Aristophanes’ described love in Plato’s Symposium as the splitting of beings into two by the god Zeus. The being originally has two pairs of legs, two pairs of hands, two heads, two hearts, and two stomachs. When Zeus splits these beings, he creates two halves of one whole and henceforth begins the race to find one’s better half and to feel whole and complete again. In our society today, we sometimes forget our original purpose of being whole once again and start to love things that are not our better halves.
The love of things, animals, and self plagues our existence and our original purpose to be one with our better halves. Society fails to realize that any other love can be destructive when experienced at its extreme. Each array of love that is not directed towards the search of our better half creates ethical dilemmas which intervene in the original meaning of love.
The love of things is one of the most plaguing aspects of our society. People these days are so entrenched in the acquisition of things they sometimes forget the important things in life. It is a popular belief in the East that people commit crimes or partake in unethical activities for two reasons: for money and for their kids. The former notion that people will do anything for money is quite universal. A man who wants power through money might rob a bank, a woman who wants to climb up the social ladder might divorce her rich husband for his assets, but a generally good man who has never committed sin will usually go out of his ethical boundaries for his child.
A usually good, moral, religious but poor man might pickpockets on the street in an underdeveloped country to buy his child a present that he cannot afford. He would tell himself, ‘for the sake of my child and his happiness.’ A usually good, moral, religious, but rich man might launder money to keep up the lifestyle of his children. He would tell himself, ‘it’s something I have to do for the sake of my child.’ In both cases, the moral man commits a crime for his child.
He commits a crime so he can give his child a life that he could not have or wished he would have. What fathers or mothers sometimes forget is that while they are out making money either within or outside of their ethical boundaries to supply their children with things, they lose precious amounts of time that could be spent with the child. A Harper’s Monthly Magazine essayist in the 1930’s wrote:
If, through our segmentalized manner of living, the child is deprived of the steadying influence of the parent, it is no less certain that the parent is losing the child. Should I wish really to know my boy or girl (and this will be increasingly true as they grow older), I must go out into the community to gain my knowledge. I must go to the playground supervisor or to the YMCA in order to discover his athletic and social adjustments… What he is, in himself, as apart from all these pigeonholes and compartments, I have no way of knowing. He has ceased to be, for me, and intimately experienced personality but has become a case study.
I am no longer a parent, but a social worker…. ¶ Just as the bond between husband and wife is tending to become one merely of sex love, so the contact between parents and children is narrowing down to an intense but purely emotional affection. The break-up of home life does not, as some think, liberate the young from the tyranny and repression of an older generation. For what really enslaves the young is not the customs of the past but too narrow a love. (Analysis of Family as and in Social Institutions)
She reflects on the idea that the institution of family has deteriorated because the purpose has simmered down to providing things for their children, whether it is a membership to the YMCA or admission to a private school with expensive tuition. Love is too ‘narrow’ because it is defined by things. Even children tend to define their parents in the form of things by measuring how hard a parent worked his entire life to equip the child with basic education, a roof over his/her head, and clothes on his/her back.
It is quite common for children, once they grow up, to comment about their parents by saying, “I love my mom/dad so much, he/she always gave me what I wanted, he/she worked overtime to get me a dress I wanted to wear to my homecoming dance.” What children sometimes don’t realize is that these things take away from the time that could have been spent together with the parent and perhaps reflected upon the real meaning of love or at least a meaning of love a little less defined by ‘things.’
The second way people establish a love of things is when they attach human attributes or emotions to the object of affection. Sometimes people tend to value the things that were given to them more than the people who gave them to them. For example: When your mother gives you her ring to give to your wife on your wedding day, you love the object because you love your mother. Any other ring would have sufficed, but you love or value this ring much more because it was from someone you love.
Sometimes, in the long run, this love transfers from the referent being to the actual object. Once your mother dies, you look back at the ring as a token of her love that you have now entrusted your wife with. One day your wife loses this ring, and when you find out, you are hurt and heartbroken.
Your wife tries to console you after you both look for it for hours, and it is still nowhere to be found. Amidst this emotional hoopla, you feel a pang of anger because you have now lost the one thing that represented your mother’s love that you entrusted your wife with. You get angry and yell at her to the point where you make her cry. At this point, your love of the referent has passed onto the thing. You give her an ultimatum and tell her to find it on two days or off with her head. Over the years, you end up loving the thing more than the person wearing it.
Your wife is unable to find the ring in two days, and at the peak of your anger, you kill her. You are now demonized. You just killed someone for a thing. You valued a thing more than a human being. A human being can feel, can be there for you, and can return the same love to you. A thing is merely an object of affection; it cannot return your love. When you love a thing so deeply, you are trying to relate yourself to something that is not integral to your existence or are trying to remove something that is integral to your existence.
This point is called alienation. (Wood, 2005, p. 7 – 9). This injustice towards human beings is rarely realized by society because either they are too entrenched in trying to acquire material wealth or value it more than actual human beings.
Capital makes people schizophrenic is the main theme of Deleuze and Guattari’s book Anti Oedipus. (2000) “Jameson writes that a schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the “I” and the “me” over time.” (qtd. in Peretti) In essence, the love of material things destroys the meaning of the word ‘we’ and deteriorates the meaning of love.
Another type of love that leads to harm is the love of animals. It is better than the love of things because an animal understands your passions as a human being and has the capability of returning love too. Nevertheless, this type of love is still not as great as the love of human beings. The dilemma of loving animals is that it is a one-dimensional relationship. It is dictated by you, and you define the creature because you love it so much you expect it to become human, which in essence is inhumane because, after all, an animal as an animal is not human.
Matthias Bier talks about the treatment of animals in the book Violent God-image: An Introduction to the Work of Eugen Drewermann. (2004) Examples of inhumane treatment of animals not only have to do with animal testing or being non-vegetarian. Inhumanities upon animals consist of doing anything to an animal that tries to make it closer to a human being, such as dressing it up as a human, giving it a bath with human shampoo, or giving your dog a pedicure. An animal’s true essence is to be in the wild or in whatever environment it comes from, and any humanization that human beings impose on an animal ends up being torturous for the animal.
Humans fail to realize that an animal might be tortured by being treated as a human. Your own conception of the good is imposed on the animal, whereas it might not be good for them. For example, although we might think it is nice to give our pets a shower in our bathtub, the chemicals we use on our bodies might be harmful to them and cause allergic reactions. Basically, animals do not have the ability to speak and to impose their own idea of good without knowing how good it actually might be made love for the animal torturous. Also, humans also tend to lose their essence when they become too involved with animals.
A perfect example is Tarzan; living with animals all his life, he loses some of his human attributes, and half a life he could have spent as a normal functioning human being in society he wastes with animals. Human beings need each other. When one human being stops helping out the other and focuses on other material things such as money and animals, the threads of society become loose. The best illustration of this concept is when people love their pets or chose pets over human beings. Many people today chose to adopt animals instead of procreating or adopting actual human beings. Society usually views this behavior as loving, caring, considerate and kind. Although it is a kind act, society fails to realize that sometimes these are the same people who would rather adopt a kitten than a human being.
There is nothing wrong with having pets but the idea that an individual who has a pet is a loving and caring individual only because he loves his pet so much is a little skewed. Human beings deserve and have the right to other human beings love and care for animals. How can it be that a person who refuses to love or take care of a child or be considered loving and caring when he or she doesn’t love a human as much as he/she loves the animal in his life? It is easy to love an animal because it does not speak but to love or care for a human being is far superior to loving an animal and to judge a person and assume he or she is loving or caring only based on the fact that he or she has a pet is quite skewed.
Society fails to realize the unethical dilemma behind this concept. People should focus on people’s needs, especially when there are billions of homeless and hungry people in the world who actually need this love more than an animal.
Another type of destructive love is ‘self-love.’ Self-love, or in other words, narcissism, creates a plague out of love. In the world of material things and desires, good looks fall in the top category. This concept is aged and has been bred into us from childhood or from the first time someone read the Ugly Duckling to us. No one liked the duck because she was ugly. When she grew up and turned into a beautiful swan, everything was okay. This sends out the wrong message, just like every other fairytale.
Cinderella is happy because she finds a prince. Snow white is happy because she finds a prince. Belle, the beauty, turns the beast into a handsome prince. The pattern is the same over and over again. You have to be pretty, and you have to find someone rich and pretty. These fairytale stories send out the wrong messages to young children all over the world. For the ones who do have the looks and the money think they live in the fairytale, and for those who don’t hope that one day they will find their prince charming or turn from beauties to beasts. The problem comes in when we grow up, and there is no knight in shining armor or the riches to go along with the dream.
The ugly duckling should have remained ugly and should have gone on a journey of real self-love. Accepting yourself as who you are despite your flaws because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Turning into a swan should never be an okay ending because it encourages narcissism. As long as I am beautiful, everything is okay. I was upset when I was an ugly duckling. Now I am gorgeous. Now everything is okay. Certain individuals in society become entrapped in self-love, which is detrimental to their mental health once the image they have fallen in love with starts to deteriorate.
The love of others is the most superior expression of love and is what makes society a safer and healthier place. Alfred Adler believed that interdependency creates more strength in society.
And since true happiness is inseparable from the feeling of giving, it is clear that a social person is much closer to happiness than the isolated person striving for superiority. Individual Psychology has very clearly pointed out that everyone who is deeply unhappy, the neurotic and the desolate person, stem from among those who were deprived in their younger years of being able to develop the feeling of community, courage, optimism, and the self-confidence that comes directly from the sense of belonging.
This sense of belonging that cannot be denied to anyone, against which there are no arguments, can only be won by being involved, cooperating, and experiencing, and being useful to others. Out of this emerges a lasting, genuine feeling of worthiness. (Classical Alderian quotes, 2003)
When people are more involved with each other and rely on each other more than they rely on institutions, there is an increased likelihood that this particular society will be more a healthier and safer place to live in. For example, when people start relying on intuitions such as banks to take loans, the chances of crime or amoral behavior increase because a bank’s only priority is to be ensured that the money will be returned with greater interest. What is done with the money is relative.
Whereas when people have to rely on other people directly to obtain a loan, the other person usually demands to know what is going to be done with that money. For example, when a kid is dependent on his parents to get money, there is still a check-in balances system in place to avoid deviant behavior through the money. Whereas if the child starts earning on his own, the entire test of his independence is that he will not partake in those deviant activities. Interdependency makes it harder for deviations to take place as compared to independence.
To love an object is to lose one’s self. To love an animal more than a human is inhumane in itself. To love one’s own self over someone else is the destruction of self. But to love another human being, depending on another human being, caring for another human being is love in its truest form. The world will only be in peace again when we find our better halves and avoid all ethical dilemmas and injustices.
Works Cited
Analysis of Family as and in Social Institutions. Web.
Beier, M. (2004). A violent God-image: an introduction to the work of Eugen Drewermann. New York: Continuum.
Kim, S.-Y. C. (2000). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis by Eugene W. Holland. PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES. 2 (4), 411-412.
Peretti, Jonah Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Web.
Plato, Groden, S. Q., & Brentlinger, J. A. (1970). The Symposium of Plato. [Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press.
Stein, Henry (2003). Classical Alderian Quotes. Web.
Wood, A. W. (2005). Karl Marx. Arguments of the philosophers. New York, NY [u.a.]: Routledge.
Xenophon. (1990s). The symposium. Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg.