The Material Expression of Love

Are you attracted to people with money / power? If you had money or power, would you use it to enhance your own popularity?

But you can’t just love someone because he or she is rich. That’s too boring and simple. Love has to be more meaningful than that.

Hmm, but that’s what Marx was writing about when he says that money “confounds and confuses all things.” Attraction based on material power is vulgar and boring, but based on spiritual power is the essence of love. Love is spiritual in essence, which is to say that it should be built from the abstract, not from material considerations.

But Giegerich says that’s what Incarnation is about, too--the transition of God from spirit to matter. [ Technology and the Soul ] What does the Incarnation in this sense mean? Is love, too, seeking a material, rather than abstract, basis?

Could the realization of socialism be called the material expression of love, and thus the completion of God’s project of Incarnation? Marx calls socialism, which for him implies the elimination of money, the realization of “man as man.” But is socialism not also the realization of “love as love”?

Should other people’s sexual practices be kept separate from their public identity as a general rule? It seems to me, yes. In general, it should be considered improper to discuss other people’s sexual practices (which is separate from sexual orientation or gender-identity). A person’s sexual practices (i.e. their sexual identity) should belong to the private individual and be made public only by individual autonomous choice. Otherwise, love as attraction based on material power/influence creeps back in.

The Incarnation of God, i.e. the material expression of love, can only be fully expressed on the social level. (As Carl Jung tells us, the Jesus in the Gospels is more God than man.) Because on the individual level, due to our individual differences, the distribution of love’s power can never be equal--i.e. some people’s bodies have predetermined material advantages compared to other people’s. On the individual level, love based on material power is disastrous and leads to inevitable jealousies. But on the social level, the material expression of love (i.e. the realization of Socialism) is achievable and sustainable.