Come What May...

I was directed to this today. I rather like it. I don't read much Buber (any at all, really; never have). But I like it.

Taken from lambsamongwolves: 

This Beloved Thing

The loving person is one who grasps non-relatively each thing they grasp. They do not think of inserting the experienced thing into relations to other things; at the moment of experience nothing else exists, nothing save this beloved thing, filling out the world and indistinguishably coinciding with it. Where you with agile fingers draw out the qualities common to all things and distribute them in ready-made categories, the loving person's dream-powerful and primally-awake heart beholds the non-common. This, the unique, is the bestowing shape, the self of the thing, that cannot be contained within the pure circle of world comprehensibility. What you extract and combine is always only the passivity of things. But their activity, their effective reality, reveals itself only to the loving person who knows them. And thus they know the world. 

In the features of the beloved, whose self they realize, they discern the enigmatic countenance of the universe. 

-Martin Buber

Now, the other night, I was attempting to convince my friend that his description of the self in love, which, in his words, locked away some small sense of apartness that defined that self against the other, some notion of reserve, did not constitute love as such, but merely some form of relationship. His reserve, as he stated it, came from a place of protection, that is, he would have something of himself left, if the other decided to up and leave him. When I suggested this was incorrect, he argued, perhaps rightly, that the self cannot be completely lost in an other, and that the two need necessarily remain distinct on some level. My point, however, is that perhaps one needs to make the effort to totally give one's self to the other in love (Buber's beloved), and make no attempt to reserve any piece of the self, and certainly not out of some attempt to protect one's self from future harm. 

For me, this self-protective withholding is the antithesis of Buber's grasping: "The loving person is one who grasps non-relatively each thing they grasp. They do not think of inserting the experienced thing into relations to other things; at the moment of experience nothing else exists, nothing save this beloved thing, filling out the world and indistinguishably coinciding with it." My view, as it stands for the moment, anyway, suggests a non-relativity, in that the total giving of the self, without concern for potential consequence or future danger, does not seek to place the "experienced thing", the beloved, in context.  It does not seek to place the beloved in the context of future danger to the self.  My friend's system, on the other hand, seeking to protect, knowing that the self needs to be protected, implies context, relationality with the larger universe, contrary to what Buber is trying to suggest.