[overflow] Re: GHHS

[Lee Gold <leeway@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mat Butler wrote:
> 
> 'love' is (in my considered, but humble, opinion) not an emotion.  It's a
> complex interaction of different desires.  For example: I desire not to
> be hurt by my current boy/girlfriend by him/her saying that my morals and
> values are completely wrong, and that I must change them to suit
> him/her.  I desire not to be hurt by my friend anymore because he couldn't
> deal with the concept that a higher-priority item came up in my life that
> I had to deal with at the time we were supposed to meet, and my friend
> couldn't comprehend why what came up was a high-priority item.  I desire
> to be around him because he's charming, witty, and we usually end up
> having good conversations.  I desire to be around him because he shows me
> and reminds me through his honest statements just how good I really do
> look.  I desire to not feel guilty for leaving my parents, who have
> gone senile, in a nursing home for the rest of their lives.  And so on.

You're certainly describing a mix of different emotions but (for me 
anyway) "desire not to be hurt" and "desire not to feel guilty" and so on
are different than love.  

I'm lucky to know several people who are delightful to be around --
and who like me and praise me.  C. S. Lewis (who claims in 
THE FOUR LOVES that Affection and Friendship are sorts of love)
would claim that what I feel toward them is love.  

I don't want to be hurt by *anyone*.  One way of achieving this is,
as Rob has noted, generating enough scorn/anger at the person that
their negative opinion just doesn't matter.  (I can work my way
up to this, just as Rob "learned" to, so that the negative
opinion only "stings," but that sting is still an emotional effect.
And I can't think of anyone I know personally that I despise enough 
that I am repulsed by hiser compliments and wonder what hidden
loathsomeness of mine evoked them.

I've always figured that if I did my best, then afterwards I wouldn't
feel guilty.  But Barry claims that it's guilt to second-guess
myself after my mother's death to say that if I'd only realized
earlier she needed a colostomy, she wouldn't have had those 
horrible months when she was in intense pain.  There were clues
but the doctors missed them too, but looking back, I still wish
I'd spotted them because she was a wonderful person and I wish
I could have spared her those horrible times. 

> I don't really think it's ever possible to completely stop loving someone,
> unless there are no positive desires to ever be around that person and no
> positive desires for that person to be happy [for whatever reason].

After I'd decided to have my first marriage annulled, I hoped I'd never
see him again or think of him again.  But it took me some months of
struggle to unweave him from my life.  Not to think of things he'd like
or dislike when I went shopping, not to think of something I might've
said to win an old argument,....  The same sort of thing happens
when someone you love dies and you have to get used to never seeing
them again except there, you can't tell yourself that they were 
loathsome and not worth thinking about, that they deceived you into 
thinking they were someone they weren't -- you just have to say goodbye.
> 
> But, on the flip side of the coin, I think we all do these things (fall in
> love, etc) because of our own desires... and I think that 'greediness' is
> not truly the sin that it's made out to be, in that context.

I've never thought that wanting to feel pleasure and happiness is a sin.
(JUdaism teaches that it's a sin to ascetically turn down a lawful
pleasure.)  I'm not quite sure what you mean by "greed."  I have a 
horror of dog-in-the-mangerism, keeping things you don't use or
enjoy rather than selling or giving them away to others.

--Lee