my two paradoxical emotions
Every so often I become aware they I'm a deeply unhappy person. The source of this unhappiness is so deeply rooted that I cannot see how anyone else could actually be happy. Admittedly a lot of people don't seem to feel the same as me, but of course they're too preoccupied with trifles to think hard or long enough to unearth a deeper unhappiness than mere dissatisfaction of not having what they want.
A little introspection of late has lead me to understand myself as having two major emotional needs. Basically I want to be loved. We all want to be loved. Deeply loved by someone, just loved by a few important people, and unloved by everyone else. Who am I that is loved? If I were someone else would you still love me? If I become someone else will you still love me? Because the other basic emotional need is freedom and independence. I cannot stand being overtly told to do anything, and only hate being implicitly expected to do anything slightly less.
So you see the problem, my emotional needs are fundamentally incompatible. How could I be happy when either one is not satisfied? But how could one possibly be satisfied while the other is? I think I'm deeply broken person, and I think that you are too.
21 comments:
Agreed. We should discuss this some more...
I love you Reuben.
For my part I'm not sure I see the incompatibility though. How does being loved restrict your freedom? (unless it is a rather weak and possessive sort of love) Do you mean that if someone loves you as you are now, you'll feel like you have to stay that one way forever or they'll stop loving you?
if you're referring to romantic love there's a lot of lonely fat chicks out there
You say you want to be deeply loved. Surely a property of such love would be that of enduring through change? I could imagine a shallow love to be only a fleeting one.
Is to love someone primarily to love their sum total, or to love them? If it is the latter, then the alteration of their constituent parts is permissible and contingent to such love's primacy. (It may then be that a secondary desire concerning those parts arises, but to the end of what is best for them themselves, in accordance with and serving such love's primacy)
I am similarly unhappy, though it is and has been due to both erroneous needs which conflict, and to (what I still understand as) genuine needs which are simply not met, and even due to these latter needs being inconsistent only with my being unwilling to first offer them.
What is this love that you need? Perhaps you should re-ask, "Who am I that is loved?", from the consideration of what the "I" is as the subject of love, and thus what the love really is of. Perhaps your need is erroneous only in your misunderstanding of that which is genuine. Perhaps this is because you value your constituent parts before you value your fundamental self, and thus impose such a ranking of values in love's perspective.
Need 1. To be loved
Getting from other people
Need 2. so called "Freedom and Independance" which from your explanation seems in this case to mean.. Not giving to other people.
That seems to be the paradox... the way you have described yourself in this post, you appear to want to be loved, but not to love...
Is it really an infringement on freedom to do something you wouldn't otherwise do because you love someone? Couldn't it rather be exercising your freedom by choosing to do something that benefits someone else more than yourself
AJ: Sure, but I'm a little pessimistic as to the use of more discussion.
Kat: Thanks. Upon reflection I now see that 'love' was far too loaded a word to use, especially with christians reading. What I meant is something along these lines:
Being part of a community is fundamental need of each and every human. Being in a close intimate relationship is likewise a pretty fundamental need. Taken together they amount to a fundamental emotional need that could be described as 'a need to be loved'.
Does that clear things up? Or will I, as I suspect I will, have to expand on what 'freedom and independence' are too?
Matthew: I'm not very inclined to treat the emotions in such a harshly analytical way, so I don't really follow most of what you said, sorry. Otherwise, have you read any Sartre? I would recommend his 'Transcendence of the Ego', I suspect you might even find it relevant.
Jim: Does my response to Kat makes things more clear? Your reading seems to place words into my mouth that I certainly didn't mean to express. But I'm inclined to agree that the view you set out is a bit dim.
"I'm not very inclined to treat the emotions in such a harshly analytical way"
I'm not sure how you can honestly say such a thing, given the content of your post. You have seemed to have analysed these two particular emotional needs to such a degree that you can conclude that they are "fundamentally incompatible". You even are critical of those who are "too preoccupied with trifles to think hard or long enough to unearth a deeper [emotional state]...".
It seems that it is your own harsh analysis that has led you to where you are. And if it is an intellectual realisation that has brought you here, then perhaps it is through such further realisation that you may leave. It is not emotions which I am analysing, but whether your own understanding is correct. You were the one asking the questions, in accordance with your own understanding.
Just as you analysed the relation of one emotional need to another, (as opposed to analysing the emotional needs themselves), I analysed the relation of an emotional need to its subject (ie: "what is the love of a person", not "what is love"). You argue that the two emotional needs are incompatible, I argue that they are not, but that such incompatibility is perceived through a misunderstanding of the subject of such emotions (ie: the person as the subject of love).
I apologize if I seem particularly austere in my comments concerning a subject such as emotional needs, and I only see such considerations as part of a means to the end of emotional satisfaction /happiness, as I'm sure you will agree.
Perhaps it would be helpful if I explained what I was talking about in my first comment.
It seems that, from your post, you understand that the person (as the subject of love) is just the sum total of their parts (that is, their personality, body, interests, desires, etc), and so the love of a person is the love of all their parts in totality. But if that person valued the freedom to be able to change themselves (that is, their parts), while, on the other hand, the love is of the parts as they already are, there then becomes a tension between having freedom and being loved. And so, in order to maintain the love, a person would have to sacrifice their freedom to be (become) and do what they wished, instead being restricted to (and depending upon) the maintenance of exactly who they were when the love first became.
This “person = their parts” seems to be the assumption about the self (as the subject of love) which you make (correct me if I’m wrong), as it logically leads to the desires for love and for freedom/independence being at odds with each other.
Since I perceive that as being your assumption, and I (rightly or wrongly) assume differently, I try to bring it to your attention for consideration. I did this first by arguing for a different assumption (that is, that a person is more than their parts, but primarily a whole entity… thus to love a person is to primarily love them as a whole entity), and then showing that it does not logically lead to any tension between being loved and having freedom. Given that such different conclusions have been reached based upon initial assumptions, I then challenged you to examine your understanding to see if such an assumption (as I have perceived it) really is being held by yourself, and further asserted that the genuine need had become (in perception) an erroneous need through a misunderstanding, due to that faulty assumption. And if that were the case, I even suggested that it was due to how you understood and valued yourself.
Hopefully I’ve managed to explain myself more clearly :)
Just an example to back my perception of true love as "primarily loving the person before their parts":
A parent who loves (and continues to love) their child, though the child may go through many changes in their becoming an adult. This is the value of the person before their parts.
(Sorry for the excess of comments)
Matthew: No need to apologize, and interesting thoughts on personal identity =) Let me see if I can respond to them.
My basic understanding of identity is that what something is is what it does. Being is becoming, as such. So, insofar as I can decide to change what I do, I can decide who I am. If my choice is drastic enough then I can even become someone else. The reason I am mostly the same person from one decision to the next is that I remain a decider, and as deciding is an act of doing it plays a constant role in who I am. Do you think that this understanding of who I am might still be the origin of my problems?
I'm not sure I quite follow your understanding of identity though. What more is there to a person than the constituent parts that go into making up the whole person? It seems tautologous that there can't be any such additional thing/part. But then I am lost as to what someone is supposed to love when they're loving the whole rather than the sum of the parts.
“Do you think that this understanding of who I am might still be the origin of my problems?”
No, and although I hold a different understanding on this, it (the problem of identity as doing verses being) seems to have no bearing on this situation. This understanding leaves the situation as I had described it as essentially the same. The difference is that the parts (of a person) are now considered as things of doing, rather than things of being. The problem of a perception of “person = sum of parts” remains, it’s just that the sum is of “doings” rather than of “beings”.
(Just to clarify, I take it that you see the situation as:
If someone loves you, and you are what you do, then they love what you do. So if you change what you do, you become what they do not love. Thus the desire for freedom to change what you do is incompatible with the desire to be loved.)
Admittedly, it is hard to define what I mean in “the whole being greater than the sum of the parts”. If you could break the whole into its individual parts, would it still be the whole? (Is a disassembled collection of a bench-top, legs and screws still a table?) But then I also consider the relationships between parts to be parts themselves. Perhaps the whole is an artificial construct that humans have come up with for ease of reference. (ie: a person who is fond of the “same” car which they have owned for years, even though over time they have replaced every component on it.)
I thought about this a lot last year in my ontological musings. I envisaged a hierarchy of forms, where an entity on one level was the sum of components on a lower level; itself on its own level; and a component of a higher entity on a higher level. It was thus “greater” than the sum of its parts – it was also itself, and also a part of something else. This does seem like a tautology, but I think that this is only so when one does not care to distinguish between levels.
On the level of person-ness, I am me and you are you, and though recognising and loving your parts, I would also love you as you – in fact I would primarily do so. And what if you were to change dramatically? I would like to think that in faithful love to your person I would accommodate such a change of parts. And I think such a thing is clearly evident in human relationships, be change sudden or gradual.
Matthew: When it comes to the identity of person I think that it is far more determined by what they are currently doing, rather than what they have previously done. This is in contrast to considering doings as parts and then deriving identity from the sum totality of these parts. For example, at any moment a person may decide to be a certain way that totality revises who they are. This also changes how what they have done to that point is to be best understood. However, the totality of a persons life does play an interesting role in who they are. This is because until they are dead it is always possible for them to change. Once they are dead though it is possible to say with certainty who they were.
I think often when people change, those who love them have to come to love them again. Sometimes they can do this, sometimes they can't, but it is never easy or automatic. I think also that if you read my reply to Kat you'll see I wasn't primarily concerned with others loving me, but rather being part of a community and intimate relationships.
Perhaps you have read too much into what I wrote. I didn't argue that the sum of the parts (whether parts of "doing" or of "being") had anything to do with time - that is, parts as things previously done/were. I assumed that we were talking about the current person, their parts being the things they are currently a combination of - whether it be the sum of what they are currently doing, or of what they currently are. In fact, I don't see how anything we have written makes sense if the person is also their past, because change does not affect the past, and so a love of (past) parts would still remain anyway, whereas your whole problem of change was concerned with love’s response to the current person.
Neither am I arguing a preference for either being or doing here. Such a distinction is completely irrelevant to my concept of parts and whole.
"…when people change, those who love them have to come to love them again. […] it is never easy or automatic."
I didn’t mean to suggest that it would be easy or automatic. And when I said, “…such a thing is clearly evident in human relationships”, I should have qualified it by saying “some human relationships”, my point was that it is quite possible and does happen. Also, I don’t dispute that it would be difficult to love them if they changed significantly, but my whole point was that their love was primarily for the person, and it then found particular points of affection in their parts. So naturally a change of parts would be difficult for the person/group who loved, but that they would “accommodate such a change”, or “come to love [their parts] again” in accordance with their primary love for the person… because the person is a whole and not merely a collection of parts.
With these things in mind, perhaps you could read what I’ve previously written and hopefully it will make more sense.
Now concerning what the love itself is, I have been considering love as an endearment, whether deeply intimate or not, toward a person, (which would also have the attribute of desiring that the other person experience such endearments reciprocally). Even so, I do not see my position as being any less compatible to a love as you have described it. In this case, we merely need to consider the nature of the identity of a group, rather than just that of an individual. It is interesting in itself that you should desire to be a part of a whole/group (a community or intimate relationship), but also because if such a group, as a whole, is merely the sum of the individuals, then a consideration of the identity of individuals only (as we have already considered) will suffice.
I again will suggest that it is your “whole = sum of parts” or “non-distinguishing-levels” mentality that is the root of this particular problem. An important part of a group is some shared attributes – lets consider these attributes as being the parts of a group (a different set of parts, in nature, to distinct individuals). Now if the group, including yourself as a member of the group, has the previously mentioned mentality, then what is of primary value in the group is these parts (attributes). If you wish to change, and in doing so no longer share some attributes, your value as a member of the group is damaged. Here the tension between freedom to change and having love (being a part of the group) is again displayed. And again, if you (plural) were to understand/value the group as being a whole, as well as being its parts (attributes), then although individuals may possess contrary attributes (and this in itself will be difficult to reconcile), the group would value itself and be committed to itself as a whole body, thus reconciling differences in accordance to this value. Is this principle not seen time and again in groups which are strongly united and groups which disintegrate? (yes, even in Christianity with its denominations!)
I suggest that this mentality/understanding remains the root of the problem, and that the solution is in thinking/valuing differently – realising and valuing the whole as itself being distinct in nature from the sum of its parts. I think you do this already, only you are inconsistent in doing so, and you certainly don’t seem to recognise it or consider such a concept plausible.
I think you have understood me slightly wrong if you understand me of thinking about identity in terms of parts and wholes at all.
But I actually don't think you do think/consider identity as having the parts/whole aspect, and I'm suggesting that because you don't, you are not seeing how there can be a solution to the aforementioned problem of incompatibility.
When I say that you have a "whole = sum of parts" mentality, I don't mean that it is something you actively think of or hold to, I'm saying that it is implicitly held despite your not realising it, and that such a “hidden” assumption explains how you arrive at the incompatibility conclusion.
Imagine that I am having trouble over the fact that the moon and planets don’t fall to earth, even though nothing seems to hold them in place. Someone introduces me to the theory of gravity, suggesting that it will solve my problem. I however fail to see how it adds anything conceptually useful – it just seems to say what I already know, that stuff falls down, and so I say that it is tautologous. They then tell me that I haven’t understood it properly, and that I further have a “gravity = stuff falls down” mentality, and that gravity is really more than things just falling down. I reply that they have misunderstood me if they understand that I think in terms of gravity at all.
And so it is with you and the idea of wholes. I introduced it to you, saying that the whole is the sum of the parts, and is also itself, and also a part of something else. If you could suspend your position that I’m being tautologous for a moment, and consider the possibility that a whole, in and of itself, is somehow different in nature to the sum of its parts, then does my argument that a person can change their parts and still remain loved on this level of the whole make any sense? Does it at least make sense that if the whole is nothing more than its parts, then loving a person is equivalent to loving their parts, and thus to change your parts is to lose such love?
I think what is really at issue here is that we each respond to a philosophical problem in quite different ways.
The classic theory of identity is that things are made up of parts, and that the sum of the parts determines the identity of the whole. This reaches very clear expression in Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Unfortunately the problem of identity surviving through change rares its ugly head.
There are various ways of responding to this problem. You can either try to rescue the theory by some alteration or addition, the option you seem to opt for. Or you can reject the framework completely and replace it with something else, the approach I prefer.
Jolly good then. What have you replaced this framework with, and how does it solve your problem? And if you don’t have an answer for that, then why do you prefer to opt for the "reject and replace" option?
Essentially, I replace the understanding of identity as being with an understanding of identity as becoming, as I have already stated. My original motivation for doing so was to resolve the problem of identity surviving through change. 'Can you stand in the same river twice?', Clearly the answer is yes, and only some sort of confused philosopher would suggest otherwise. But, says the philosopher, the problem is that the river you stand in today is made of entirely different parts than the river you stood in yesterday. I instead invite people to consider what the river does. By drawing attention to the fact that it is doing the same thing today that it did yesterday we can easily see why we consider it to be the same river. To do something is to change, thus everything changes, and change is no obstacle to identity. So, put simply, a thing is how it changes.
So you see, it is a simple solution to the problem of identity surviving through change. What it is not however is a solution to my two paradoxical emotions, nor is it intended to be, nor can it be sensibly evaluated in terms of it. In fact, I only discussed it because you asked me if I held a competing assumption about identity. The discussion has made me more aware than I previously was how my theory of identity fits into my understanding of freedom however, which is convenient.
we're all unhappy.
http://beezone.com/AdiDa/doublebind.html
Buddhism is such a tempting doctrine. But, because I firmly believe that *I* am not the source of my suffering, I find myself unwilling to accept the noble truths. Essentially this is the same reason I am not Christian either; I am not in need of salvation.
Aside from that a very interesting piece.
Reuben,
Just saw your post. Nice. Kinda raw and honest. That always gets my respect.
I think Jim is right, you can't really expect to be meaningfully integrated into a community of other people for the long term and retain 100% freedom independence. But the issue you're facing is, I think, quite a common one for people around your age. I know I went through it.
You are certainly not correct that a lot of other people are "too preoccupied with trifles to think hard or long enough" about these sorts of issue. I have observed that most people do address issues like these at some stage in their lives - but perhaps not commonly until they are older than most of your friends. Furthermore, people experience and express issues like this in ways that aren't always familiar to us.
I think this problem is never fully resolved in happy intellectual way. What tends to happen, I found, is that the scope of intellectual, emotional, and volitional tools we have expands in such a way that it finds ways to manage these sorts of issues, even while they remain not fully resolved. We start to see these sorts of problems through other lenses, and not simply philosophical ones. This happens, I think, quite aside from Christianity.
What I'm saying by that, I guess, is that you have typically placed a great deal of importance on philosophy. No harm in that. But it's only a matter of time before you discover it won't solve all your problems. In fact, in time I think you'll find that while it's very useful, successfully living involves much more than philosophy. It's bigger, broader, and in many ways more challenging. I don't mean to sound like I have all the answers - I feel like I have far fewer than I used to, it's just that I've been through a similar stage in life, and that's what I see it as now. A stage where it's easy to think just have the right philosophical view of life that everything will fall into place. From this post, it seems like you're moving out of that phase in life.
So you're probably thinking, "well, that's not very helpful." No, it's not helpful in an intellectual, philosophical way. But I suppose I'm saying, "you've got us as friends with you." I think that's part of the fun in life - learning and growing through issues like this, with other people.
Hope that was in some way encouraging... =)
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