Knowing abuse as the antithesis of love gives me the power to separate the concept of love from the abusers in my past.Personally I think bell hooks’ definition of love is profound, and it led me to think through a couple reactions: Defining love as an action, as an extension of oneself to nurture another’s spiritual growth, gave me the words to start to unpack my own experience with a new point of view.Īlthough hooks is open about her Christian point of view, she clarifies a loose interpretation of the “spiritual growth” she refers to with respect to love:Īn individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self - a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us. If you stop reading right here, I think these four quotes are a powerful and beautiful summation of hooks’ message. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.² That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called “cathexis.” In his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us “confuse cathecting with loving.”¹ When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action. the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
Hooks begins the book by proposing a definition of love, upon which she builds the rest of the book, and to me this definition itself is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. That said, I thought some chapters and quotes were absolutely fantastic, so I’m going to cherry-pick my favorite highlights to share.
As a Christian divorcee writing in 1999, hooks leans into her personal experience throughout the book, which made me feel at times like her points had not aged well or didn’t apply to me. All About Love offers 13 chapters of bell hooks’ thoughts about different forms of love: parental, romantic, patriotic, spiritual, and more.
0 kommentar(er)
