When someone is posed the inquiry,
"What is the opposite of love?” the two most common answers I have stumbled across from personal conversations have been either hate or indifference. Neither of these answers make logical sense, but understanding why this is the case requires that one stops thinking of experiences in abstract terms, because by definition you cannot experience anything abstract.
The reciprocal of love is fear.
The juxtaposition of love and indifference
as a reciprocal relationship appears to make sense prior to any thorough analysis, particularly if you imagine love as a kind of caring for another person or thing, and not just any caring, but a very deep, philanthropic, unselfish sort of caring. The sort of caring where the well-being of another person becomes far more important to you than the well-being of yourself. Then it might follow, or appear to follow, that the lack of any kind of care at all, what we might call pure indifference would be the opposite.
There is actually no way for this to be the case.
Now consider hate.
What is hate anyways? Could you not also say, just as easily, that hate is caring about another person as well? Just in a negative way instead of a positive? Hate is simply a powerful form of contempt and disgust of another person or thing, so much so that you could say you wish to do harm to the well-being of another person. You care about them in the manner of doing them harm, or at least wishing to do them harm even if your actions do not reflect your emotions. So is it such a stretch to say that the opposite of hate is indifference as well? Can you feel indifference and hate simultaneously?
Phenomenologically speaking, the word indifference is sort of a nonsense word. Sure it has meaning in a modal, abstract sort of way, but can you truly experience indifference? Indifference as a concept has an abstract meaning and performs a function on our thought process, but only in the sense that it indicates an attitude, or lack of attitude, which is held towards a thing, like a belief, but is not an activity nor an experience.
Love, hate, and fear
are activities one becomes engaged in during the process of experience. Hate and love can be experienced and engaged simultaneously toward a thing, which should immediately disprove the two as opposites. A love/hate relationship is generally understood as a relationship in which both experiences are happening at the same time, you are not flipping between the two. Even if you disagree with this assertion you cannot deny that indifference cannot held towards a thing while experiencing either love or hate, and to contrast a thing as having more than one opposite is nonsense.
So how are love and fear opposites? It may not seem intuitive, however I find this is simply because it is typically articulated incorrectly.
We can define love in a different way,
although difficult; for if it were easy, there wouldn’t be so much art centered around the experience. Love is not simply caring for someone in a positive way, no matter how strong that care becomes. I believe love can be best defined in terms of the underlying existential or phenomenological function that is performed when it is experienced. To put simply, love is the occurrence, or activity, of an involuntary longing to match your mode of experience to another experiencing individual. In this sense you can only actually love something that also experiences, because the involuntary activity of love is that whatever that which you love experiences, so then do you experience (although you may like some “thing” enough to say that you love it, but it is then being used in an exaggerative and non-phenomenological sort of way). When that which you love feels happiness, so then do you automatically. When that which you love feels sadness, you do as well, automatically. That sort of thing. And it isn’t that love actually is this automatic same-ness of experience (kind of like the scientific notion of quantum entanglement in physics, except experiences in place of particles) but rather that it is the constant activity of involuntarily yearning for this state of experience. If this makes sense, you could also say that you wish to be ever-closing-the-gap, if I may make up a term on the fly, because it isn’t so much that you wish to become identical, or one experience/entity, but you rather involuntarily yearn to exist in a perfect harmony (Or same-ness) of experience with that which you love.
Fear is the perfect reciprocal of love.
Fear, is an involuntary longing to cut one self’s experience off from that of which is the thing causing the fear. It is the direct inverse of the desire to match your experience with another into some kind of harmonious same-ness.
If you were to think of the absolute most positive experience you can imagine, I am guessing most would say either love or pleasure or happiness. I am going to ignore happiness for the sake of simplicity, since it isn’t the kind of experience of which I am referring, because it is much simpler to think of happiness as a state of being moreso than an independent experience since it depends on so many other factors.
If you were to think
of the absolute most negative experience you can imagine, you probably need to think a second longer for this question than the last, because hopefully it isn’t something you typically dwell on. The typical answer would be suffering, which is obvious; however most envision suffering through the lens of physical or emotional pain-because that is our proverbial yardstick for measuring suffering-when it should be fear.
There is scientific evidence to support this,
but it is strange to say the least. In Sam Harris’ book The Moral Landscape, he describes a study performed on patients about to undergo a painful procedure. The researchers took half of the sample population, and for a semi-brief period of time-before the most intense painful event of the procedure-the doctors created a mild pain which was totally unnecessary. For the other half of the sample population, they did not do this. What happened at the end was very interesting, as the patients with the prolonged pain subjectively rated the “most pain experienced at one time” much lower than those who didn’t receive unnecessary prolonged pain. The research concluded that pain is much more relative to personal interpretation that what we tend to believe. If pain can be interpreted subjectively in an inverse way to reality, could there be a different experience driving this interpretative process?
The hypothesis is that it isn’t pain which is the most negative experience possible, but the fear of pain in the subsequent moment to the present. The negative anticipation, which triggers that involuntary desire to cut that experience off from your experience. This is one possibility, which if true, makes fear so dangerous. Think about the function fear performs under this theory, the dissection and separation of consciousness and experience. When you experience love, you desire that connection, that harmony of experience. When you fear, you desire a separation, a division from experience.
Both are necessary for continued existence.
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