back tomorrow, but in the meantime, if you have something I should read, please let me know.