溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
What Does Love Build Up?
Is love a feeling one feels, or an act that builds something up within the other?
Love builds up.
Kierkegaard's defining of love as an act that "builds up" was a provocation that returned love to duty. He held that the command "you shall love" is the only guarantee of a love unshaken by the whims of feeling — a head-on rebuttal of the Romantics who sang love as overwhelming passion. Yet later thinkers asked again: is a love compelled by command truly love, when love cannot be commanded? Is love a resolve or a passion, a building or a being-seized? The question still divides those who see love as the labor of continuance from those who see it as the spark of a moment.
In an age that thinks love ends when the flutter fades, Kierkegaard's question — that love is the labor of building up — makes us ask again what makes love last.
Kierkegaard lifts love out of the list of feelings and sets it up as a deed: love builds up.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Kierkegaard lifts love out of the list of feelings and sets it up as a deed: love builds up. But what does it build? He says love presupposes love already present in the other, and calls it forth to grow. To love another is to believe in the best within them and draw it upward. I feel this question moves love from receiving to constructing. Does my love build the other up, or am I whittling them down to fit my own need? I watch, carefully, for that difference.
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