Unconditional Love - Does It Even Exist?

Unequal results of human achievement conjure up simplistic notions of defining unconditional love which can result in people choosing fear over love. What most of us experience through exchanges with other people is conditional/transactional love (including our parents)- Instead of being encouraged to feel completely protected, loved, honored, and respected by all people, you've been taught that you're being judged. Because you've been taught that, you feel guilt and fear. But guilt and fear do not open you to connecting more to the community; they only serve to close your heart.

In 2000, during my 3 year wedding anniversary dinner, I had an argument with someone (I forget about what) and my wife noticed it was ruining the evening. My wife instructed me to honor my feelings, but not to allow the hate into my heart - she reminded me the person I had the disagreement with, earlier in life was somebody's baby. She told me to "overlook the flawed adult and focus on loving the baby he once was, since the best way is love". This shift in paradigm trick helped me be a better son too, my mom loves me, but is far from perfect. Unfortunately, unconditional love isn't innate, you must first choose to see this for yourself. The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love, separates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity, or because I love the way that someone is? Often love starts with some type of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realize the other person doesn’t merit our love. The other person isn’t like this or that. So at the death of love, it appears that one stops loving another not because of who they are but because they are such and such. That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and what. The question of being, to return to philosophy, because the first question of philosophy is: What is it to be? What is “being”? The question of being is itself always already divided between who and what. Is “Being” someone or something? I speak of it abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. One wants to be true to someone—singularly, irreplaceably — and one perceives that this someone isn’t x or y. They didn’t have the properties, the images, that I thought I’d loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.

I wrote this comment as a therapeutic exercise, not as a way to peddle ready made answers to this predicament nor have I sweetened the deal by boasting about Kant and/or other philosophers. Indeed, as long as there is language, it will confuse us, we will face the temptation to misunderstand. And there is no vantage point outside of it. There is no escape from language games then, but we can forge a freedom from within them. We might first need to be stupid or embrace our insignificance if we are to see this. Normally, we hate being made to feel small. We can’t stand to be reminded of our insignificance, we get affronted and resentful. By embracing our insignificance, the individual can be less personal about disagreements once one realizes that one is only saying that one’s point of view is more probable than one’s opponent’s, not that one is certainly right and he or she certainly wrong. Relativism discourages people to embrace their insignificance, because the beliefs are not false from the point of view of the believer. In other words, fallibilism gives us pause by reminding us we may be wrong. It emphasizes the risk that we are acting on false beliefs. If I accuse you of falsehood and you reply that ‘false’ is a dangerous word, people should laugh. We’d be in trouble if instead their reaction was to nod with respect. For words by themselves are harmless, the danger lies in the choices we make in response to words. The scientific spirit also makes us self-critical and tolerant of contrary opinions since we are all fallible. Whenever one asserts something, one should be willing to add ‘but I may be wrong’. The person one is disagreeing with may be right after all. In that sense I call myself a ‘fallibilist’. It’s the very importance of the distinction between truth and falsity that should make us humble, and tolerant of others. It is bigger than all of us. The issue is your undermining of the authority of rational argument. What it liberates people to do is to act on their deepest prejudices, without having to justify them rationally. Don’t assume that what they do then will be politically acceptable to you. If they feel liberated to choose injustice and cruelty, you may not like the results. You may be the first to be lined up against the wall and shot.

I'm hoping most haven't become jaded and their minds aren't impenetrable or opaque. I believe we all possess a superpower, a capacity to give people something we can be sure they fundamentally require, founded on a primordial & basic insight into human nature: that all of us are in deep need of reassurance. This is why fear is the easy default setting for so many of us - so many of us are afraid of the leap of faith required to practice unconditional love. If this sounds like you, you are not alone. Despite not growing up with my father, I thought of him as the baby he once was and called my dad for Father’s Day (2014). I could hear the joy in the frail voice of this most imperfect man. For the first time in my life, I spoke to my dad regularly. He died six weeks after the only Father’s Day we shared. I’m glad I was able to say goodbye. At the end of the day, we only have two options to pick from - we're either cowards (closed hearted) or fools (see & love the baby we all once were). Today, I'm trying to be the biggest fool.

Jose Franco is a self anointed "Public Intellectual"