Man and Love

PHENOMENOLOGY OF HUMAN LOVE
Pius G. Morados

What is LOVE?

ROMANCE “Many of us have the tendency to equate love with romance”.

POSSESSION “Love is an act of possessing or being by another person. People fight and struggle in the name of love. ‘I love you’ has come to mean ‘You are mine’ and ‘I want you to do the things I want, I want you to be what I want you to be’. Or else, it has come to mean ‘I am yours, and you can do whatever you want to me’.”

INFATUATION “Love is to be attracted to the good qualities of the other. ‘Love is blind, and lovers do not see’. Love has been equated with admiration.”

SEX “Love has become synonymous with sex for many young people. To love another means to be passionately attracted to her and to bring her to bed with me.”

Love is a “many-splendored thing”. There are many viewpoints and aspects of love. Let us take one of the most human and true-to-life viewpoints – an experiential or phenomenological description of the experience of unselfish love and then only can we arrive at the realistic meaning or philosophy of love.

Love is an activity of giving, the disinterested giving of self to the other person whereby I enhance the other’s unique value and in so doing enrich my own.

A Phenomenology of Love

The experience of love begins from the experience of loneliness. The experience of loneliness is basically a human experience.

Loneliness ends when one finds or is found by another in what we call a loving encounter. (Love at first sight)

The LOVING ENCOUNTER is a meeting of persons. The meeting of persons is not simply bumping into each other, nor is it simply an exchange of pleasant remarks, though these could be embodiments of a deeper meeting. The deeper meeting here in love happens when two persons or more who are free to be themselves choose to share themselves. Love is a CHOICE. Loving is a DECISION.

“Love is more than a feeling, it’s a choice”.

THE APPEAL OF THE OTHER is not his corporeal or spiritual attractive qualities. I can conceptualize the other into a list of beautiful qualities (which I myself may lack) but they can only at best give rise to enamoredness, a desire to be with the other. But once the qualities cease to be attractive, love also ceases. Love is more than mere infatuation, more than mere liking such and such qualities of the other. The other person is more than his qualities, more than what I can conceptualize of him. And love is the experience of this depth and mystery of the other and the firm will to be with her.

Nor is the appeal of the other an explicit request.

The appeal of the other is herself. The other in her otherness is herself a request. The appeal of the other is the call to participate in her subjectivity, to be with and for her.

Because of you, I understand the meaninglessness of my egoism. Perhaps, I am not meant to be alone, perhaps I can only be truly myself with you.

WHAT THEN IS MY REPLY?

Since the appeal of the other is not his quality or an explicit request, it follows that my response cannot be an outpouring of my qualities to the other or the satisfaction of his request. Compatibility is not necessarily love. Neither is submission necessarily love. Sometimes refusing the request of the other may be the only way of loving the person in a situation, if satisfying it would bring harm to the person.

If the appeal of the other is herself, then the appropriate response of that appeal is MYSELF.

His appeal then to me means an invitation to will his subjectivity, to consent, accept, support and share his freedom. Love means willing the other’s free self-realization, his destiny, his happiness. When I love the other, I am saying “I want you to become what you want to be, I want you to realize your happiness freely.”

THE CREATIVITY OF LOVE

Madaling maging tao sa pagmamahal. Subalit mahirap ang pagpapakatao sa pagmamahal.

Love is creative. Love creates a new person, either in myself or in the other. Each of us is created, molded and remolded by those who loves us. But it is difficult and takes time to get to know the real person, the person behind the “mascara” (mask). We often appear what we are not. When a “guy” is courting a girl, he always has his best foot forward; but once married, the “real guy surfaces”. Love is full of surprises or can be a real eye opener. Love creates a new “you” – this is the “you-for-whom-I-care” which cannot be discovered by scientific inquiry. This new you can only be discovered by one who loves.

Love is becoming. Love is the acceptance of the other as the other makes the other “become.” By love I create a new meaning for the other. But love is reciprocal. In making the other “be”, he also makes me “be”. An appeal of love from another makes me discover a new “me”, who I really am and who I can become. We “see” ourselves better in others; they mirror the real me. What I am and the meaning of my life depends very much on others. We need one another to become human, to become “new persons”. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.

Love gives meaning. Up to the point of our lives, others (parents, family, teachers, classmates, friends) have given meaning to our lives. We begin to love when we begin to give meaning to the lives of others. This is what it means “to be loved”, to “become” a new person. What does the other make me when he loves me? He simply makes me “become”; he gives meaning to my life.

Love creates a unity. Love creates a new “you” and “I” – a “we”. The other makes me authentically myself and I make the other authentically the other. What a boring and dull world this would be, if everybody was like me. The “we” that is created in love is the union of persons and their worlds.

A Philosophy of Love

THE REALISM OF LOVE

It is very important to love a person from the inside, not merely from the outside, to love the “real person” behind the appearances. What is the difference between “knowing” and “loving”? I “know” her could mean I have an objective and impersonal information about the UP girl, e.g., five feet two, lives in Quezon City, has an IQ of 110, is taking AB or Mass Comm. I “love” her means I know her subjectively and personally as a person either because she is “my sister”, “my good friend” or “my girlfriend”. However, to really “know” is to love and to “love” is to really know another as a subject or person.

Many fall in love with an IDEA rather than with a PERSON; they fall in love with a “dream” or an “ideal” girl rather than a “real” girl. “Falling in love with love is falling for make believe”. The so-called “ideal” boy or girl simply does not exist, but each one of us can make that “ideal” person “become” because love is creative. No two people are ever compatible to begin with; they have to “become” compatible and often enough this is the task of a lifetime.

CHARACTERISTIC OF LOVE

1. Love is the gift of self. Love is a giving, a giving of the best, the giving of the self to the other. One of the highest expressions of a life of giving and a giving of life is in the case of married love. It is better to give than to receive – this is the paradox of love. It is only in enhancing the other’s unique value that I enrich my own value; it is only in fulfilling the other as a person that I fulfill and realize myself as a person.

It if better to give than to receive, not because giving is difficult but it is a joy. When I give myself, it is the highest expression of what I can become, of my power to love. Whatever goodness is in me – be it my time, advice, talent, patience, a word of encouragement – is truly valuable because somebody needs my love. Paradoxically, it is in giving that we receive.

If someone believes in me and trusts in me, I try to live up to her faith and trust and will try never to hurt, disappoint or fail her.

2. Love grows and should grow. Love must not be taken for granted. Just as one can fall in love, so too she can fall out of love. And when love dies, it is difficult to resurrect it. The relationship between an unfaithful husband and a faithful wife can never be the same again. Hurt or wounded love takes time to heal and sometimes it never heals. One’s love should deepen over the years. The “I do” of a married couple is different from the “I do” when they became a lolo and lola. They have gone trough a lot but their love for one another has never died. For somebody who mean a lot to us, we must continually make the effort to know the other. If our love grows cold and dies, someone too will die. We are responsible for those whom we love. “It is the number of years that I have wasted on my rose that makes it so unique and important.” (The Little Prince).

“Winning the girl is not the accomplishment, but keeping her is.”

3. Love is shown by deeds rather than words. Love is not only saying it, it is DOING it. Love is effective, it takes actions (“Action speaks louder than words.”) I will her bodily being and consequently her world. Love is inseparable from care, from labor. To love the other is to labor for that love, to care for her body, her world, her total well-being.

If love is not to become domination, it must be balanced by a certain RESPECT, respect for the uniqueness and otherness of the other. Accepting the person as she is, different from myself. Respect also means being patient.

4. Love is creative. Love creates the lover. If I love a person, I am never the same again. I change. Love also creates the beloved. Although he knows me from within, even the worst of me, he still loves me. I must be good and therefore can become better.

5. Love is mutual or reciprocal. How can I love the other unless he has already begun to love me. Love is an appeal. How is it possible that I can love a person very much and yet that person does not love me as much? This is the mystery of freedom and love. Love cannot be forced or bought; possessed or dominated; it can only be given freely.

“There is no shop in the world that sells love” – Manuel Dy

Reference:

“A Phenomenology of Love” by Manuel Dy S.J.

“Human Love” by Vitaliano Gorospe S.J.

Man and Death

PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEATH
Pius G. Morados

It is never certain that we will be born; but once we are born, it is absolutely certain that we will die.

We fear death and we use all our strength to forget it. We avoid what reminds us of it, we call morbid any thought of it. We cultivate the habit of thinking always of death as something that concerns others, only others, and we live more or less as the fools of our own blind faith. In this domain as in all others, however, repression and insincerity profoundly disturb conscience and life. The world at large sees us as people immensely ourselves, for that is the face we show; but secretly we are ceaselessly measuring how near the abyss has come towards us and we find ourselves – sometimes more, sometimes less – aghast at the thought of it. There is no use of lying to ourselves or pretending that is all a charade. All without exception begin through birth and end in death. It is simpler, courageous, and more human to reflect serenely on the mystery of death, which cannot but be my death.

1. To be human is to be in the world. Man is primordially directed towards the world and has the power to be in the world. His being in the world consists in being alongside with things and in being with others.

Through his being in the world, and involvement in it, man has the power to be. Man realizes his own possibilities, constantly actualizes his potentialities of existence, and so is always ahead of himself or of what he actually is.

While being, he is also always becoming.

2. Care is the fundamental structure of Dasein. As project it always comports itself towards its potentiality for being. There is always something still outstanding in man. As long as man exists in the world, his potentiality for being is never exhausted.

As long as man exists in the world, his potentiality for being is never exhausted. There is always something to be settled yet in man. As long as he is, man never reaches his wholeness, he is always has an unfinished character.

3. Man reaches his wholeness is death. He then loses his potentiality for being. There is no more outstanding in man, everything is finished, settled for him. He is no longer being there.

Death is the transition of man from Dasein to no longer Dasein.

4. There is no possibility of experiencing this transition. No one has ever come out alive from death to tell us about death. Our first experience of death is the death of others. This does not necessarily give us the objective knowledge about death even if we are beings with others; for the death of another person makes him no longer a person but a thing, a corpse, although he may be the object of concern for those who remain behind. We have no way of knowing the loss of being that the dying man suffers; in other words, we never experience the death of another person as he himself has experienced it.

“My death is absolutely certain, but its modalities are wrapped in uncertainty and it has the unique character of being completely inexperienciable. Those who break the seal of its secret do not return to tell us either how the trial is offered, or how they have met it, or how we in our turn must face up to it. Being strictly personal, death is an act in which the experience of others can give us strictly personal, death is an act in which the experience of others can give us but very feeble help.”

No one can take my dying away from me. Death is always mine. It is a peculiarity of my being in which my own being is an issue. Mineness and existence are constitutive of death.

5. Death is the possibility of man, a “not yet” which will be. And what is unique in this possibility is that it has the character of “no-longer-Dasein” or of “no-longer-being-there”, and belongs to the particular man, his very own, non-representable.

As long as man exists, he lacks a totality, a wholeness, and this lack comes to its end with death. The lack of totality of man is not the lack of togetherness of a thing which can be completed by piecing together entities or parts. This “not yet” of man is something that is already accessible to him. Dasein, as long as it is, is already, is already its “not-yet” or its end. This may be likened to the unripeness of the fruit which contains as its end its ripeness. There is however, a big difference between the ripeness of the fruit and the death of man; namely, with the fruit, the ripeness is the fulfillment of its being. In the case of man, on the other hand, in death, man may or may not arrive at his fulfillment.

“So little is the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with death, that Dasein may well have passed its ripeness before the end. For the most part, Dasein ends in unfulfillment.

6. Dasein, as long as it exists, is already its end. This end is not to be understood as “being-at-an-end” but as “being-towards-the-end”. Phenomenology of death is not a description of death or an afterlife but of man as being-towards-his-end or a being-towards-death. If man is a being-towards-death, and his being in the world has the fundamental structure of care, then the end of man must be clarified in terms of that basic state.

7. Being-towards-death and Care – Man, in being ahead of himself, as project, comes to the disclosure of his extreme possibility, the possibility that he will no longer be there. Death is the uttermost “not-yet” of man, something towards which he comports himself. Death is not just something that happens to man; it is something impending. The impending is not that of the coming of the storm, or of the arrival of a friend, or a journey one is going to undertake. The impending death is distinctive, because it is the possibility which is own most.

Death is mine, something that I have to take over myself. In death I stand before myself in my ownmost potentiality for being, because the issue in death is no other than my being in the world. Death is the possibility of my no-longer-possible, of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there., the possibility of being cut off from others and from things. And this possibility that must be, something that I cannot outstrip.

This possibility of my absolute impossibility is not just obtained in my rare moment. As soon as I am born into the world, I am already thrown into this possibility. I may not be aware of it, but the fact that I exist in the world, I exist with the possibility of death.

8. The possibility of death is revealed only in the basic mood of man, anxiety in the experience of dread, wherein man comes face to face with his potentiality for being. Anxiety is not fear, because fear is concerned with something determinate which threatens my immediate involvement of things. Anxiety is of something indeterminate: what I dread is not entity, but the world itself, my being-in-the-world.

Many are indeed ignorant of death as the possibility which is ownmost, nonrelational and cannot be outstripped. They are engrossed in immediate concern with things, thus covering up their own being-towards-death, fleeing in the face of it. The fact remains that they are being-towards-death, that man is dying even in his “falleness”, in his being absorbed in the everyday world of concern.

9. Everyday Being-towards-death – inauthencity – In the publicness of everyday concern, death is known as a mishap that frequently occurs. The self of the public, the impersonal “they” talks of death as a “case of death”, an event that happens constantly. The “they” hides death by saying, “People die… one of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us.” The “they” realizes that death is something indefinite that must be arrive ultimately, but for the moment, the “they” says, it has nothing to do with us. It is something not yet present-at-hand, and therefore offers no threat. The “they” says “one dies” but the one is nobody, no one will claim that it is I. In this way, the “they” levels off death, makes it ambiguous, and hides the true aspects of this possibility, the mines, nonrelational, and that which cannot be outstripped.

10. Everyday being towards death is a falling, a constant fleeing in the face of death. The everyday man is constantly evading death, hiding it and giving new explanations for it. The everyday man, even in his falling, attests to the fact that he is a being-towards-death, although he assures himself in the inauthentic, impersonal “they” that he is still living. Even in the mode of tranquilized indifference towards his uttermost possibility of existence, man still has his ownmost potentiality of being an issue.

11. The impersonal “they” is also certain of death. The “they” says, “Death certainly comes, but not right away.” There is at the same time a denial of certainty which seems only an empirical certainty derived from several cases of other people’s death. As long as man remains on this level of certainty, death can never really become certain for him.

Though man may seem to talk only of this empirical certainty of death in the public, he is really at the bottom aware of another higher certainty than that of the empirical and this is the certainty of his own death. The inauthentic man, however, evades this higher certainty in carefreeness, in an air of superior indifference. He stops worrying about death and busies himself in the urgency of concern, deferring death as something later. He covers up the fact that death is possible at any moment. The inauthentic man confers a kind of definiteness upon this indefiniteness of death by intervening it with urgent matters of the everyday. He cannot flee from death, however, because he derives the certainty of death from the fact that being thrown into this world is being-towards-death. Death is ever present in the very being of man.

12. Authentic Being-towards-death – The authentic response of man to his awareness of being-towards-death is not evasion, of covering up death’s true implication, nor of giving new explanations for it. Man must face the possibility of death as his possibility, the possibility in which his very existence is an issue. Facing this possibility is not actualizing it or bring it to happen. That would be suicide and suicide demolishes all the potentialities of man instead of bringing them into a whole reality. Nor does it mean that man must brood over death, calculating it; for death is not something one can have at his disposal.

The authentic being-towards-death is anticipation of this possibility by which man comes close to death, not by making it actual but by understanding it as the possibility of impossibility of any existence at all for him. Anticipation reveals to man that death means the measureless impossibility of existence. This projection of his utmost possibility will provide him with a vision of his own present existence, the latent possibilities lying before him.

13. In authentic being-towards-death, man realizes that death is his ownmost possibility and thus the awareness comes to him of his potentiality for being, for fulfilling his own being. He must therefore wrench himself away from the impersonal “they” and make himself an individual, alone.

Death individualizes man, because death does not belong to everybody but to one’s own self. This individual by death reveals the “there” man, his being-alongside-things (concern) and his being-with-others (solicitude). It reveals to man that his concern and solicitude is nothing when his ownmost potentiality for being is itself an issue in death. This does not mean cutting himself off from all relationships but rather projecting himself upon his ownmost potentiality for being instead on the “they” self.

The authentic man does not outstrip death. His anticipation does not evade death. It accepts this possibility and in accepting man frees himself. By his anticipation man frees himself, he is free for his own death, he is delivered from becoming lost in possibilities.

BIRTH. My birth is something for which I do not have the slightest responsibility. I carry no memory of it. The temporal, local, racial, family and circumstances of my birth have greatly influenced the whole course of my destiny, but it was entirely independent of me. Whether under a blessing or a curse, my birth took place and I could not shape its pattern. It is eternally what it has been, for it belongs to the past.

DEATH. My death lies inescapably before me, but it has not yet come. It will be and I may therefore expect it and prepare for it. My liberty, which could not intervene in my birth, can now be exercised in this at least: that I may at this moment bring about my own death.

14. Man can thus understand and choose among the possibilities in the light of this extreme possibility. In authenticity, man guards himself from falling into the ambiguous “they” and he is now free to be himself, the person he himself wants to be. His possibilities are now open before him, determined by his end and understood, thus, as finite.

The indefiniteness which goes with the certainty of death calls for authentic Dasein to open itself to the constant threat arising from its being in the world. The state of mind that is open to this constant threat is anxiety. What he is anxious about is no other than his potentiality for being. Anxiety individualizes man, and in individualizing him, makes him become certain of the totality of his potentiality for being.

Sources:

“Martin Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Death” by Manuel Dy Jr.

Notes from the “Phenomenology of Death” by Ranilo Hermida

Man and the Absolute

PHENOMENOLOGY OF GOD
Pius Morados

Man is a finite and fallible being who searches fro meaning. His primary task is to create order and meaning in an ambiguous situation through his freedom. Sore Kierkegaard enumerates three stages in the search for meaning.

The Aesthetic Stage (The Life of Pleasure). “Boredom is the root of all evil.” The chief goal of existence therefore should be to escape boredom and to fill life with novel and interesting experiences. In this way of life, the aim is pleasure. The aesthetic individual admits of no restraint and constantly satisfies himself in new and different ways. Enjoyment of life is his aim, his focus is the self.

Freedom is understood as the absence of dependence and commitment. The aesthetic man seeks to avoid dependence on people and things which threaten his freedom. He therefore rejects marriage and other similar relationships. For him the immediate moment, the now, takes precedence over long-range commitment.

There is a resistance factor in human existence. Inner stability and the achievement of lasting meaning are incompatible with the dispersal of the self that is required for the pursuit of and aesthetic life style. To avoid or to extricate oneself from the ultimate self destruction that can emerge from an aesthetic life, a fundamentally different orientation is needed. At the very least, what is required is a turning within to cultivate a sense of resolute commitment to a goal or ideal that transcends the capriciousness of the aesthetic life.

The Ethical Stage (The Realm of Duty). This stage is arrived at by the radical decision on the part of the individual to avoid despair of the aesthetic level.

The ethical is the universal, the realm of objective moral truths that everyone ought to accept or love by. The ethical individual is thus the person who has morality as the chief principle of his conduct. The ultimate aim of the ethical individual is to perform his duty.

The ethical individual is personified by the person who commits himself to marriage for he finds this relationship to provide a lasting sense of meaning and self identity. Through commitment to another person and to the fulfillment of the duties that marriage entails, continuity and stability emerge.

Whereas the aesthetic individual must be constantly on the move to avoid boring repetition, the ethical individual lives so that the repetition of everyday activities and responsibilities become a source of deepened commitment and satisfaction.

If the inescapable boredom of the aesthetic individual can drive one to despair, the inescapable guilt of the ethical stage can do the same and the result is likely to be the experience that life seems hollow and that fulfillment is negated.

The experience of guilt can heighten the self-awareness and inwardness of the ethical man. He may come to reflect on the despair that guilt can produce and on the possibility of release from both guilt and despair. Such possibility is realized in the religious stage. To move to that stage requires a fundamental reorientation of his will, a definite choice and commitment.

The Religious Stage (The Life of Faith). Its essence is the affirmation of allegiance to and dependence on God, the transcendent but personal source of existence.

The religious individual shapes his life in terms of the faith that God has acted upon man, to redeem him from sin and endow him with peace, meaning, and eternal life.

The content of faith is not something that can be conclusively verified, demonstrated, or rationalized so as to assure everyone that it is highly probable, if not absolutely certain. Instead, it offers hope and meaning to individuals, a hope and meaning which ultimately depends on a movement of faith that goes beyond the boundaries of reason.

To have faith is to make a decision entirely on our own without the security of objective reasons to back it up. It is such difficult decision and one that must be constantly renewed in order to be maintained. Faith is absurd.

The person who has faith arrives at self-awareness because in faith the relationship to God involves one conscious self activity and self creation. When I subjectively believe that God exists I understand that what I believe cannot be rationally understood or justified, since it is objectively a paradox. Yet, if in spite of the lack of external support, I still believe, then it must be because I consciously decide, with all the passion of the infinite to choose to bring this commitment into existence. In faith I confront myself as an existing individual, since I am entirely responsible for my faith and I know that I am alone with my faith.

There is a fundamental difference between knowledge and faith. The former involves a cognitive relation between a subject and an object, an object whose existence owes nothing to the passionate interest or commitment of the subject. The latter owes its existence to an infinite passion and a continual will and commitment to believe in light of objective uncertainty.

Religious faith is irrational. Religious beliefs cannot be supported by rational argument for true faith involves accepting what is absurd. Kierkegaard insisted that it is absurd and logically irrational for Christian belief to hold that God who is infinite and immortal was born as Jesus Christ who was finite and mortal.

When one lives in faith he is truly an existing individual. A man who lives in faith recognizes that he is a finite creature in a precarious world. At the same time he acknowledges that he is a being who seeks meaning and who hopes for fulfillment and understanding. In faith, both awareness of the precariousness of existence and the qualities of hope and desire for meaning are extended to a maximum.

Reference:

Source taken from the outlines of Professor Ranilo Hermida of Ateneo de Manila University.