I picked up all about love: new visions by bell hooks from McNally Jackson in Nolita last weekend. I bought it impulsively, but had known about hooks for a while.
I’m only about 10 pages in, but one passage that sticks with me is one in which hooks defines love. To clarify, it’s not her definition, it’s one she found in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s 1978 book The Road Less Traveled. He defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth…Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
I like the fact that love is defined as a choice, rather than a thing that happens. I think society and media makes most relationships (platonic or romantic) seem like they happen automatically. But I like this definition for countering that “love as instinctual” narrative, solidly framing lo s as something that we can all choose to do (and are all capable of doing). I’m excited to see how hooks develops this and a conception of love throughout the book.
MLK’s Agape
This definition of love reminds me of MLK’s effort to define the different types of love. King referred to three types of love, “eros, romantic love; philia, the reciprocal affection between friends; and agape, the highest form of love”
Though King interprets this in a Christian manner, many of the ideas of non-violence that animated King came from the Indian independence movement, through Howard Thurman. (Colored Cosmopolitan is another resource that talks about the connections between the Indian struggle for freedom and the Civil Rights Movement).
Agape came up in the Civil Rights Movement because King and other leaders implored love – specifically agape – towards the very people who were violently resisting their efforts for equality and justice. Specifically:
“At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love,” said King before the NCC. “When we rise to love on the agape level,” he continued, “we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does”
Papers 6:324; 325 via https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/agape
The definition that hooks uses and King’s invocation of agape are concordant in the sense that agape is a very intentional form of love. It is a choice that King, and other non-violence faithfuls, made towards the spiritual growth of others – specifically those who were doing hateful deeds.