Disliking

It is a staple of sermons on love that we are required to love our neighbor, not like them. I think this is true. But it seems to me that in many cases, perhaps even most cases, _dis_liking people is a moral flaw. My argument below has holes, but I still think there is something to the line of thought. I am sharing it because it has helped me identify what seems to be a flaw in myself, and it may be a flaw that you share.

Just about everyone has some dislikable feature. After all, just about everyone has a moral flaw, and every moral flaw is dislikable. Moreover, there are many dislikable features that are not moral flaws: a voice that is too hoarse, a face that is too asymmetrical, an intellect that is too slow, etc. However, that Alice has a dislikable feature F need not justify my disliking Alice: on its face it only justifies my disliking F. For the feature to justify disliking Alice, it would have to be a feature sufficiently central to Alice as a person. And only moral flaws or faults would have the relevant centrality, I think.

If I dislike persons because they have a disability or because of their gender or their race, that is a moral flaw in me, even if I act justly towards them. This suggests that dislikes cannot have an arbitrary basis. There must be a good reason for disliking. And it is hard to see how anything other than a moral flaw could form the right kind of basis.

Moreover, not just any moral flaw is sufficient to justify dislike of the person. It has to be a flaw that goes significantly beyond the degree of flawedness that people ordinarily exhibit. Here is a quick line of thought. Few people should dislike themselves. (Maybe Hitler should. And I don’t deny that almost everyone should be dissatisfied with themselves.) Hence few people are dislikable. Granted, there is a leap here: a move from being dislikable to self and being dislikable to another. But if the basis of dislikability is moral flaws, it seems to me that there would be something objectionably arbitrary about disliking someone who isn’t dislikable simpliciter.

Yet I find myself disliking people on the basis of features that aren’t moral flaws or at least aren’t moral flaws significantly bigger than flaws I myself have. Indeed, often the basis is a flaw smaller than flaws I know myself to have, and sometimes it is a flaw I myself share. This disliking is itself a flaw.

I may love the people I unfairly dislike. But I don’t love them enough. For unfair disliking goes against the appreciative aspect of love (unless, of course, the person is so flawed as to be really dislikable—in which case the appreciative aspect may be largely limited to an appreciation of what they ought to be rather than what they now are).

I used to be rather lessez-faire about my dislikes, on the fallacious ground that love is not the same thing as liking. Enough. Time to fight the good fight against dislike of persons and hence for a more appreciative love. Pray for me.

That said, there is nothing wrong in disliking particular dislikable features in others. But when they are dislikable, one should also dislike them in oneself.

A Trinitarian structure in love

On my view, love has a three-fold structure:

• benevolence
• appreciation
• union.

This three-fold structure has certain Trinitarian parallels. The Father is the benefactor: he gives being to the Son and thereby to the Holy Spirit. The Son admires the Father, is the Logos that reflects upon the Father’s goodness. The Holy Spirit unites the Father and the Son.

A Trinitarian structure in love

In One Body, I identified three crucial aspects in every form of love: benevolence, appreciation and unity. But I did not have an argument that there are no further equally central aspects. I still don’t.

But I now have some suggestive evidence: There is a Trinitarian structure to these three aspects. The Father eternally conferring his divine nature—the nature of being the Good Itself—on the Son and, through the Son, on the Holy Spirit. The Son in turn eternally and gratefully contemplates the Father. And the Holy Spirit joins Father with Son. This makes for benevolence, appreciation and unity, respectively, all perichoretically interconnected. That there are only three Persons in the most blessed Trinity is thus evidence that these three aspects are what love is at base.

Emotivism about art

Being largely tone-deaf, I don't appreciate music much at all. In fact, the older I get, the more music tends to annoy me, particularly when I meet it in the background of daily activities. I would much prefer listening to 4'33'' than to Mozart or Beethoven.

Yet I know that Mozart and Beethoven are much more beautiful music. Hence I embody a counterexample to emotivism about art. It is fun to be a counterexample (but I realize that it would be more fun to appreciate music, and I hope to do so in heaven).

Value-of versus value-for

Some people distinguish the (non-instrumental) value of an individual's feature from the (non-instrumental) value for the individual of that feature. Ockham's razor, on the other hand, suggests we identify them. There is an interesting kind of argument from the nature of love for such an identification. Love has at least three aspects: benevolence, appreciation and pursuit of union. (For more on this, see One Body.) Love isn’t merely a conjunction of these aspects. The aspects are tightly intertwined, with each furthering the others. And the identification of (non-instrumental) value-of with value-for gives us a particularly elegant account of part of this intertwining. Appreciation is appreciation of what is valuable. When I appreciate the value of an individual, I seek to preserve and promote that value. Now when I act benevolently for an individual, I seek to preserve and promote what is of value for the individual. If the value-of and value-for are the same, then this appreciation motivates the benevolence and the benevolence is an expression of the appreciation. And a benevolence that is an expression of appreciation is a benevolence that escapes the danger of being patronizing and condescending.

On the other hand, if value-of and value-for were different, then not only would we lack this elegant intertwining, but there could be a real conflict between appreciation and benevolence. For appreciation would naturally lead me to promote the value of the beloved, which would take time away from the benevolent promotion of the value for the beloved, and conversely. The identity of value-of and value-for makes it possible for love to have an intrinsic unity between the appreciative and benevolent aspects. And union can then flows from these, since through benevolence one unites oneself to the beloved in will and through appreciation one unites in intellect.

Music, religion and appreciation

I typically do not appreciate music at all. While there are rare exceptions, music typically leaves me aesthetically cold or annoys me (though there may be a non-aesthetic emotional impact, say of creepy music during a scary part of a movie). This inability to appreciate music is a kind of disability, one that I hope will be gone in heaven (plus the music there will be better), since music seems an important part of the human good of aesthetic appreciation.

I suspect that how I typically feel about music is how many (though not all) non-religious people feel about religion: while it may be good for others, it's just not something one finds oneself getting anything out of. But I think there is a crucial disanalogy. For it is uncontroversial that to be properly benefited by receptive aesthetic goods, like those proper to listening to music or contemplating a painting, one needs to experience them with appreciation. One gets nothing from musical goods without listening to the music, and mere listening gets one nothing of the aesthetic good if one doesn't appreciate. (Though experiencing the art without appreciation can lead to later development of appreciation, and an analogous claim can be true of religious practice.) But according to many of the great religions, many of the goods of participation—say, innate transformations of the soul, the intrinsic value of praising God, etc.—can occur in the absence of experiential appreciation.

There is also another disanalogy. Participating in religious goods isn't exactly analogous to experiencing works of art. Rather, it is analogous both to experiencing and to creating them. And creating works of art is an aesthetic good that perhaps does not require appreciation of the works of art that one is creating. One could have a sculptor who manages to express her artistic vision in incredible ways, but who incorrectly experiences herself as producing junk. The artist need not understand her work.

Size

There is something particularly impressive about astronomical objects, such as nebulae and galaxies. Take the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery, 25 light years across. Yet, a nebula is, as the name indicates, just a big cloud. It is hard to say that it is necessarily much more beautiful than cloud formations in earth's sky lit up by the setting sun. But the astronomic object is more impressive.

Are we wrong to take astronomical objects as particularly impressive? Or is size something objective? (Would the universe bet at all different if everything got a million times bigger, with the laws of nature changing in a compensatory way?) Or is it, perhaps, the impressiveness has a relational component, and things that have much more mass-energy and spatial extent than ourselves are appropriately seen as more impressive? But if so, then when we are impressed by an astronomical object, we are impressed not just by how the object is in itself, but how it is in relation to us. The latter seems phenomenologically somewhat wrong: being impressed by something takes us outside of ourselves, and hence should not be a way of seeing things in relation to ourselves.

Or perhaps astronomical objects are no more impressive than terrestrial ones, but the mistake in our perceptions is not in our finding the astronomical objects more impressive than they are as much as in our failure to find the terrestrial objects impressive. Perhaps we should find the earthly clouds in many ways as impressive as we find nebulae, and grain of sand in many ways as wondrous as a planet? (In many ways, but not in all. For, after all, a planet has much more complexity than a grain of sand, if only because it is made up many more atoms.)

I generally suspect we don't love and appreciate the things around us enough.