The Art of Loving and Sociality

There is a dimension that is common to most, if not all psychological theories, which spans the need to be ourselves, individual and free, to being one with the other, or others in a moment of fusion. A friend of mine refers to this desire for fusion, in its unhealthy form, as the 'urge to merge'. It is something, that is with us from birth, and requires re-construal throughout the life span, as we learn to be ourselves with, and amongst others. Before we reconstrue, the desire for fusion, often manifests itself, as a quest to be loved, to find someone, who will love us. Eric Fromm the German psychoanalyst and social psychologist suggested that the solution to this quest lies, not in finding someone but in giving it up and learning to love somebody else. This is not an easy task according to Fromm, in his classic book 'The Art of Loving," as it requires us to develop, not just an objective love of the other, but an objective love of oneself, and through these come to an attitude of love for others in general.

To do this we have to know the other person, we have to know ourselves and to know is a task which involves prediction, anticipation of what we ourselves will do and how others themselves will react. It involves an idea of of what human flourishing and growth consists in, which involves an awareness of ourselves and others. Practically speaking we need to be able to direct our attention from ourselves to others. To shift attention to the other, is to start to make sense of not just them, but of ourselves in relation, as someone who attends, tends to others. To tend others, to care, to actively love in a Frommian sense, requires sociality, not in a superficial sense, as when we drive and we mostly successfully, anticipate and predict other drivers, but in a deep sense. A deep sense requiring not just an ability to be with another but with ourselves, in a unity where each is separate, individual, yet joined together, in a moment of being, a unity of purpose. In that moment of being and unity of purpose, an attitude starts to take hold, which extends beyond that single relationship, into our other relations, allowing a depth of maturity and wisdom to develop, so that in our becoming, we become fully human.

Freedom

Freedom comes in many guises. Like many words it is easy to say but what it means is harder to fathom. It is freighted, weighed down, deep by experience, history and myth, surround it like dense fog. To approach it, fathom it, we can turn to dictionaries, philosophers, songs, movies. ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing' left to lose’ in ‘Me and Bobby Mcgee.’ While in Braveheart, William Wallace makes the following speech ‘Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!’
That it is better to die by living, rather than live by dying, is the classic existentialist position.
Sartre a leading exponent wrote that ‘we are condemned to be free’. Our freedom lies in having to make choices, in taking responsibility for ourselves. We cannot blame others, our parents, society, God or evade it by pleading the unconscious. We are not blind puppets, dancing on the end of someone else’s string – it really is up to us. To recall Shakespeare we are actors on a stage, ‘players’, with our ‘exits’ and ‘entrances.’ Playing ‘many parts’ through ‘seven ages’ we start with sound, as infants ‘mewling’, schoolboys ‘whining.’ Before, we become lovers ‘sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad’. Sound is shaped, words arise and we continue as the soldier ‘full of strange oaths’, and then the justice ’full of wise saws’. In the ‘sixth age’, the ‘big manly voice’, is ‘turning again toward childish treble, pipes’, with ‘whistles in’ its ‘sound.’ From speech, back to sound,and then lastly silence.
Sound is our medium, shaped sound our speech. Our voices carry us into the known world and beyond. It is the connecting pattern vibrating between us, if we let it be, as sound. Sounding the depths we fathom our own freedom. We find, our own unique, individual voices, in speech and language. We communicate, and become human. Language is here connecting. It is the gift by which we give ourselves, find ourselves, find love, find friendship - love and friendship are cognate with freedom. The fog has lifted, as it sometimes does and in the clarity of the moment, freedom, love and friendship are together, united in language, three in one, a trinity to aim for. A trinity, experienced last week, with my fellow Dark Angels, to all of whom, my thanks.