Magic and Participating Consciousness

Jung—Criticising Freud's theory of the death instinct—wisely observed that the opposite of love is not death but power (JUNG 10, pp. 53-54). Love is compelling—a ‘mighty daimon’ in the words of Socrates—but I doubt that it can be compelled. The Judeo-Christian commandment to love (God and other people) strikes me as an absurdity fostering hypocrisy, sentimentality, and self-deceit. Though I know of no way that I can be compelled to love what I do not love, I take satisfaction in the philosopher Franz Brentano's expressions ‘right loving’ and ‘right hating’, as they imply to me a more open process of learning to know what things are to be valued and in what way.

I take a similar satisfaction in Kent's admonition to King Lear, near the beginning of Shakespeare's play, that he must ‘see better’. I take Kent to mean—what all the good characters in the play understand—that the right perception of value entails the right form of relationship to the thing valued, with no special need for one to be told, or to tell oneself, that it must be valued. If I need to be told, or to tell myself, I ‘ought’ to love something, it must not, in fact, deserve my love, or else I must misunderstand it in such a way that I am right not to love it as it exists in my misunderstanding of it. Misunderstanding can be corrected—one can come to ‘see better’—and the correction sets the object free to flourish in the plenitude of its own being as one remains in relation to it. Or if it deserves to be rightly hated, one may oppose it or remove oneself from it with a decency to which one ‘ought’ properly to aspire. But love moves of itself.

Love implies trust, respect, openness and mutuality. Allowing whatever is loved to be itself also implies detachment; love moves towards contemplation. Indeed, love begins in a pre-form of contemplation. At least, that is how I understand D. W. Winnicott's description of important moments of emotional communion between mother and infant, moments of a