George Grant on Love

[L]ove is consent to the fact that there is authentic otherness. We all start with needs, and with dependence on others to meet them. As we grow up, self-consciousness brings the tendency to make ourselves the centre, and with it the commonsense understanding that the very needs of survival depend on our own efforts. These facts push us in the direction of egocentricity. When life becomes dominated by self-serving, the reality of otherness, in its own being, almost disappears for us. In sexual life, where most of us make some contact with otherness, there is yet a tendency to lose sight of it, so that we go on wanting things from others just as we fail to recognize their authentic otherness. In all the vast permutations and combinations fo sexual desire the beauty of otherness is both present and absent. Indeed, the present tendency for sexual life and family life to be held apart is frightening, because for most people children have been the means whereby they were presented with unequivocal otherness. In political terms, Plato presents the tyrant as the worst human being because his self-serving has gone to the farthest point. He is saying that the tyrant is mad because otherness has ceased to exist for him. I can grasp with direct recognition the theological formulation of this: “Hell is to be on one’s own.”

The old teaching was the we love otherness, not because it is other, but because it is beautiful. The beauty of others was beleived to be an experience open to everyone, though in extraordinarily different forms, and at differing steps toward perfection. It was obviously capable of being turned into strange channels because of the vicissitudes of our existence. The shoe fetishist, the farmer and St. John of the Cross were on the same journey, but at different stages. The beauty of otherness is the central assumption in the statement, “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.” (Simone Weil)

—George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity” in Technology and Justice