922 - On Love [Working note 3]

Everything can be described in terms both of its acme and its opposite. Pick your opposite.

White is an overload of colour, and a negation of black; the removal of pigment from a white light, or the switching of that light on.

Love is a selfless giving, which promises, thereby, self-fulfilment. Therefore its pursuit is pure selfishness and selflessness both.

So the Love Meme possesses two contradictory definitions. Both are in themselves satisfactory: together they create a tension which can only be resolved by appealing to the experience or event of love. This is what it is, because it is what it is.

There's something about intention in the examples I give, perhaps because intention is about a viewpoint. It depends where you are looking from as to whether the interrogation light illuminates or blinds. And only an objective viewpoint allows for light, defendant and inquisitor in clear and co-equal display.

I guess there are two equal and opposite ways to achieve objectivity. The first is to step outside the experience: to become an observer. The second is to so step in that one becomes embodied in each aspect of the experience. One feels the fulfilment of love and also its full expense.

Perhaps the rhetorics of science and religion represent, in this way, a deliberate shuttling to and fro between objective and subjective experience of life (this is, I think, what Mary Midgley is articulating in her book Science and Poetry). They start from opposite poles, and it is not that they meet halfway, so much that each learns to describe itself, both in its own terms, and in the terms of its opposite.