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  • One of the great intellectual puzzles that daily life forces all of us to consider on

  • a slightly too regular basis is: ‘Why are other people so awful? How come they are so

  • unreliable, aggressive, deceitful, mean, two-faced or cowardly?’ As we search for answers,

  • we tend quite naturally to fall back on a standard, compact and tempting explanation:

  • because they are terrible people. They are appalling, crooked, deformed orbad’;

  • that’s simply how some types are. The conclusion may be grim, but it also feels very true and

  • fundamentally unbudgeable. However, when things feel especially clear cut, we may be goaded

  • to try out an unusual thought experiment, which stands to challenge a great many of

  • our certainties and render the world usefully more complicated: we can try to look at our

  • fellow humans through the eyes of love. The experiment requires particular stamina and

  • is best attempted at quieter, less agitated times of day. When we manage it, it may count

  • as one of our highest ethical achievements. We are normally resolutely on our side, deeply

  • invested in our own point of view and prone to trade in settled and moralising certainties.

  • Yet, very occasionally, we have the strength to look at other people through a different

  • lens: we notice that their reality is likely to be far more complicated and nuanced than

  • we first expectedand that, contrary to our impulses, they may be deserving of more

  • sympathy and consideration than we thought, even though they have hurt and frustrated

  • us, even though their behaviour runs contrary to what we expectand even though the

  • temptation is to call them idiots and numbskulls and move on.

  • Looking at another person through the eyes

  • of love involves some of the following: – Imagination Moralistic-thinking identifies people closely

  • with their worst moments. Love-thinking pushes us in another direction, it bids us to use

  • our imaginations to picture why someone might have done a regrettable deed and yet could

  • remain a fitting target for a degree of understanding and sympathy. Perhaps they got very frightened,

  • maybe they were under pressure of extreme anxiety and despair.

  • Those who look

  • with love guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings or

  • a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They intimate

  • that early trauma and let-down must have formed the backdrop to later transgressions. They

  • will remember that the person before them was once a baby too. The loving interpreter

  • holds on to the idea that sweetness must remain beneath the surfacealong with the possibility

  • of remorse and growth. They are committed to mitigating circumstances; to any bits of

  • the truth that could cast a less catastrophic light on folly andnastiness’.

  • To consider others with love means forever remembering the child within them.

  • Our wrong do'er may be fully grown but their actions will always be connected up with their early years.

  • We overlook the need occasionally to ignore the outward adult sides of others in order to perceive

  • and sympathise with the angry confused infant lurking inside. When we are around small children

  • who frustrate us, we don’t don’t declare them evil, we don’t bear down on them to

  • show them how misguided they are. We find less alarming ways of grasping how they have

  • come to say or do certain things. We don’t readily assign a negative motive or mean intention

  • to a small person; we reach around for the most benevolent interpretations. We probably

  • think that they are getting a bit tired, or their gums are sore or they are upset by the

  • arrival of a younger sibling. Weve got a large repertoire of alternative explanations

  • ready in our heads. This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults; here we

  • imagine that others have deliberately got us in their sights. But if we employed the

  • infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different. Given

  • how immature every adult necessarily remains, some of the moves we execute with relative

  • ease around children must forever continue to be relevant when were dealing with another

  • grown-up.

  • Moralistic thinkers reach their certainties swiftly; love thinkers take their time. They

  • remain serene in the face of obviously unimpressive behaviour: a sudden loss of temper, a wild

  • accusation, a very mean remark. They reach instinctively for reasonable explanations

  • and have clearly in their minds the better moments of a currently frantic but essentially

  • loveable person.

  • Love-thinkers interpret everyone as having strengths alongside

  • their obvious weaknesses. When they encounter

  • these weaknesses, they do not conclude that this is all there is, they know that almost

  • everything on the negative side of a ledger could be connected up with something on the

  • positive. They search a little more assiduously than is normal for the strength to which a

  • maddening characteristic must be twinned. We can see easily enough that someone is pedantic

  • and uncompromising; we tend to forget, at moments of crisis, their thoroughness and

  • honesty. We may know so much about a person’s messiness, we forget their uncommon degree

  • of creative enthusiasm. There is no such thing as a person with only strengths, but nor is

  • there someone with only weaknesses. The consolation comes in refusing to view defects in isolation.

  • Love is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free

  • people do not exist. – We Are Sinners Too The single greatest spur towards a loving

  • perspective on others is a live awareness that we are also deeply imperfect and at points

  • quite plainly mad. The enemy of generosity is the sense that we might be beyond fault

  • whereas love begins when we can acknowledge that we are in equal measures idiotic, mentally

  • wobbly and flawed. It’s an implicit faith in their own perfection that turns some people

  • into such harsh judges Looking at the world through the eyes of love, we are forced to

  • conclude that there is no such thing as a simply bad person, and no such thing as a

  • monster. There is only ever pain, anxiety and suffering that have coalesced into unfortunate

  • action. We are not just being kind in this notion; this isn’t merely an exercise in

  • being nice, it’s an exercise in getting to the truth of things, which maywhen

  • we get down to the details of human psychologybe roughly and almost coincidentally the

  • same thing.

  • To learn more about love and how to find love, which explains why we have the types we do and how our earlier experiences shape how and whom we love.

One of the great intellectual puzzles that daily life forces all of us to consider on

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如何愛 (How To Love)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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