Self love as the highest good.
People might think that it's narcissistic to indulge in self love; but, I contest that notion.
Jesus is said to have claimed that one ought not treat others in a manner that they would not treat themselves. I believe that such a sentiment cannot arise without self-love. Self-love requires one to be consistent and have a high self-esteem.
Yet, many people tend to become assholes or pretentious due to this.
So, my question is twofold.
1. Is self-love possible without negative and highly selfish traits arising?
2. If so how does one go about doing this?
Jesus is said to have claimed that one ought not treat others in a manner that they would not treat themselves. I believe that such a sentiment cannot arise without self-love. Self-love requires one to be consistent and have a high self-esteem.
Yet, many people tend to become assholes or pretentious due to this.
So, my question is twofold.
1. Is self-love possible without negative and highly selfish traits arising?
2. If so how does one go about doing this?
Comments (47)
I agree, I don't think you can love other people if you don't love yourself somewhat. The way you treat yourself, the relation with yourself, tends to spill over into your relations with others. So I don't think pretentiousness and assholishness come from self-love really, but rather from some skewed way in which you relate to yourself.
Narcissus was not in love with his self, but with his image.
Your image is the way you envision other people to see you... and you typically want to project a certain image to get respect, praise, etc from other people if you feel you yourself are lacking... i.e if you don't love yourself.
The self on the other hand is not the way you 'imagine' yourself to be, but your whole being, thoughts, body, emotions etc... Love of self involves acceptance of all that in the first place i'd say, which would imply some honesty in looking at yourself. But that is not enough by itself I think. It needs to start from there, but there has to be something tangible in what you do, how you act in the world and relate to other people, otherwise it's would seem hard to keep accepting yourself. So I guess it's a proces of being honest with yourself, accepting what you see, and at the same time working to live up to your standards.
True; but, what else is there apart from one's image of one's self?
It seems like folks with issues have a deficit of self-love. How does one account for that?
And, what is that?
People don't like to suffer and prefer to be happy. Self-love is a spectrum that can be hard to nail down and quantify. If you are not completely right you are atleast some what right.
No need to quantify a qualifier.
If we are to love others then that means we should want the best for them, and strive to help, protect, and strengthen them however and whenever possible. So, in order to maximize the effectiveness of this ideation, then, we must strive to preserve, maintain, and strengthen our ability to continue doing so. That means we must love ourselves (first & foremost). Simply put, we (as individuals) are the source (the Q) of our universal “love of others”; as such, we must hold ourselves to the highest regard, so that we can continue holding others to the highest regard. Anything less is reflexive of just that.
Yes, self-love may seem an extreme form of selfishness. However, I view it as a necessary prerequisite for truly loving others. Otherwise, we undermine our abilities to actualize and demonstrate our love for others, via truthful speech and action.
If we are able to accept and understand the flaws in ourselves, we will be able to accept and understand the flaws in others.
Quoting Shawn
Accepting oneself as who they are, is markedly different from thinking highly of oneself. If one starts to rank themselves above others out of 'self-love', is when it turns into arrogance or narcissism.
One thing that I believe to be crucial in accepting oneself, is complete honesty with oneself. This includes confronting and accepting one's flaws, and not ignoring them to create a false sense of self-esteem.
Great topic, by the way.
What prevents self-haters from treating others as themselves?
Quoting Shawn
Consistent with regard to what?
Self-esteem, as in: favourable regard of self, self-respect, or recognition of self-worth. Yes.
High self-esteem, as in: inordinate or exaggerated regard of self. No.
Quoting Shawn
Primary question:
What is self-love (in the context of what "Jesus is said to have claimed")?
Quoting Shawn
Selfhood
Self Evaluation
Self Efficacy
Self Concept Discrepancies
Self Knowledge (Neisser, 1988)
Extended Self (James, 1890)
Dialogical Self (Hermans & Kempen, 1992)
Quoting jamalrob
I don't love serial killers, and I'm not indifferent to their actions.
No he didn't. He said to love others as much as yourself.
It's fairly straightforward, and doesn't tax the mind too much. If you can be bothered to eat, be bothered to feed the folks around you when they are hungry.
Everything can be quantified including personalities. When people argue using definition based arguments or on the other hand over semantics, they are in some sense using mathematics. We quantify qualifiers all day without even knowing it (a lack of exact precision in most cases).
There are one to one (a type of linear), linear, exponential, inverse exponential and other types of graphs that can link any two ideas or words or creatures. Everything can be quantified. David was told not to do a census on Israel but he did it anyway.
Being on the low end of the love spectrum, herein meant as desirability I know how tough it is to find love; all these fairy tales about "true" love, if such a thing as "true" love event existed/exists, are simply too unrealistic to make it from fiction to fact. Thus, why not indulge yourself in some self-love, given how finding a person to do that for you is simply beyond the reach of ordinary mortals like myself. You may not deserve it though but isn't that what true love is? To love that which doesn't deserve love is the highest form of love, isn't it?
Also, the very notion of loving others is maybe based on how bad one feels when unloved. Just saying...
Matthew 22.39
"Love" translated from Koine Greek agapao(v): to regard the welfare of.
Love is not merely a matter of respect and esteem. We care for the beings we love. We feel obliged to care for them, to make ourselves in some respects responsible for them and to them, to act in their interest and for their sake, and therefore to understand what is in their interest.
This applies to loving oneself as well as to loving others.
Arrogant boasting, egoism, vanity, false pride -- aren't these obstacles to love of oneself as well as to love of others? Don't they seem to flow from anxiety, insecurity, fear, and self-loathing?
Learn to recognize and wear-down these obstacles to loving kindness by practicing mindfulness, sincerity, and compassion.
Compassion includes compassion for oneself, which helps us recognize and wear-down obstacles of guilt, shame, and denial.
This seems to be the gist of the issue. I believe that we need to love ourselves first, rather than being in love. Many people mix this up, for some reason.
Well, if we reduce the self as the common denominator here, then it seems that the feeling must originate from one's self rather than another.
Hence, it almost seems imperative, that we learn to love ourselves with all our defects and vices, and work from there.
Love is an action of realising potential and value.
When we love ourselves, with all our limitations, as interconnected with the world, then this love radiates outward. We can maximise perceived potential and value and transcend our limitations in increasing our awareness, connection and collaboration with the world.
To love the ‘self’ as an individual and exclusive entity in relation to a separate world, however, is to maximise our own potential and value by decreasing our perception of relative potential and value in everything else. Likewise, to love ourselves as an exclusive entity with all our limitations, we limit our love for the world.
Yes, it is definitely possible, but fraught with error and traps. Hence the better method, also proclaimed by Jesus, is "To love your neighbour before your self", then "To love your self". This was clever. If you do it this way around, by abiding by the first, you automatically have the second. You cannot really love another person without loving yourself. A quote from the Children of the Law of One says,
“There is nothing wrong with loving your self either - unless that is a rationalization for actually being selfish, which is often the case. But you can really, Unselfishly Love your self. In fact, it is unavoidable if you Love Unselfishly at all. Because when you Love Unselfishly, you love ALL, and that includes your self. And when you Love Unselfishly, you feel so good about yourself that you can’t avoid loving yourself. But you don’t ever really feel good about yourself when you love selfishly - your self might feel good temporarily, but you don’t feel good about yourself. And if you don’t feel good about yourself, how could you really be loving yourself? And how could a heart full of selfishness even find room for truly loving its self simultaneously? So it is backwards- what ‘they say’ about loving yourself first. Now remember this - instead of ‘loving yourself first’, Unselfishly Love others first, and you will truly love yourself automatically. You just can’t go wrong that way. The other is too often just a clever trick of the selfish separate self, to rationalize selfishness.”
According to The Lost Teachings of Atlantis?
Quoting Antidote
Nonsense.
Please expand?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nonsense
Yes, well, this seems like a common theme of yours, about inter-connectivity. Yet, most people feel very lonely and sad being themselves.
How do you explain this feature of the world, that leaves us feeling desolated with our own thoughts?
They do it in their own way. I don't think being a psychopath automatically means one is evil, although they do seem to have a propensity for doing very selfish acts. Psychopaths worry me; but, they lead a burdensome life of acting out their intentions in a manner consistent with what non-psychopaths would find as "normal".
How do you characterize it?
Another important question in my view would be:
Why don't people feel self-love?
What is preventing people from feeling self-love?
Self-love?
That’s kind of the point. It doesn’t help to try and define ourselves as a separate entity in relation to the world - this is where the loneliness stems from. When I feel the need to draw a conceptual line where my ‘self’ ends and the rest of the world begins, then I am ignoring, isolating and excluding information to achieve this. To try and achieve self-love and loving others with this separate perspective of ourselves leads to uncharitable comparisons, as well as fear, hatred ignorance and oppression - either towards ourselves or towards the world.
The idea is to stop trying to define ourselves as an individual in relation to the world, but rather as a particular manifestation of the potential of an interconnected universe. It doesn’t matter where I end and you begin - in loving you, I am not choosing you instead of myself, but rather choosing to realise the potential of these connections that are as much a part of me as they are of you.
I don't mean to rain on your parade; but, the history of humankind indicates that there are exceedingly few people who are philanthropic. As much as I hate my own negativity, it seems like even after Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins, that we continue on perpetuating this theme of self-enrichment, even manifest in this thread!
Does it require willpower to entertain self-love?
If you say that "love" is simply "love", be it directed towards oneself or towards others then it makes it a little easier to work with and see.
We like to imagine that "hate" is the opposite of "love". It isn't. "Fear" is the opposite of "love". Where there is fear, there is no love. So you could say, love is always present but it gets obscured by fear or any other feeling that is "not love". Hence why "being kind and caring" which are attributes of love, help you feel more loving.
If you liken love to a completely still pond of water. The less disturbed that water is, the clearer it is. Love works the same. If there are small disturbances in the pond, love is only slightly obscured. If you create big disturbances, then love is more obscured. Eventually the pond becomes completely disturbed and love cannot be felt. It is still there, it is always there, but you can lose the sense of it by creating disturbances.
Quoting Shawn
It requires will power not to indulge your self in fantasies where by you are separate from the creation whilst still trying to maintain you are part of the creation. I have to agree with "Possibility" on this.
And that's a good thing, because instead more people are charitable. Problem solving, especially when it is aimed at the outside world, is fraught with error and usually adds to the misery of the human condition - taking recycling for instance! Instead, problem solvers would do more good by solving the problems internally before trying to change the world. Have you discovered your purpose yet, or are you trying to create your own purpose in life?
This is Theology, not Ethics.
Quoting Shawn
The application of the Golden Rule becomes an automatic process, arising from empathy, which begins to develop at 3 years of age (Borke, 1971). Intersubjectivity and empathy result from the operation of the mirror mechanism (experience of others' acts, including simultaneous exteroception and interoception, and the activation of common and/or associated mental representations) (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2005).
So, you are correct: there is no regard for the welfare of others without regard for the welfare of self.
If you have no love (regard for the welfare) of self, you die. This kind of love has nothing to do with emotion, and is cultivated by the experience and practice of neurologically typical human beings.
You don’t ‘entertain’ self-love. Let me go back a step, and try to meet you where you’re at...
Quoting Shawn
Jesus’ message was to challenge the notion of ‘self-love’ that requires us to devalue what is ‘not-self’ in order to value and realise our own potential in relation to it. What he asks is that we love others with the same value as we love ourselves - that we perceive and realise our potential and value as intertwined with the potential and value of those with whom we interact, rather than isolated or exclusive. There is NO need to be consistent, or to have high self-esteem. Integrity, self-awareness and patience are where it starts. There IS need for courage, too - not so much ‘willpower’.
I doubt that Jesus expected this to be understood during his lifetime - he simply demonstrated the potential.
If you want a woman that is relatively thin but can also eat alot, date a girl who likes to lift weights alot. She might be able to kick your ass, but she'll have a pretty face and a somewhat thin body. Women love to eat.
If you don't want to have kids then marry a girl who already has kids so when she asks you to help you with her kids, your the hero and at the same time you don't have to worry extensively about them because they aren't really your kids. The edge is taken off that way.
Don't make fun of James Kirk, he was a great man. Could you have managed the Star Ship Enterprise? I don't think so buddy.
What is love? I would suggest that it is a strong feeling towards an object for which you only want what is good. If this definition is right, it would be impossible not to feel love for oneself since we can only want what is good for ourselves. Whatever you want, you want it because you think it will bring you satisfaction (or lack of dissatisfaction if you are suicidal). Also, the feeling towards yourself is necessarily strong because of the nearness or immediacy of your relationship with yourself.
It is sometimes argued that because it is not possible not to feel satisfaction whenever you succeed in doing something, all actions are essentially selfish. But even if that is so, there is clearly a difference between actions that at least look altruistic and plain asshole behavior. If there’s always selfishness anyway, the goal would be to train yourself to get this selfish feeling of satisfaction when you are doing something that looks unselfish. If you are able to feel satisfaction when helping others you are a better person than someone who only feels satisfaction when he himself is benefited. In other words, the natural self-love should be nurtured so that it is stimulated when loving others.
How much does empathy factor into treating one's self in a good manner? What is it about empathy that would lead one to conclude that they ought to be empathetic towards themselves?
Too late; I did that here.
Quoting Shawn
Read some of these and try to come up with some intelligent questions.
Here's one for you...
Under what circumstances is empathy rational?
Sorry to get back to your post so late. I mean, one has to know how much they love themselves to be able to reciprocate it, don't they?
I may have misspoken in my previous reply. It seems, if people are like me in relevant terms, that self-love maybe the wrong way to describe this. It's not love at all. Love is a positive valuation of what is loved and people don't love themselves in that sense in my opinion. The thoughts people have of themselves are actually survival-oriented i.e. their concern is very basic - they wish to draw another breath of life-sustaining air. It's not the case that they feel themselves to be worthy of love and thus indulge themselves in self-love. To the contrary, they're simply trying to make it to the other side of today, tomorrow, in one piece and that has been misinterpreted as self-love. Basically, it isn't true that people value themselves highly and then love their reflection in the mirror; all people are trying to do is not die and that involves some degree of selfishness.