About Self-love 

After reading some part of Les Pensees of Pascal, I want to share a Little reflection about what he says about self-love. In this article he says:

“We do not like others to deceive us; we do not think it fair that they should be held in higher esteem by us than they deserve; it is not then fair that we should deceive them, and should wish them to esteem us more highly than we deserve.”

When I read this paragraph, I was surprised with the vision of esteem that Pascal has. Some questions came to my mind and I couldn´t answer them. Who decides how much each person deserves to be loved? Which is the correct criteria for making this judge?  I thought in my life and in people who I esteem, and I don´t know how much each of them deserves to be appreciated. I don´t know why I appreciate people who I love, neither who I appreciate more. Of course I have people that is closer than other one, but sometimes I can´t say who I love more. For example, I don´t know if I love more my father or my mother. Probably, I´ll never know that kind of things, because it is difficult (if not impossible) to measure love. Love is something that is not quantified. I´m sure that most of the people have the same problem as me when they try to answer that kind of questions. Although, the vision of Pascal is that love is something that we can quantify. According to him, man deserve to be held in esteem. If he says that, then he thinks that man is able to quantify how much love each person deserves to receive and how much love he deserves to receive. Additionally, according to Pascal, man can control who loved and how much love to give everyone. For me, it is impossible. I think that the vision of Pascal´s love is very rational, in the sense that he can control who and how to love. If I think in our society and in my life, I am sure that no one can control who and how to love. 

On the other hand, the vision of Pascal´s love is not only rational but also capitalist. When he use the word “to deserve” to describe a relation between two or more people, he is giving a utilitarian sense to love. For him, everyone deserves to be appreciated according to some criteria (that is not explicit in the text) that will tell you how much love you should give to everyone and how much love you should receive. Therefore, love is like the price of yourself. People are machines that produce something and according to this, they deserve to be appreciated for others. Pascal is even stronger in his ideas: 

“We ought not to be angry at their knowing our faults and despising us; it is but right that they should know us for what we are, and should despise us, if we are contemptible.”

According to my interpretation, Pascal believed in a conditional love; a kind of love that is not genuine and purely just because we are human beings. Then, there are some people who deserve to be loved and others that deserve to be contemptible. Two questions came to my mind. The first one is, are Pascal´s ideas accurate according to our society? The second one is, does man deserve to be appreciated according to some criteria or just because man exists? 

There are a lot of cases of daily life, in which we can see that people act to hide their defects and faults. Perhaps most social relationships are misleading in the sense that those involved must act to be accepted; they are like Pascal describes in his text. In this sense, in most social relationships the underlying type of love is the conditional, because the actors appreciate each other according to whether they deserve it or not. However, this issue doesn´t mean that every social relationship are like this. It doesn´t mean that everybody act to hide their defects because if they don´t act, they are not going to be appreciated. There are some people who don´t act and they show their defects, and they are loved by many people. In this sense, I think that Pascal committed a fallacy  in his idea of self-love, because he generalized the reality of some people to everybody. There are a lot of examples in which it is impossible to deny that people is not acting to hide their defects and they are still loved. I thought in the case of people with mental illness or others disabilities. Some of them can´t act because they are not totally conscious of their life and they don´t know that people act, they just live. Others have defects that are impossible to hid, then they have to show to other as they are, without masks or costumes. These people don´t hid their defects and people loved them. In these social relationships there is an unconditional love, they don´t do nothing to deserve being loved, they just are as they are. 

The second question is more sophisticated than the first one, that is why I am going to give my opinion, without any formal support, just common sense for me. For me, everybody deserve to be loved just because they exists. I´m totally disagree with the thought of Pascal, according to which we should be despised if we are contemptible. If we deserve to be love according to some criteria different than just because we exist, how could it be possible for a mother to keep loving her son even when he despised her? Why newborns or babies in the womb of their mothers are loved if they don´t do nothing more than live? 

I think that most of the social relationships are just like Pascal describes them in his text, but it doesn´t mean that man is destined to act and hide their defects to be accepted. I don´t think that hidden defects is in our nature, but I think that is in our culture. I´m sure that if we stop acting to other and we show as just as we are, we are going to have better social relationships, more real and genuine. As a consequence, we would be more free and thus, much happier.