溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
To Be Loved, Must One First Love?
Is love a striving to be loved, or does it begin with giving first?
If you wish to be loved, love.
The Stoic prescription "to be loved, love" set love as an activity, and afterward diverged over love's spontaneity. The Stoics held love to be governable, not a tremor of feeling but a direction of will. Augustine countered that love cannot be squeezed out by oneself but must first be received before it can be passed on; the later Romantics revived love as an overwhelming passion beyond will or calculation. Is love something I can resolve upon, or something that overtakes me? The question still divides the heart that would govern love from the heart swept away by it.
In an age flooded with advice on how to be loved, Seneca's prescription to love first still turns the direction backward — strange, and still valid.
Seneca borrows his friend Hecaton's words for a brief prescription: if you wish to be loved, love.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Seneca borrows his friend Hecaton's words for a brief prescription: if you wish to be loved, love. Do not beg for love; become one who gives it. I feel these few words reverse love's direction. We usually think of love as something received, but Seneca returns it to a power of giving. And yet, if I love in order to be loved, is that not still a calculation? Between love given without return and love that hopes for something back, I ask, carefully, which mine is.
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