May 1, 2006
Love
Love is necessary, because it gives you even if temporarily the reason and importance of your existence, however trivial your existence seems to be. However, love is not sufficient, because it does not give you the meaning of your existence, as the meaning is something you choose and realise through your activities, and it is something that could be permanent in nature. Â
Filed by Satoru Shimada at 11:56 pm under Personal Statements
If the meaning is something that you can choose for your self then it is not permanent in nature.
If it is permanent in nature then you have no choice, your cannot choose it, it’s there. If so, then the question becomes, “can you find it ?”.
Could something like love that is temporary be necessary ?
I used here ‘permanent’ as opposed to ‘temporarily’, thus meaning more ‘long-lasting’ than ‘universal’ which you seem to have in mind. Although this depends on what kind of world view you support, if you believe there are things in themselves, it might follow what you said, as something permanent in nature would be something universal, objective, or absolute. Whatever that is, it would be independent from your choices. However, what if this world is just a bunch of appearances? The world as we know it is the world we can sense and make sense of by our theoretical reason, like causality. But there might be another world which we cannot have direct knowledge of, but only can see from our practical reason, that is our morality. Let’s call the former world the sensible world and the latter the intelligible world. The sensible world is full of experiences and the intelligible world, so to speak as nobody knows it for sure, full of complete morality. Then we belong to both worlds, incompletely to either of them. Thus we need certain categorical imperatives, in other words laws of morality, to guide our actions, as we are not completely governed by natural laws. This is where our freedom and autonomy come from. In this sense, we have to choose our actions according to the commands of morality. This is actually similar to the process of finding them. To find them, we need to think carefully about our experiences and morality. So in the end, what I imply by ‘permanent’ is something which fits our morality more and better, thus being able to be more stable.
With regards to your second question, I’ll leave it to you to think, as the answer would vary depending on what kind of love you have in mind.