If, by grace or hard work or both, we manage to broaden the scope of our love so that we are able to give patient attention, to respond joyfully and generously, to the presence of a wide variety of others, this suggests not that we have abandoned a point of view, but that we have learned not to let our responses be totally dictated by what we believe to be our needs, and to accept, or even celebrate as a gift, what in another person is irrelevant to my imagined need or expectation.
Tag: rowan williams
“My value and security may come to depend entirely on my needs and wants being met by a particular kind of human relationship—by a variety of what we usually call human love…. I may manipulate or tyrannize over someone else, deny their right to be themselves or to have interests other than my supposed interests, and so do profound injury to them…. Weil’s claim is that this is endemic in ordinary human relations. If I love someone as a particular individual, this means that their particularity is attractive to me. These features of their reality meet or gratify my expectations, they are pleasing to my standards; my selection of them as objects of love means that I have found reason to ignore or discount other aspects of their reality and to withhold love from other individuals not possessed of the relevant desirable features. Thus my love of the individual as individual is necessarily an attempt to"cannibalize" them, to bring them into my world on my terms”.
—Rowan Williams, “The Necessary Non-Existence of God,” in Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture, ed. R. Bell
Little Bristling Soul 