Perspectives on Love (Bell Hooks)

Hello everyone, today I'd like to talk about perspectives that I have recently come to on love. It is mostly informed by my reading of the book 'All About Love' by Bell Hooks, and of course, some video essays that I unhealthily binge-watch along with my meals. 

It is quite hard to talk about love in an objective manner. One of the primary reasons for this is that most of us are not even talking about the same thing when we use the word, love. When the word is used in a rap song that has been created in today's culture, (though that is probably a rarity) it is referring to or trying to represent quite a different concept from what a spiritual guru uses it for example.

Love is Spiritual

One connotation I found interesting was something that relates very (seemingly) disparate paradigms of thought; Transgressive literature and Kashmiri Shaivism. I haven't read the primary texts for either of these so my interpretations might be wrong, however, the concept is interesting to me anyway, so I will try to flesh it out.

The idea is that all energy we have is at its core erotic. The word erotic here is not used in the sense of the commodified and perverted instantiations of sex that are sold to us to create a lack and further marketing today, but rather in a Nietzschean Dionysian and overflowingly creative sense. It is closer to the feeling the word 'Eros' seeks to point to. It comes from the realization, seen in for example Sri Aurobindo that what is described as 'Human Love' and 'Psychic Love' flows from the same source. In Georges Bataille, it is talking about how we have a seeking for continuity. In Kashmiri Shaivism, it is the bliss of the union of form and energy. The dynamic movement of being in itself searching for being for itself and the polarity created because of it.

This energy is infinitely creative, infinitely dynamic but in all its manifestations isn't easy to control (and its intensity can also be terrifying) which is why society seeks to supress it, through power structures, or perverting it in other forms. As a side note, it seems to me that this energy is also connected to Prana or vital energy but that is something I will explore some other time. 

Another point here is that this basis of dualism I have mentioned here which seems to be at the basis of all of our language, providing meaning to it by Binary opposition also raises interesting questions. I have just been getting my feet wet with Deleuze, but there is a radical opposition to this dialectical negation present there. It is argued that a lot of our structures of meaning are formed by favouring one of the members of these dialectical negation pairs in thought, which leads to, for example Patriarchal or Racist ideas continuing to propagate. 

There is an argument instead that each of the different discontinuities in our field of perception or 'salient forms' as Rene Thom would say are engaged in a process of determining themselves through a dynamic evolution of their will to power. Each of them is radically different and can not be compared to each other on any metric. However, in determining itself, a concept sublates the other wills into it and becomes the framework through which other wills are interpreted. This is probably a shaky understanding of the concept of difference but I hope to expand upon it as I read more as it seems interesting. 

Self Love (?)

if love is "the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth", as Bell Hooks mentions in her book quoting Scott Peck, then self-love is the will to extend yourself for the purpose of nurturing your own spiritual growth. 

Self-love then, is not saying yes to another product that has been marketed to fill your artificially created sense of lack in the system. It is a conscious and aware decision to undertake actions that lead to the flourishing of your spirit in each moment. It is perhaps, what the Ashtanga Yogic practice of 'Svadhyaya' wishes to achieve.

If we look at Krishnamurti's definition of discipline, as coming from the word root disciple, from the feeling of wanting to learn everything there is to know about something and emulating the behavior of a perfect disciple, it puts the stoic association of discipline and self-love into even more explicit terms. Funnily enough, if we proceed with the understanding that Atman and Brahman are the same, then the word 'Brahmacharya' which means 'conduct consistent with Brahman' matches up almost perfectly with this definition of self-love and discipline. Interestingly, we note that celibacy which this word has become almost synonymous with is not essential to this definition. 

Modern Love, Masculinity

Taking a big-picture view of the landscape of modern love, we see that the situation is utterly dismal and seems to be worsening. Slowly we are becoming aware of some of these problems, as shown by the multitude of media talking about the fact that as a society we are screwing up, how online dating makes us see people as products and profiles instead of human beings.

This of course is exceeded only by videos using complicated psychoanalytic jargon to describe potential "red flags" and media showing you why your relationship is shit as compared to some random influencers (who make money off of your exact feeling of lacking that experience btw). There is another pipeline that has affected the dismal state of things as they are without seeking to make systemic changes to our conceptions of gender roles etc. The red pill, hustle culture, or on the other side rhetoric which promotes using promiscuity for manipulation and material gains is an example of this. These are both fundamentally not bad as ideas, i.e. not resenting your situation and trying to make the most of it anyway, and reclaiming women's sexuality. However, when they fail to critique and change the system and instead use the problems inherent in it to amass more and more possessions or power they miss the mark. 

The whole system is a race to the bottom where everything continues to become more and more commodified and superficial, and almost everyone seeks to get what they can out of the burning ship before it goes down (or they have simply given up, which is even worse).

In my opinion, the fundamental problem here is something that Bell Hooks touched on in the book. It was something so basic, yet something which I hadn't seriously considered before I read it. Love isn't really about becoming "more lovable". It is about becoming "more loving". With all our technologies we're optimizing for the wrong thing fundamentally. A lot of being a more loving person is the grueling work that comes from a conscious effort to be dedicated to another's spiritual growth. It is about being there for them, sometimes about believing in them when they can't believe in themselves, and you feel like you shouldn't either. It is about not being afraid of your feelings being resonated. It is about being a beacon of gratitude and warmth. There are a few people in my life who fit these descriptions, and in observing them I have come to learn this and slowly work on letting go of my constricted heart. I am immensely grateful to them. I am no one to preach about these things, as I have a long journey ahead of me in understanding these things too. 

The point which is important here is that all of us have this latent potentiality to be overflowing with such feelings in our being. However, there is immense fear involved in rejection. Red pillers and pick-up artists would say that we can get used to overcoming the fear of rejection however I would say that that is just desensitization. If what we have felt is real love for another then rejection would actually destroy us. (Relates closely to death being the ultimate continuity and union, and love being longing for union).

Fearing rejection it is easy to see that all these different media outlets are just people transmitting the same to us. Crucially, the biological mechanism these technologies are hacking is that love is nourishing to us. Hence, it seems to us that someone who is "lovable" must also be "loving". The "lovability" constraint then gets replaced by "attractiveness, social status, appearance and aesthetics, etc." and this small slippery slope leads us to the profilic disaster modern dating has become. 

We have a generation of men and women who have focused on becoming lovable instead of loving. Hence it is no wonder that the pinnacle of this process is a jacked aesthetic millionaire lonely narcissistic playboy whereas the pinnacle of a woman's image is a strong independent woman who has her emotional needs met and owns her sexuality yet is perfectly submissive and hence never communicates those needs in the first place. With the jump from aiming to be lovable instead of loving, we cut out the effort that is involved in love, but end up with fundamentally unworkable premises to start from. A man who became lovable after being loving first would have already had enough love in their life to the point they would never be lonely in the first place (links well to attachment styles). I don't have a perspective on the female side of this divide but it seems natural why a lot of male loneliness and female emotional labour is invisible. It's getting assumed in the construction of our technologies that people were probably loving before they became "lovable" where "lovable" is a metric not based on genuine connections with the person but rather whatever our algorithms end up learning to substitute for it.

That is all I wish to say on the topic of love for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this or at least got a new perspective.