User:ADALTM/sandbox

bell hooks
All About Love: New Visions is a critically acclaimed text by feminist scholar bell hooks. This text offers a rendering of love that is multifaceted; it is painted not as a static thing we derive pleasure from but is verb, an action.“An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principal in the self-- a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us. To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.” In that action she names components such as care, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust as essential components to the act of loving.

Martin Buber
The text I and Thou by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, is a radicalization of the Hegelian understanding of self and focuses on the interpersonal space between selves. He makes the argument that beings generally approach the world from the mode of an ‘I-It’ relation. A conscience being must objectify the world of things and other beings to be able to understand them. He feels this kind of objectification and categorization is necessary to make sense of the world and conduct oneself in it. “Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter thinghood again and again”. But there is another mode for the self to exist in, the ‘I-Thou’ or ‘I-You’ relation. This relation is a mode that you can only step into with another conscience being and is outside of the understanding. It can not be made knowable, it is a personal space between these two being and leaves both beings with their particularities, meaning it does not objectify or categorize them. It is the mode of relation where love resides. “Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. Jesus’ feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one ‘has’; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is not metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the feelings that he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force.”