93. JULIA T. MESZAROS — C

Posted online is a stimulating Trinity College, University of Oxford, Doctor of Philosophy thesis by Julia T. Meszaros. Her title, “Selfless Love and Human Flourishing: A Theological and A Secular Perspective in Dialogue,” got my attention. Her work is now available in a book.

Meszaros views her thesis as a conversation between two complementary thinkers: Tillich, who seeks to draw on and incorporate the views and concerns of the non-believer into his theology, and Murdoch, who recognizes and seeks to compensate for the moral losses implied in the collapse of theism. Meszaros’ thesis considers the meaning and place of selfless love both from a religious and from a secular perspective.

“The proclamation of the death of God has led the philosophers of life and their relatives in (secular) existentialism to subject the human being to oppressive autonomy. The eventual result of this loss of the universal is that ‘the very possibility of meaning itself’ is undermined.”

“Paul Tillich … sought to promote the individual’s self-affirmation and self-realization, his intrinsic power for a greater fullness of being — and to do so not in denial, but in the face of, the darker sides of reality.” Tillich viewed the human being to be characterized by a passionate life urge or drive towards self-actualization, freedom and individuality. He believed that Christianity must make sense of this drive inhering in the human being. He considered it proper for the human being to use his creative freedom to develop his personality and to empower himself.

He argued that our finite existence must be oriented towards a transformation of and not an escape from existence.

“According to Tillich, it is precisely the existential human being, who, on account of asking about himself, points beyond himself and indeed becomes intelligible only in light of what lies beyond himself. The human being in existence is itself ‘the door to the deeper levels of reality’. Tillich conceptualizes this by distinguishing between an existential and an essential self.

“The existential is the result of the actualization of the freedom and power of being to stand ‘outside the divine life’ which sustains the same freedom and power; the essential signifies unity with the divine life [from which] the existential self separates itself.”

“Tillich can also be said to implicitly agree … that the existential self tends to experience its relationality as threatening. Tillich would then also insist, however, that the self can and must escape, not its dependency on relating to others but, its perception of this dependency as a threat. According to Tillich, the illusion of the existential self lies less in its aspirations towards substantial being than in its pretensions to autonomy. This implies also that the self must not strive to fill its initial emptiness of its own accord but precisely through entering into relation.”

“Tillich thus argues that the ‘encounter of person with person’ is the precondition for the development of the human being’s ‘personal life’, which Tillich considers to be connected also with her moral and spiritual life. Since communion appears to depend on the consent, and the active participation of, all parties involved, Tillich can thus be said to consider individuality at

its fullest to be dependent on mutuality.”

“By wanting to make itself the center of the world, the self makes itself an object of the world, thereby losing its true self. This self-loss is ‘the first and basic mark of evil’ and the ‘basic structure of destruction’ which ‘includes all others’.”

“Tillich connects salvation from estrangement and its despair with a shift in consciousness, i.e. on an awareness of the human being’s participatory relation with being-itself, which makes possible a conscious assumption of non-being into being. … This implies an acceptance of human relatedness as well as human individuality, which Tillich argues becomes possible through the ‘courage to accept acceptance’ — a courage intimately interconnected with love.”

“Tillich defines true selfhood and human flourishing as ‘personality in community’ and thus considers the human being’s flourishing qua individual to depend on her participatory relation with the world. The kind of openness to the other that seems ‘antithetical to human flourishing’ is proclaimed to be precisely the precondition for such flourishing.”

“The inter-dependence of self and other means that the human being can flourish only where she turns towards, affirms and participates in the other, yet also that the very affirmation of the other depends on an affirmation also of the self. … This leads Tillich towards an argument about the dependency of human flourishing on a selfless love which does not deny or even destroy the self and its dynamic drive for individuality and freedom, but which affirms this drive and builds up the self.”

“Love thus stands for precisely that union of essential and existential being, which, when actualized, liberates the human being from her existential estrangement and realizes ‘the true expression of potential being’ — what Tillich calls the ‘New Being’.”

“Agape [the word for a particular kind of love] is the most adequate characterization of the divine love of being-itself, a love Tillich considers to manifest itself in existence as the ‘Spiritual Presence’. In arguing this, Tillich bases his interpretation of agape on a prior understanding of God as ‘work[ing] toward the fulfilment of every creature and toward the bringing-together into the unity of his [God’s] life all who are separated and disrupted’.”

“It is important to stress that Tillich does not consider agape’s focus on the other to come at the cost of a disregard for the agapeic lover’s own self and flourishing. The agapeic lover’s ability to seek the other’s flourishing positively correlates with his own flourishing.”

“The presence of the divine Spirit means that existential life is marked not only by ‘structures of destruction’ but also by counterbalancing ‘structures of healing and reunion of the estranged’. This Spirit, which manifests itself in existence as the ‘Spiritual Presence’, strives towards the

reunification with, and thus towards the fulfilment of, all creatures and is therefore best

symbolized as agape-love.”

“Agape becomes a reality within the human being. Acceptance of the saving power of the divine agape is ‘the only unambiguous and all-inclusive sacrifice a human being can make’ and (at least ‘fragmentarily’) saves the human being from the typical existential predicament of being uncertain about which potentialities to sacrifice and which not.”

“According to Murdoch, whose career coincides with the height of psychoanalysis,

Freud’s analyses demonstrate the moral dimension of consciousness. Although Freud

himself is of course uninterested in regarding the human being and her consciousness in

a moral light, his thought uncovers the typically selfish nature of inner human activity.

Murdoch argues that Freud’s human being is a ‘machine’ which ‘in order to operate needs sources of energy’ and which is ‘predisposed to certain patterns of activity’.

“In particular, the human being is under the power of ambiguous attachments and desires, which pull him in conflicting directions. As Freud recognizes, it is not only difficult to control and to understand these desires, but the human being is unwilling to understand and re-order them. The ‘egocentric system of energy’, which constitutes what Freud calls the psyche, tends to lead the human being to generate and hide behind illusions which bolster and console the self, but which detract it from its true being and make it obscure to itself.”

“With the above, Freud has, Murdoch argues, ‘presented us with a realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man’. … The human being he presents is a ‘historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself’.”

“Murdoch understands the human being to be constituted by desires. … Murdoch considers the natural state of these desires to be one of conflict, and that she considers attempts to

resolve this conflict via assertions of the ego to necessarily fail because the ego is a mere

illusion generated by the conflict of desire. Meanwhile, Murdoch’s sense that the human

being is constituted by desire appears to lead her to understand even the true self as a

dynamic reality, which lacks any given or intrinsic unity and which can easily fragment.”

“Since the individual cannot choose not to attach herself, Murdoch identifies the soul or self as a ‘substantial and continually developing mechanism of attachments’. Only on the basis

of such a ‘more positive conception of the soul’ is it made clear that the human being is

necessarily, by virtue of her nature, relational, yet that she can and must determine her

attachments such that she is related not to an immoral and … disempowering illusion but to that which is other than self and in which she encounters the Good which her standing in reality depends on.”

“The solution lies not in self-assertion but in a turn away from self and towards the other, where she encounters Good. Only where the desirous human being is oriented and attached to this unified transcendent reality are her conflicting desires harmonized and does she thus

attain her real self-identity. … Murdoch considers the transcendent Good to be that

reality which ‘all men love and wish to possess forever’. Its attractiveness is such that

it exerts a magnetic pull on the self.”

“As Murdoch characterizes it, Eros [the word for a particular kind of love] is an energetic force seated deep within the human being. In principle, it provides the force necessary to break through selfishness and its product, the ego, and is thus the precondition for our attachment to Good. It propels the human being onto her path towards Good by — potentially at least — causing her to fall in love with Good, and thus to leave behind all concern with self. Eros thereby enables ‘moral progress’, which results in what Murdoch herself refers to as ‘metanoia’ or a ‘new state of being’ — a phrase which calls to mind Tillich’s notion of the ‘New Being’. … As the energy which directs desire towards Good, Eros is crucial to human selfhood.”

“Murdoch recognizes that Eros does not have an infallible sense of direction. It can mistake a false good for Good and thus lead the human being to attach herself to something unreal. … Eros can thereby also support the individual’s natural selfishness. When causing a person to fall in love, Eros can for instance cause her to mistake her own attempts to swallow the other up (say, by loving them as an extension of herself) for true love, which respects the other in their individual distinctness.”

“While the Good is ‘the spiritual goal’, ‘the absolute’, and of a ‘transcendent, impersonal and pure’ nature, Eros-love is the spiritual path and, as such, something ‘more mixed and personal’ than Good, Murdoch suggests.”

“Where a false good is mistaken for the Good and Eros causes the person to fall in love with this, Eros enshrines our natural selfishness. It then fosters the disharmony of desires, which stands in the way of moral goodness and … of a person’s flourishing.”

“Murdoch explicitly associates goodness with a selflessness understood primarily in terms of a distinct relation with the other when she writes that ‘the good life becomes increasingly selfless through an increased awareness of, or sensibility to, the world beyond the self’.”

“The primary benefit Murdoch ascribes to selfless love of Good as encountered in the

other is, perhaps, the lover’s arrival in reality. Murdoch claims that the absence of self

from the mind is ‘good for us’ because it involves respect, because it is an exercise in

cleansing the mind of selfish preoccupation, because it is an experience of what truth is

like. It is only upon being connected with Good that the human being sees and

accepts what is real ‘boundless and not totally definable’ particulars separate from the

self. … Considering that Murdoch counts a sense of reality, freedom, and happiness among the fruits of selfless love, this love can indeed be considered conducive to, even critical for,

human flourishing.”

“I have argued that both Tillich and Murdoch defend a notion of selfless love as

necessary and conducive to the flourishing of lover and beloved. … Both Murdoch and Tillich, moreover, argue that true love not only issues from within the individual and his erotic drive, but also fulfils human desire and brings individuality to greater fruition.”

“I have argued that both Tillich and Murdoch define true love as selfless in the sense of being other-centered and gratuitous, in the sense of seeking Good as an end in itself. True love, they have suggested with different emphases, consists in turning away from self and confronting, accepting, and respecting what is entirely other than self. As such, love as they conceive it is certainly to the other’s Good.”

Q: What, if anything, have you learned from these gleanings from Meszaros’ thesis?