Birth of Love

Love. We all by nature desire to love. Aristotle begins his metaphysics with: “all men by nature desire to know.” To imagine a world, in which our individual pursuits revolve around the desire to know for the sake of knowing without a purpose beyond knowing, creates a vacuum within the world that is infinitely divine. The essence of thought in its self-awareness may think itself to be transcendent, liberated and above the rules of “earthly passions,” but I am moved to bring to light that this idea not only is dishonest it is the cause of the chaos and darkness. Before an individual begins to desire to know, this individual must have a cause for its desire, and since he does not know what he desires to know, the cause cannot be the knowing. For how can we have the desire to know, when we do not know what it is that we desire? And if we know what we desire, then is there even a need to desire it?

We are born at the precise moment of conception. First, “moment” – implies a specific time in which there was a time before our birth. It is quite “simple” to conclude from hindsight that we were born into the world out of our mother’s womb, and that we can infer that there was a world before our existence into this world. We can define “conception” as the moment when fertilization occurs and the embryo forms in the mother. However, this answer and its language (as extension of our thinking) seem to be cold, detached and indifferent to the divine. The process of becoming, before our being born into the world necessitates a desire to understand not for the sake of knowing but to appreciate and recognize the mysteries of life and the question of free will and determinism. Must we “moderns” limit ourselves to the narrow definition of our individual self as some autonomous creature devoid of the past having free will? If we liberate and unshackle the chains of heartless, “secular” thinking, and approach the question posed by love and the lived-in experience of life by trying to comprehend what it means to live and to love, then the mysteries dissolve into the beautiful. It is with this intuitive experience that I have chosen to start with the word “Love”.

Birth, can be defined by the first moment of existence. Our existence in the womb from this first moment is represented and experienced in pure passivity. We are the recipient of love without any awareness. Even during this state of pure passiveness, there is a determinate expression of pre-infantile love in the process of growth. The pure selfless expression characterized by the mother giving birth to a child is an act that bares upon the child the first and only true responsibility – the duty to fulfill and reciprocate the love in active terms. This first decisive moment as an existent being in the world is coupled with our intuitive need to become lovers, if not for the sake of oneself, for the sake of the infinite. Yet, even birth into the world begins in pure passiveness. We are dependent on all of our needs for survival and are the passive recipient of our parents’ love in our process of growth. Although, awareness to respond to our parents’ love does not occur in the beginning, and in some cases never occurs, intuitively we respond to our parents’ love, however passive it maybe, by our ability to communicate our appreciation of love. The process of growth and the becoming of active agents in this world can be characterized by our ability to speak through the extension of language. By “speaking” and “language”, I do not mean solely the ability to use our vocal cords, but the ability to communicate in its fullest expression, at times represented in complete silence. As infants in the world, we by nature speak in the simplest of tongues, first by showing simple emotions such as contentment and discontentment in the form of smiling and crying progressing as we mature to formulate specific actions and speech. It is such then that our development in the world is represented not just by our physical growth, but our growth in our ability to communicate. Through trial and error of becoming we learn how to use the appropriate language for the purpose of expressing our love, to approximate the divine.

Through the observation of the natural laws governing all animate existents we exist to reproduce. What characterizes the different existents in this process of maturation to reproduce is the complexity of language and communication involved in finding a way to love. It is hard to characterize and judge through some form of hierarchical standards what is involve for an existent’s natural necessity to “be fruitful”. We can observe that there is a sliding spectrum of “selectivity” for all animate reproduction of love. Although we can study the patterns of the different types of selectivity represented to us through our observation of nature, the actual human experience can be the only one that we can truly comprehend. Our thought and our ability through language, an extension of our thinking, allow us to become not just passive agents who receive love, but as active lovers who participate in the journey within the narrative of life.

Philosophy and its tradition does not begin with the fear of death or to transcend adversity in the physical world, to reach some metaphysical truth or to become an agent of pure thought beyond the material world, but begins through the awareness of the lived-in experience of the infinite, to come to accept our existence in this world and to become movers who actively express and approximate the divine. We traverse beyond the boundaries of the possible, not just the boundaries of the physical, to learn and to express the infinite love of the divine. Philosophical thinking and the encounter produce a desire first to understand, preceded by a need to become characterized by the extension of language in the form of expression.