A righteous, passionate anger can be indistinguishable from love. Having and committing to something worth fighting over, however bloody the battles may be, can make a life just a meaningful as one that practices disciplined quiescence, reflection, acceptance, etc. Love is what it is because it must paradoxically accept its opposites; love can be anger, anger can be love. The real mind killer is a pat moralism!
> A righteous, passionate anger can be indistinguishable from love. ... love can be anger, anger can be love.
These are just word games. Blurring and mixing what we mean with different words. To say what? Passion takes different forms and can be a hell of a motivator? Nobody disputes that.
There's clearly a difference between anger and love. GP was addressing that difference and recommended to focus on the healthier of the two. That's good advice.
What is the anger that arises from you when one you care for is hurt because of some violence or injustice? Is that not an expression of love?
What is that particular anger you can feel towards a romantic life partner of many years? One that can only be based in an already profound intimacy, in some deep fidelity? Don't you feel that same love you have always felt for them, but in a different color?
What is the anger you feel when you see grand injustices? Hate crimes, genocides, crimes against freedom.. Isn't that something like a humanistic love?
To make love simply the "healthier" option is to totally destroy it! It makes it, like, at best a pragmatic maxim and at worst a weird kind of imperative (we should be healthy after all..). But love is not an imperative, it's a (beautiful, amazing, natural) condition. And it is not always "healthy," not always without anger, but always "good" in that you can't go wrong following it.
Of course there is a difference between anger and love. Either one can be present without the other, and that they can sometimes mix and play off each other does not change that they are different.
You are playing around with words to pretend they are the same. That's very poetic and dramatic, but I hope you realize that love is not the same as anger, and that neither truly requires the other.
If done right, love can eat anger. If done wrong, anger will eat love, and much more. These outcomes are not the same. That's were the game gets serious, and that's why I'm being such an ass about what you wrote.
Sure ok. I do think its ultimately just semantic. That is: if you start from the definition of love as a state we can, like, get into or not, if it is more something we do rather than experience, then sure, the state of anger and the state of love are different, and the latter definitely seems more preferable. I only get "dramatic" here insofar as I feel like thats just kind of an unsatisfying definition! Like, love songs are sometimes sad songs too. I just reject this psychological/behavioral starting point and offer that what we call "love" should be a broader, deeper, messier thing is all.
But this is really heady woowoo stuff at this point, and its quite ok to disagree on stuff of this sort! I understand you will probably continue to dismiss all this as sophistry or playing with words or whatever, but know either way that I do recognize and respect your point here! It can probably be seen as a choice: love can be a desirable state or a dramatic raison d'etre. For the former, you're probably a pretty happy monk/stoic type, for the other, you're more like the classic Romantic, the artist, etc.
"Love", the word, can stand for so many more or less related concepts. Is it something we feel? Is it something we do? We're always picking a nebulous definition, a different one each of us, different ones at different times.
"Love" is suprisingly ill-defined for the power it has. Maybe that's even part of its power: being a vague word to refer to powerful things within us to try to give them meaning, and a handle to hold them by, which then of course is also a handle that has a hold on us.
That's why, I'd say, it's important to be careful with the other words we place around that word "love", because they can illuminate or conceal, sharpen or blur, all the while gripping people by that handle.
I appreciate what you're doing to promote a better understanding of that word here and give it some context you were missing from the post you originally reacted to. Of course, "love" may mean different things to a Romantic poet or a monk or a teenager or a long-married couple; none of them are wrong, none takes away from the other, and all with some pretty messy edges, probably.
The poster you reacted to used "love" and "anger" to refer to opposing tendencies and motivations within us. You pointed out that "love" and "anger" can overlap. That's right, of course, I don't think anyone would say otherwise. I just think it's not what OP was talking about when they used these words. They used a different, albeit related, concept of love from yours, for a different purpose, relying on the difference between their chosen form of love and anger to make their point. You pointed out that things can be seen differently; that's fair.
What I do object to, though, is the conflation of anger and love. I understand what you're getting at, but I think it's important to keep these things separate and distinguishable, because it is not good to mistake anger for love, or excuse anger with love.
It may seem as if they are inextricably mixed, nothing we can do about it! But I think this is, please excuse the direct language, a little lazy and a little cheap. It's quick to use a few words to stir up some emotions and romantic notions that are sleeping in our hearts. But it opens the way to let anger reign in the name or even guise of love, which is, morals aside, not gonna lead anywhere nice at all. Romantic? Yes. Good? Bad? Ugly? We all have choices, and we should consider them.
Thus spake zarathustra etc etc..