PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN PERSON (MR. JOEL C.

PORRAS)

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF LOVE

by Manuel B. Dy, Jr.

What is love? The question has been asked since the time of Plato, not only by the professional
philosophers but by people from all walks of life. Much has already been written on this subject,
answers to the question have been given and many more questions posed; and yet the reality of love has
not been exhausted. The very fact that this question of what love is still being asked seems to show that
love is part and parcel of mans life, and a philosophy of man is incomplete without a philosophy of
love, of man as loving.

Many of us have the tendency to equate love with romance. The world love rings a sweet
melody to the ears, brings to the imagination the image of two lovers whispering sweet nothings to each
other in the park or on the telephone, unmindful of the rest of the world as if only they matter and exist
at all. Love is a many splendored thing, so the song goes.

On the other hand, love is pictured many times as an act of possessing or being possessed by
another person. People fight and struggle in the name of love. I love you has come to mean, You are
mine and I want you to do the things I want, I want you to be of what I you want to be. Or else, it has
come to mean, I am yours, and you can do whatever you want to me.

For many young people, love has become synonymous with sex. To love another means to be
passionately attracted to her and to bring her to bed with me. This equation of love with sex has led to
the idea that friendship is not love, that when two lovers break up, they may settle down for friendship
as if friendship were inferior to love.

People say, love is blind and lovers do not see. This has come to mean that to love is to be
attracted to the good qualities of the other. Sometimes this is earned to the extreme of attributing
attractive qualities to the other even if they are not there. Love has come to be equated with admiration.

Erich Fromm in his famous book The Art of Loving1 mentions the fact that the popular notion of
love at present is falling in love. People have the misconception that there is nothing to be learned
about love, that love hits a man like lightning. Either you are struck by the arrow of Cupid or you are
not. He attributes this popular notion of love to three reasons:

1) the emphasis on being-loved rather than on loving. This is evident in the many books
written and sold on how to win friends and influence people, how to be attractive, how to have a
sex appeal, etc.
2) the emphasis on the object loved rather than on the faculty of loving. People talk of the
ideal girl, the idea boy, the ideal husband, the ideal wife. And it seems the right object to love
follows the same trend as the fad in the market.

3) the confusion between the initial state of falling in love and the permanent standing-in
love. People mistake the initial feeling of infatuation as love. Two people finding themselves as
strangers in a country and feeling lonely easily fall for each other. If they simply based their love on this
feeling of loneliness their love will not last.

Our phenomenology of love must first set aside all the above preconceptions of love. Now, let us
go back to the original experience of love.

Loneliness and Love

The experience of love begins from the experience of loneliness. The experience of loneliness is
basically a human experience. Because man as man is gifted with self-consciousness, there comes a
point in the stage of mans life that he comes to an awareness of his unique self and the possibilities
open to him. He becomes aware that he is different from others, that he is not what others (like his

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parents) think him to be. As a child, he gaze was turned towards things; toys and candies made up his
world. As a child, people were mere extensions of his ego, mere satisfaction of his desires. But as he
grows up to becomes more an adolescent, his gaze is gradually turned inwards; he questions the things
that were taught to him by his parents and teacher; he reaches for his own identity. Who am I?
becomes more important than the toys and candies that once were objects of his desires. Too old to be
identified with the child and too young to be considered an adult, he feels misunderstood, unwanted,
alone.

His natural tendency is to seek out his fellow adolescents from understanding and acceptance.
Together they invent their own language, their own music. It is in the barkada that he finds equality. But
then what has equality come to mean? It has come to mean uniformity, sameness in actuality. The
adolescent groups himself with his barkada because they happen to have the same likes and dislikes as
he. Very often, he has a different barkada for movies, another barkada for work and study. Very seldom
does he find himself in a group who will take him for that all he is, different from the group.

Until this equality will mean oneness in difference, the person will remain lonely amidst a crowd.
Loneliness is possible even if one is immersed in the crowd. In an attempt to conform to the group and
hide ones individuality, his loneliness eventually expresses itself as an experience of boredom.

To overcome this boredom and loneliness, the person many times resorts to drinks and drugs or
any form of heightened sensation. The effect of this artificially created sensation is to involve ones total
being in some kind of a trance reminiscent of the primitive mans ritual and dance. It provides to the
lonely and bored person a temporary escape from reality, temporary because the trance, the happening
is transitory and periodical.

Another resort to overcome the experience of loneliness is to keep oneself busy with creative
activity. Keeping oneself occupied with all sorts of activity diverts ones attention from oneselfbut
only for sometime. One eventually will tire himself out. Moreover, it is not any activity that can be
fulfilling ones emptinessthe activity has to be creative, something that the person himself has started,
developed and finished to end. This kind of activity is rare nowadays. And even if one discovers himself
in this creative activity, in the end he still has to come to face with the anguish of being alone.

The answer to the problem of loneliness is the reaching out to the other person as an other. Love
is the answer to the problem of loneliness because it is only in love that I find at-onement and still
remain myself.

Love is the union under the condition of preserving ones integrity, ones
individuality. Love is an active power in man, a power which breaks through
the walls which separate man from his fellowmen, which unites him from
others, love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet,
it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs
that two beings become one and yet remain two. (Fromm, p.21)

The Loving Encounter 2

Loneliness ends when one finds or is found by another in what we will call a loving encounter.

The loving encounter is a meeting of persons. The meeting of persons is not simply bumping into
each other, nor is it simply an exchange of pleasant remarks, though these could be embodiments of a
deeper meeting. The deeper meeting here in love happens when two persons or more who are free to be
themselves choose to share themselves. It presupposes an I-thou communication, a communication of
selves. (This is possible even in groups of common commitments although the meeting of persons may
be harder due to the expectation of roles.)

First of all, the loving encounter necessitates an appeal, an appeal of the other addressing my
subjectivity. The appeal may be embodied in a word, a gesture or a glanceall these can be signs of an
invitation for me to transcend myself, to break away from my pre-occupation with myself.

Very often in the daily run of life, I ignore this signs. I am too absorbed or too conscious of the
roles I am accustomed to play in daily life as a teacher, a student, an employer, a priest, that I fail to see
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the appeal of the other. To be able to see the appeal of the other, I need more than eyes; more than mind
I need an attitude, a heart that has broken away from self-preoccupation.

What is the appeal of the other?

The appeal of the other is not his corporeal or spiritual attractive qualities. I can conceptualize
the other into a list of beautiful qualities (which I myself may lack) but they can only at best give rise to
enamoredness, a desire to be with the other. But once the qualities cease to be attractive, love also
ceases. Love is more than mere infatuation, more than mere liking such and such qualities of the other.
The other person is more than his qualities, more than what I can conceptualize of him. And love is the
experience of this depth and mystery of the other and the firm will to be for him.

Nor is the appeal of the other an explicit request coming from the other. The explicit request of
the other may just be a sign of a deeper appeal, yet if I base my reaching out to the other simply on this
need, it may well be because of a certain pity, and not really out of love. Or, it may be possible that I can
satisfy his request because I just want to get over with it and not be bothered anymore. In such a case,
even if I have satisfied the request of the other, he may go away dissatisfied because my heart was not in
it.

The appeal of the other is himself. The other in his otherness is himself the request. The appeal
of the other is the cal to participate in his subjectivity, to be with and for him.

While it is true that I need an attitude that has broken away from self-preoccupation to see the
appeal of the other, the converse also holds: the appeal of the other which is himself enables me to
liberate myself from my narrow self. It reveals to me an entirely new dimension of my existence, that
perhaps myself-realization may be a destiny-for-you. Because of you, I understand the meaningless of
my egoism. Perhaps, I am not meant to be alone, perhaps I can only be truly myself with you.

If the appeal of the other is himself, what then is my reply?

Since the appeal of the other is not his quality or an explicit request, it follows that my response
cannot be outpouring of my qualities to the other or the satisfaction of his request. Compatibility is not
necessary love. Neither is submission necessary love. Sometimes, refusing the request of the other may
be the only way of loving the person in a situation, if satisfying it would bring harm to the person.

If the appeal of the other is himself, then the appropriate response to the appeal is Myself.

As a subjectivity, the other person is free to give meaning to his life. His appeal then to me
means an invitation to will his subjectivity, to consent, accept, support and share his freedom. Love
means willing the others free self-realization, his destiny, his happiness. At times it may mean refusing
whatever could impede or destroy the others possibility for self-realization. When I love the other, I am
saying, I want you to become what you want to be. I want you to realize your happiness freely.

Love, however, is not only saying it, it is doing it. Love is effective, it takes actions. (Action
speaks louder than words.) Since the other person is not a disembodied subjectivity, to love him
therefore implies that I will his bodily being, and consequently his world. Love is inseparable from care,
from labor. To love the other is to labor for that love, to care for his body, his world, his total well-being.

Willing the happiness of the other, however, also implies that I have an awareness, though
implicit and at times vague, of the others destiny. I have a searching for and a partial finding of his way
in the world. And whatever opinion I have of the happiness of the other will influence and give direction
to my affection for him. It will open certain worldly roads for him and also close others, those that
would not bring him closer to his destiny. Love then necessitates a certain personal knowledge of the
other.

Of course, the possibility exists that I could be mistaken as to what will make the other happy.
The temptation is also very great that I may impose my own concept of happiness on the other. I can go
on laboring for the happiness of the other, where in reality I am simply fulfilling my own needs. The
other has become an extension of myself and has become absorbed by my own person. If love is not to
become domination, it must be balance by a certain respect, respect for the uniqueness and otherness of
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the other. Respect does not mean idolizing a person; it simply means accepting the person as he is,
different from myself.

Accepting the other as other, as he is, is not to be taken in a static sense. The other is also himself
in his potentialities, in his becoming. But his becoming may have a different rhythm from my own. His
pace of growing may be faster or slower than my own. In such a case, respect also means being patient.
Patience is also harmonizing my rhythm with his. Like a melody or an orchestra, my music of life must
follow his own tempo. Patience requires a lot of waiting and catching-up, a waiting that is active, ever-
ready to answer to the needs of the other, and catching up that is spontaneous and natural.

Reciprocity of Love

From our description above of loving encounter, it seems that love is wholly concerned with the
other. What happens to myself? Am I not at all concerned with myself in love? Am I not at all interested
in being loved in return? Here we touch upon two important questions on love: First, what is the
relationship of love of the other and love of myself? Secondly, what happens with unreciprocated love?

In the loving encounter, my response to the appeal of the other which is his subjectivity is
myself. I will the others free self-realization. In other words, I offer myself to him by placing a limitless
trust in the other. This opening of myself to the other is defenselessness. It becomes a call upon the love
of the beloved, an appeal to him to accept the offer of myself. This appeal of the lover to the beloved is
not the will to draw advantage from the affection for the other (upang magkaroon siya ng utang-na-
loob). It is not compelling, dominating or possessing the other. Love wants the others freedom: that the
other himself choose this safe way and avoid that dangerous path.

There is indeed an element of sacrifice in loving the other which is often understood by many as
a loss of self. In love, I renounce the motive of promoting myself. I have to break the provisional
structure I have given to my own life, and this is painful. Entering into a friendship is acceding to my
friends wishes which may not be the same as mine. The pain lies in abandoning my egoism, my self-
centeredness.

But this does not mean the loss of myself. On the contrary, in loving the other I need to love
myself, and in loving the other I come to fulfill and love myself.

In loving the other, I have to be concerned with myself if my love is to be authentic. Since in the
loving encounter I am offering myself to the other, the gift of myself must first of all be valuable to
myself. If I despise myself and give myself to the other, my giving is a throwing away of myself. I have
made the other a garbage can of my despicable myself. In the development of man, this love of self
takes the form of being-loved. I am first loved by my parents, teachers and friends before I learn to give
back that love to others. The joy I first experience in life is the joy of being loved.

And yet this value of myself remains unconfirmed, the joy of being myself a hidden joy. I need
to go out to others, to accept and value them as they are to discover the value of myself. In giving myself
to the other, I discover my available self. In willing the happiness of the other, I experience the joy of the
giving. I giving I also receive. Just as the teacher is taught by his students and the actor is stimulated by
the appreciation of his audience, so in loving the other I cannot help but also fulfilled. In love, giving is
also receiving, and receiving is giving.

Consequently, there exist in loving the other the desire to be loved in return. I cannot love the
other if I am one hundred percent sure my offer will not be accepted. One does not give something he
knows the other will not receive. The desire is essential but should never become the motive for loving,
otherwise I am loving the other not for what he is but for what I can get in return, for myself.

The primary motive for loving the other is thus the other himself, the You. The you is not a
he or she l talk about. The you is not just another self (just a rose among other roses, a fox among
other foxes3), but the you-for-whom-I-care. The you in love is discovered by the lover himself. It is
not that the lover is blind to the objective qualities of the other but that he is clear that the other is over
and above his qualities. The motive of love is the you that is seen not only by the eyes or the mind but
more by the heart. I love you because you are beautiful and lovable, and you are beautiful and lovable
because you are you.
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 Since the you is another subjectivity, he is free to accept to reject my offer. This is the risk of
loving, that the other may reject or betrayed the self I have offered to him. What happens to
unreciprocated love?

One cannot of course erase the possibility that the rejection of the beloved could be a test of the
authenticity of love. If the other rejects my offer and I persist in loving the other inspite of the pain, then
perhaps my love is truly selfless, unmotivated by the desire to be loved in return. But granted that the
rejection is final, what can one say of the experience? No doubt the experience is painful, and it will take
time fort the lover to recover himself from the experience. Nevertheless the experience can provide him
with an opportunity to examine himself. It can be an opportunity for self-reparation. The experience of
being rejected can be an emptying of oneself which would allow room in oneself for development. In
this sense, an unreciprocated love can still be an enriching experience.

Indeed, the risk and reality of love being reciprocated proves that there is no shop in the world
that sells love.

Creativity of Love

When love is reciprocated, love becomes fruitful, love becomes creative.

Granted that knowing the other person as he is necessitates loving him, still there is a distinction
between knowing the other as other and loving him as he is. In knowing, I actively let reality be by
opening myself to it, but this letting be of reality demands a certain respect and acceptance of reality
which is somewhat passive. Loving the other, however, is willing the others free self-realization, and
willing demands a making of the other. In fact, in every encounter, there is making of each other: the
teacher makes the student a student, the student makes the teacher a teacher. In the loving encounter, we
also make each other be. What then is created in love?

To understand more clearly the creativity of love, let us try a brief phenomenological sketch of
the experience of being-loved: what does the other make of me when he loves me?

When I am loved, I experience a feeling of joy coupled with a sense of security. The feeling of
joy is the sense of being valuable, of being accepted and consented to. I no longer feel the fear of being
myself and anxiety of trying to be someone else. I experience an exhilarating sense of freedom. At the
same time I feel secure, secure because the lover participates in my subjectivity such that I no longer
walk alone in the world but that I walk together with him. The other by his love has made me fully
myself, not just being what I am but also by being what I can become when I am with him. What is thus
created in love is a being-togetherness, a we. I can no longer say, I did this or he did that but we did
this and that.

Concomitant with the creation of the we is the creation of a new worldour world. No longer
do we live in two different worlds, but our worlds have become one.

Such a feeling coming over me

There is wonder in everything I see
Everything I want the world to be
Is now coming true especially for me
And the reason is clear
Its because you are here
Im on top of the world looking
Down on creation and only the explanation I can find
Is the love thats found ever since youve been around
You almost put me at the top of the world.4

My life is very monotonous, he said. I hunt chickens; men hunt me.

All the chickens are just alike and all men are just alike. And, in consequent,
I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine
on my life. I shall know the sound of the step that will be different from all
the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours
will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-
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 fields down younder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat
fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the
color of the gold. Think how wonderful that will be back the thought of you.
And I shall love to listen to wind in the wheat5

Union of Love

The we that is created in love is the union of persons and their worlds. The union of persons is
not an objective union: when two things are united what results is a composition or assimilation: the two
elements are no longer distinguishable from each otherthey have each lost their identities. The union
in love, however, does not involve the loss of identities. The I does not assimilate the you or vise
versa. On the contrary, the I, the you an other. We become more of ourselves by loving each other.
This is the paradox in love, the many in one, one in many. Says the poet E.E. Cummings,

ones not half two

its two that are halves of one.

The Gift of Self

It is not our intent here to explain this paradox of love, the paradox of one in many and many in
one. That would call for a metaphysics of love. What we can do on a phenomenological level is attempt
to clarify and deepen this paradox by means of description of love as essentially a gift of self.
What is the nature of a gift? A gift is causing another to possess something which hitherto you
possess yourself but which the other has no strict right to own. If the other has paid for that which I have
given him, this is not gift-giving but an exchange or selling. It is of the very essence of gift-giving that it
be disinterested, that is to say, I give not in order to get something in return.

Love is essentially a disinterested giving of myself to the other as other. The giving in love is not
a giving up: I am not being deprived of something when I give in love because the self is not a thing that
when given no longer belongs to the giver but to the given. Nor is the giving in love the giving of the
marketing character because as we have said, in love I do not give in order to get something in return.
Furthermore, the giving in love is not of the virtuous character: I do not give in order to feel good. I do
not give with reporter and photographer surrounding me. Why then do I give myself in love?

The answer can be seen in what is essentially given in love and to whom it is giventhe Self. To
give myself in love is not so much to give of what I have as of what I am and can become. And this self
that I am and can become is given to the other as other, not so much of what you have but of what you
are and can become. I can of course express this giving of self in the giving of what I have, in the giving
of sex or material things, but when I do so the thing has become unique since it has become a concrete
but limited embodiment of myself. When I pick up a rose from a garden of a hundred roses, the rose that
I pick ceases to be a rose among hundreds of rosesit has become unique, a symbol of myself. But
what does it mean to give myself? It means to give my will, my ideas, my feelings, my experiences to
the otherin short, all that is alive in me. Love is sharing myself to the other. And why do I share
myself to the other? Because I experience a certain bounty, a certain richness in me, and this richness
cannot help but flow to the other. The giving in love comes from a productive character.

But why this particular other? Why did I choose you and not some other? Because you are
lovable, and you are lovable because you are you. I see a certain value in you, and I want to enhance and
be part of that value.

The value of the other is the value of his being a unique self. In a sense then, everyone is
valuable and consequently lovable because everyone is unique, original, irreducible and one of its kind.
Thus, if I am capable of loving this particular person for what he is, I am capable too of loving the others
for what they are.

Love is Historical

The gift of self is offered to another self. Love is thus essential interpersonal (between persons).
But human persons are not disembodied souls. They are being-in-the-world, living in time and history. If
love is a disinterested giving of myself to the other, then it follows that love is historical.
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 Love is historical because the other who is the point at issue in love is a concrete particular
person. Love is not love if it is simply love of humanity in the abstract. Indeed, it is easy to love
mankind in general but so difficult to love unique individual persons. As one cartoon of Peanuts
ironically puts it, "I love mankind, it's people I cannot stand!" It is so easy to shout in the streets "for the
masses" but the "masses" is an abstraction. The farmer in the fields, the beggar in the streets, the laborer
in the factory are "parts" of that humanity. If I really love the poor masses, then I must have shared their
poverty, have lived with them, have labored in the fields with them to be able to work for the upliftment
of their impoverished condition, and not simply shout and preach.

Fyodor Dostoevsky puts in the mouth of the doctor, a character of his novel The Brothers
Karamazov, the inverse relationship between the inauthentic love for humanity and the authentic love
for persons:

I love humanity, but I can't help being surprised at myself: the more I love humanity in
general, the less I love men in particular, I mean, separately, as separate individuals. . . I
become an enemy of the people the moment they come close to me. But, on the other
hand, it invariably happened that the more I hated men individually, the more ardent
became my love for humanity at large.

The concrete other is not an ideal person but unique being with all his strength and weaknesses.
If we examine the friends we have, they are far from being ideal persons. Christ did not choose perfect
people to be His friendsthey were fisherman and tax collectors. Such being the case, to love the other
does not mean improving him, although in the course of the relationship it does happen that the other
becomes more his authentic self. Many parental loves are based on the motivation of realizing their own
frustrated dreams in their children or in making their children carbon copies of themselves. "I love you
because I want to improve you is making an object out of the other person.

To love is to love the other historically. To love the other as other, as an individual unique being,
I have to use places, times, singular events. It is not strange that we associate songs and places and
happenings with people we love or once loved. Friends remember exactly the time, place, circumstance
of their first meeting. In the Gospel of St. John recounts his first meeting with Christ and ends that
account with the words It was about four oclock in the afternoon (John 1, 39).

And when friendship is breaking down wants to reconcile one begs to remember things they
have done together. Friendship remembered involved events.

You are beautiful, but you are empty, he went on. One could not die for you.
To be sure, an ordinary passer-by would think that my rose looked just like
youthe rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important
than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because
it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have
killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies;
because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even
sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.

Love thus involves no abstraction. Everything in love is concrete. In contrast, loneliness, the
absence of love, lives among shadows, involves that nothing is real.

Equality in Love

If love is essentially between persons, then it follows that love can only thrive and grow in
freedom. In loving, I do not surrender my liberty and become a slave to the beloved. Love is not a
bondage but a liberation. In the case of parental and filial lovers, at the beginning the affection may be
natural and not personally willed, but later on I have to make this love personal: the father or mother is
not just an authority figure but a friend. In the case of the wife being submissive to her husband, this
submissiveness is done in freedom and recognition of the husbands position in the family.
There exist therefore an equality of persons in love, the equality in what they are, as subjects, as
freedom, and not in what they have. Cicero says, the great thing in friendship is being equal to an
inferior. The bridges of love can be built between persons of different age, race, sex, status, nature. (Of
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course, for a man and wife to live together for life, they have to be compatible. But compatibility is not
yet necessarily love.)

The union of unique persons results in a community. Unlike in a society where the bond comes
from the common purpose to be achieved and thus necessitates an organization, the bond in a
community springs from the persons themselves and an organization is not necessary. Nevertheless, the
friends in a community can have a common project to express and substantiate their unity. And likewise,
the members of a society in the course of doing their individual functions can get to know each other as
persons and not just as functions.

Love is Total, Eternal and Sacred

Man as person is not a bundle of qualities and functions. As a person, he is indivisible and
persists through time and space. As a person, he is unique and irreplaceable.

As such, love as a gift of self to the other as self cannot but be total. In love, I cannot say to you,
you are my friend only insofar as you are my classmate. The you in love is indivisible and thus love
is an undivided commitment to the other. It is offered from the totality of my being to the totality of the
others being.

Love is eternal. The gift of myself to the other is not given only for limited period of time,
otherwise it becomes a loan and not a gift. When I make friends with you, I do not say to you, let us be
friends only for two years, for as long as we are in the same class. True, friendships can be broken, yet
people do not become friends on them understanding that they will be friends only for a limited time.
Love implies immortality. In love, we catch a glimpse of eternity. In the marriage vows, I say to you, I
shall commit myself to you, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer till death do us part. And yet
love even conquers death. As Gabriel Marcel would say, I love you means you shall not die.

Love is sacred. The persons involved in love are unique, irreplaceable beings as such are
valuable in themselves. A person has a dignity no money or material wealth can buy. And since love is
the gift of a person of his own self to another person, their relationship is also sacred. Thus friends and
lovers share secrets and intimacies not for public consumption. They have a common world that may
include others but can never be made vulgar. The greatest tragedy that can happen to a lover is when this
trust is betrayed, when the self that is entrusted in confidence to the other is disclosed and thrown to the
public. When a confidence is betrayed, something fine and beautiful dies. Like a broken glass, it
becomes almost impossible to patch it up again.

After having written so many pages on love, I feel I have really said nothing of the experience of
love. Love is to be practiced rather than talked about, What can love do to ones life? The answer is
better left to be experienced rather than enumerated. Try it anyway and see if without love, you can be
anything at all.

Without love, you are nothing at all.

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