We took advantage of the heatwave and talked about philosophy.
I don't know when I came across this powerful statement: "Not loving is almost a crime." In any case, it was years ago. But I haven't forgotten it, and I can assure you that the passage of time has only convinced me of its plausibility. The problem is that when I start writing with the intention of developing this idea, all I manage to do is squander it. Love is one of those unique things that are difficult to express, and to express them, you have to dance, cry, shout, sing, or simply show them. Small things can be understood and explained without needing to love them, but great things, if they are not loved, cannot be understood or explained.
The manifestations of love are diverse and sometimes even contradictory. Self-love is not the same as love for others, although without the former, the latter would probably be diminished.
Not loving oneself is almost suicidal, because it forces us to carry a weight with no positive value. It's like harvesting a piece of junk. It's obvious that we are much more bearable with ourselves if we love ourselves than if we loathe ourselves, if we are bored, or if we simply don't know how to fill the emptiness of our soul with meaning. But here we move, as always when we deal with the human, between the more and the less, because the human is always a matter of degree.
The Greeks, who had the habit of meditating on everything (yes, even in summer) to put the right words to each thing, gave self-love the name of philautia, understanding that it is the essential condition for any personal improvement project. As we just said, there is no point in striving to improve what we despise. philautia It is not a kneeling place for us to bow down before our narcissism, but rather the realistic feeling that grows within us through our daily interaction with our abilities, and allows us to feel worthy of love in ourselves, which is a substantial ingredient of happiness. In this sense, it is an essential condition for our moral development, because it affirms the value of our existence, and a requirement of the good life (which is not the good life of the vacationer without financial problems). Those who do not know how to love themselves will hardly be able to contribute to the good of others. Friendship is the reciprocity of philautiaFriends, let's put it this way, are the pieces of our soul that we have scattered around the world and that make it more habitable.
Nature – wrote Erasmus – gave, both to each mortal and to each nation and in each city, a certain communal self-love, which is the philautiaErasmus defines it thus: "ipse sibi palpatur", that is, to celebrate or enjoy oneself. And he immediately points out that if we direct this celebration toward another, we must be careful that it does not turn into flattery, which is a form of servility.
In conclusion: those who do not know how to love themselves well waste themselves.
Since we move between delicate balances, it's easy to fall into either excess or deficiency. But this—walking a tightrope—is characteristic of human beings: we are moral tightrope walkers with vertigo. If a certain amount of self-love is good, and even essential for leading a good life, an excess of self-love is harmful because it prevents us from loving others and locks us into the prison of our intimacy. This is the case of those who believe that there is nothing in the cosmos more worthy of admiration than their own navel. Saint Augustine considers these men incurvatus in se, because they are a ball of self-satisfaction (heart incurvatum in seipsum).
St. Augustine believes that selfish love, which is like cancer of the philautia, is perverse because it betrays and renders sterile the very essence of love, which is to take the person you love out of yourself to go and meet the person you love. What Christianity calls sin is nothing other than this perversion of love, which, incapable of centrifugal dynamism, falls into a centripetal dynamic.
Many Christian theologians (Saint Anselm, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Albert the Great, Saint Bonaventure, etc.) have dwelled on the image of the hedgehog-man who, hunched over, has lost the ability to raise his gaze, unaware that his narrowed gaze limits his intelligence. Love, on the other hand, is the strange conviction that there exists in this world someone more real than ourselves, who possesses so much reality that we never tire of looking at it, and that, when we lack it, we lack a world.
Not loving is almost a crime.
