Love and Hate – A La Buber
Another photo taken yesterday showing how signs of winter arrived early on the Canadian Prairies.
More from Martin Buber:
You speak of love as if it were the only relationship between men; but are you even justified in choosing it as an example, seeing that there is also hatred?
- As long as love is “blind” – that is, as long as it does not see a whole being – it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can only hate part of a being. Whoever sees a whole being and must reject it, is no longer in the dominion of hatred but in the human limitation of the capacity to say You. …
Yet, whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are without love or hate. (Buber, I and Thou, 1970, pp 67-68)
These are powerful words, words that resonate with ideas from Jungian psychology as well. Awareness of other, where it be a person one loves or hates, is increased as one removes projects which allow a “real” person to emerge from behind our projections. Then, one can engage in real relationship with real people. Then love shifts and hate dissipates.
Ah! But this is the difficult part, at least for me, to remove the projections. Also, if one is in love with the “Other”, one cannot be really sure if it is the love of the projection or truly the love of the “Other”, or at least, I’m not sure.
Each day is a little more discovery.
Paul
9 Oct 09 at 7:57 PM
It’s difficult for all of us, Paul. I’d say that it is something that happens over time rather than being something that occurs by force of will.
Robert G. Longpré
10 Oct 09 at 8:21 AM