What is the performance of truly loving someone?
| Fromm
All forms of love are common: care, responsibility, respect, and understanding.
Care and caring also includes another aspect of love, namely responsibility. Today people often understand responsibility as an obligation, something imposed from the outside. But the original meaning of the word conscientiousness is a fully conscious action, my reply to the expressed or unexpressed desire of another life. "Responsibility" means being able and prepared to respond to these wishes.
Jonah had no sense of responsibility to the inhabitants of Nineveh, and like Cain, he would have asked the question, "Should I be my brother's guard?" ”。 The answer of a loved one is that my brother's life is not only about himself, but also about me. I am as responsible for other people as I am. This sense of responsibility is mainly manifested in the mother's concern for the child's physical requirements in the mother-child relationship, and in adults, it also includes the spiritual requirements of the other party.
If love does not have a third element: respect, then responsibility can easily become controlling others and enslaving others. Respecting others is not fear of each other, and the origin of the word respect is the ability to face the other person realistically and recognize his unique personality. Respect is about trying to enable the other person to grow and develop themselves, so respect is never meant to be exploitative.
I hope that a person I love should grow and develop in his own way and for himself, not serve me. If I love others, I should feel in agreement with him and accept him as he is, rather than asking him to be the way I want him to be so that I can use him as an object of use.
Only when I reach independence myself, independently walk my own path without foreign aid, that is, do not want to control and use others, only in this case can respect the other party become possible. There is love only on the basis of freedom, as sung in an old French song "Love is the child of freedom and will never be the product of control".
People can only respect each other if they know each other and understand each other. If it is not based on understanding, care and responsibility will be blind, and if it is not from the perspective of caring to understand each other, this understanding is also useless. There are many ways to learn about it. To be an element of love is to go deep inside things, not to be content with a half-understanding.
I can only understand others if I see them through their eyes and take a back seat of interest in myself. For example, I can know that the person is angry, even if he doesn't show it himself. But I could have gone further to get to know him, and then I knew that he was frightened and restless, that he felt lonely and condemned by his conscience. Then I understood that his anger was only a reflection of something deeper within him, and that I saw him no longer as an angry person, but as a suffering man in fear and trepidation.
Understanding that there is another fundamental relationship with love. The desire to unite with another person to escape the imprisonment of self-solitude is intimately linked to another perfectly human desire, which is to know the "secret of man." Life is a miracle and a secret from the point of view of its pure creatures, and within the human realm everyone is an unsolvable secret for himself and for others.
We know ourselves, but we don't know ourselves despite all our efforts, we know others, but we still don't know them, because we are not the same thing as them. The deeper we go into the depths of our lives or the depths of another person's lives, the farther we are from knowing the purpose of life. Nevertheless, we cannot prevent this desire to delve deeper into the secrets of the human soul, to understand the core of man, the "self," from continuing.
There is a desperate possibility of knowing this secret—that is, to have all the power to control the other person, and to use this power I can dominate him at will, to make him feel and think according to my will, to turn him into a thing, into my thing, into my property. The most obvious manifestation of this is the extreme practice of the abuser, who demands and can cause suffering to a man, who tortures and forces that person to divulge his secrets. The demand to discover man's secrets is the basic motivation for wanton atrocities and saboteurs. Isaac Babel expressed this idea very clearly. He quotes an officer from the Russian Civil War who had just trampled his former master to death. The officer said, "With one bullet— I would say — one bullet can only kill this guy..."
Shooting is never going deep into his soul, reaching where he is a man and where he has a soul. But I have no scruples, I have trampled the enemy to death more than once, each time for more than an hour. Do you know —I want to know, what is life, what is the life we encounter every day? ”
In children we often see this shortcut to knowledge. The child picks up an object and breaks it so that he can recognize it. For example, if he catches a butterfly, he cruelly breaks his wings, and he wants to know the butterfly and force it to hand over its secret. There is a deeper motive for cruelty here: the desire to know the secrets of things and life.
Another way to know secrets is through love. Love is a manifestation of actively going deep into each other. In this process, I hope that the requirements for knowing the secrets are met through combination. In the process of combining, I knew each other, knew myself, knew all the people, but still "knew nothing". My understanding of life is not through the knowledge transmitted by thought, but through the only way that man can use—through the union of people. Sadism arises to learn secrets, but to no avail.
I disintegrate a life piece by piece, and all I can achieve is that this life is destroyed. Only love can bring me knowledge, answering the questions I ask in the process of union. In love, in devotion, in going deep into each other, I found myself, I found myself, I found both of us, I found people.
Delphi's proverb "Know Yourself" expresses our desire to know ourselves and others. This is the origin of all psychology. Because this desire is to know the whole man, to know the deepest secrets of his heart, ordinary knowledge, knowledge transmitted by thought, cannot satisfy this desire. Even if we knew a thousand times more about ourselves than we do now, it was impossible to go deep into the most essential things of things. We are a fan of ourselves, and others will always be a fan of us. The only way to reach full understanding of man is to know the mind, that is, the knowledge of psychology is a condition for achieving full understanding through love. I have to get to know each other and myself objectively in order to be able to see the reality of the other person or to be able to overcome illusions and distorted images of him in my imagination. Only when I know a person objectively can I understand his true nature in love.
Care, responsibility, respect and understanding are interdependent. A concentrated expression of these attitudes can be seen in mature people. Mature people are people who can creatively exert their own strength. The mature man, who only wants to have the fruits of his own labor, abandons the narcissistic fantasy of obtaining full strength and omniscience, and has a humble attitude. This attitude is based on the strength of his heart, which alone enables him to carry out real, creative labour.