Page 72 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 21

Gilberto Safra, Full Professor, Universidade de
São Paulo, Brazil.
He inves�gates de post modern subjec�vity,
and religion and spirituality of the person in
contemporary world.
Gilberto Safra
(Brazil)
Comment to “Can love destroy a human person?”
Cristopher A. Wojcieszek's paper en�tled Can
love destroy a human person? conveys a com-
petent discussion about the ques�on of love,
using frui�ul ground in philosophy. to support
his arguments The ar�cle makes an important
discussion in contemporary problem’s perspec-
�ve, in which the word love is being used frivo-
lously, to address phenomena very distant from
those discussions on love in the cultural herita-
ge of humanity.
Several authors have addressed the issue of
love as an ontological posi�on and gesture.
Much is lost when we understand love simply
as an erra�c drive or as an emo�on. Vladimir
Solovyov (SOLOVYOV, V. The Meaning of Love.
London, Lindisfarne Books, 1985.), for example,
tried to contemplate the complexity of love,
highligh�ng its meaning and dignity of love as a
feeling, since it demanded that we recognize
for others the same absolute significance that,
because of our selfishness, we are aware only
for our own selves. Love is important not only
as one of our feelings, but as the possibility of
transferring our interest from ourselves to An-
other. For this author, the meaning of human
love is the event that enables the sacrifice of
selfishness. It leads the person to leave his own
72
self towards the Other. Very different from the
o�en-degraded use of the word love, to deno-
minate a simple desire to fulfill one self’s own
desires.
The clinical situa�on shows us that there is a
primordial desire in human beings to achieve
the possibility of becoming “us”. The individual
is born into a family environment (us) and longs
to achieve the experience of becoming “us”,
through the experience of friendship, marital-
family and community rela�onships. From this
perspec�ve, the matura�on of the capacity to
love establishes as an existen�al horizon, a life
project, which allows the person the possibility
of becoming “us” amid the community.
In leaving one’s own self in favor to the Other,
through the experience of love, the loved one
becomes a presence (not an object), when he is
then accepted and welcomed not only by his
past, by his present, but fundamentally by a fu-
ture, with whom one can experience the we-
community event. Whoever loves another does
so, for what he was, for what he is, and for what
he could become.
Love implies keeping the other at the heart of
the soul, guarding the stature of his dignity and
his poten�al for development of himself in the