By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Love involves the two moments of sympathy and service (cf. Hartshorne, "Mind as Memory and Creative Love": 448).
Service without sympathy may be "beneficence," but it is not "benevolence." Indeed, to will the good is to take pleasure in the intention to achieve a result, and further pleasure in its actual achievement; and that is precisely to sympathize.
Hartshorne says elsewhere, "To love is to take pleasure in the welfare of others, to allow them to make a difference to oneself" ("God and Nature": 60). I should prefer to say instead, "To love others is to allow them to make a difference to oneself, to take pleasure in their welfare." But either way, this formulation expresses only the moment of "sympathy," not that of "service."
By contrast, the following formulations express both moments:
"[L]oving the other [means] so accepting the other as to take account of the other's interests and then acting toward the other on the basis of such acceptance" (Doing Theology Today: 112).
"As we ordinarily use the term 'love,' to love another person is to do something that always has two closely related aspects. First of all, it is to accept the other person, in the sense of taking him or her into account, allowing him or her to make a difference by partly determining one's own actual being. Then, secondly, it is to act toward the other person, in whatever one says or does, on the basis of such acceptance" (Faith and Freedom: 69f).
25 April 2005
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