BEING LOVED: In A World Bereft of Love
INTRODUCTION
From the start I want to clarify the title of this essay. My reference to love and being loved is not directed at the capacity or incapacity of human beings to love one another in a personal manner. I know that many, many human beings love one another and lead lives that include acts of love and kindness towards others, even strangers. If we cannot love others at times, we mostly strive at least to do no harm, as the Dalia Lama advises. When I therefore speak of a world bereft of love, I am not talking about any judgement about people knowing how to love or not. So this essay is not a polemic against “man’s inhumanity towards man” or some such.
In fact I am addressing language, its intimate relationship to thinking, and its world-forming power. I will italicise language and thinking to distinguish my usage from the ordinary one in which language/thinking has a reference outside itself, i.e., the things of the world that we perceive in ordinary life. Our ordinary referential language has now become abstract information, so easily converted into a linguistic tool for power and control over others. We now inhabit this linguistic world as resources, or assets, in the mode of “standing-ready”, to be used and cast aside.
Ordinary prosaic language is now a tool, mainly for purposes of the will to power. It has no life of its own anymore. When we turn our attention to language itself today, we do so in order to manipulate it for purposes of further control over others. Advertising and politics are striking examples of our wilful use of language.
We do not experience ordinary language as love-soaked, infusing us with its potent, generative, freely gifting, life-bestowing generosity. It’s mode of being is no longer as living language, addressing us, making its claims on us, towards which we spontaneously open in wonderment or humility, or dread, still receiving its gift of love gratefully. The love that had gifted us with language, that maybe is language i.e. living language in the first place, has withdrawn, departed, or lies in oblivion, as Heidegger says. We are no longer the beneficiaries of love! …
CHAPTERS
EXPERIENCE OF BEING LOVED
MEANING OF BEING LOVED
LANGUAGE OF LOVE
BEING LOVED: In A World Bereft of Love
