It was brought to my attention recently how erroneous the extent to which the idiom “unconditional love” is taken literally and actually believed in. Before revealing my response, the original post reads as follows:
“There is nothing more empowering than loving unconditionally.”
Let us examine the latter section of this sentence, namely “loving unconditionally.”
Love is commonly defined as an intense feeling of deep affection. As stated by Sigmund Freud, the “instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can’t control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.”
In the light of Nietzsche: The lust of property, and love: what different associations each of these ideas evoke! and yet it might be the same impulse twice named: on the one occasion disparaged from the standpoint of those already possessing (in whom the impulse has attained something of repose, who are now apprehensive for the safety of their “possession”); on the other occasion viewed from the standpoint of the unsatisfied and thirsty, and therefore glorified as “good.”
Thus, the conception of love cannot be understood without its fundamental affinity to its love-object: there is no love without its contingency – without its conditionality. Hence ‘love’ that is understood as unconditional cannot be love at all, for love itself is contingent upon its object. The action of love cannot be actionable if not for that in which it can act upon.
Love cannot be comprehended were it not a conditional phenomenon. Loving itself presupposes condition – how can it be conceived any other way? For without condition, the inclination to love could never become so as to even identify what it concerns itself with.
Moreover, perhaps this phrase of “loving unconditionally,” presuming that the ‘unconditional’ absurdity can be absolved temporarily for the ‘sake’ of argument, amounts to the status of an idiom that is synonymous to the rigidity one feels himself, in a position of love, to his love-object. But in order to stand in a practical position of truth with this idiom, one must have a thorough understanding of all future encounters/situations/circumstances/events (entailing all love-altering phenomena) that is to take place until the end of the lover’s life (and coincidentally the loved-object if it is organic) so as to possess sufficient certainty in presenting such a claim. Conclusively, whether unconditional love is to be taken literally or as an idiom, it is absurd at its base.
Now, let us examine the former section of the sentence “there is nothing more empowering than loving unconditionally” and analyze what exactly love-empowerment entails.
Concerning the sensation of empowerment coinciding with the phenomenon “love”, the former is essentially superfluous. To love is to thirst for obtaining love-object, or to have obtained the love-object already, i.e. to desire to ‘own’ or to ‘own’ already. Insofar that the giving or delegation of power is synonymous with empowerment, love can either represent an unsatisfied thirst for obtaining a/the love-object, in which case the impulse to love presupposes the impulse to power, or love can represent an establishment-expression of an obtained love-object, in which case love has empowered already.
“Love is empowering” vs. “Love empowers” contrast greatly (although both are commonplace expressions generally intended to mean the same thing) whereas the former grants the conception “love” the idiosyncrasy of “empowering”, i.e. love is the sensation of empowerment – which, as said above, empowerment is indispensably tied to love, and therefore always holds at least a minuscule portion of validity – the latter simply, and redundantly, expresses itself twice-over, i.e. “love loves.” Love is empowering, as it gives rise to the sensation of empowerment from the perception of a successful obtaining of the love-object, but when love has yet to confirm itself in the safety of its possession, love is not empowering. When love is not empowering, that is to say when it is within the state of impulse and without satisfaction, – to say once again – the impulse to love presupposes the impulse to power, but when successful, love has empowered already – by nature of love and love-object.
Now, onto the sensational phenomenon that is achieved with obtainment-love.
According to Nietzsche, “We gradually become satiated with the old and securely possessed, and again stretch out our hands; even the finest landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and any kind of more distant coast excites our covetousness: the possession for the most part becomes smaller through possessing.”
Which is to say, the sensation of the security of one’s possession diminishes through the actuality of possessing it. Not in “three months” as a literalist may interpret, but in relative, sufficient time. This sheds some light as to the derivation of love-impulse; if possession-security diminishes, it would make sense as to why the inclination to possess would originally become desideratum. If unconditional love was possible — if loving limitlessly and infinitely was possible — there would be no impulse to love in the first place.
Tre Collins
2/1/2013
Psychologically Philosophical 