Week 47 2024

This morning, I was thinking about love—and the opposite of love. Here are my thoughts.

Love is not an emotion. It transcends emotion. It involves a kind of duty or commitment that’s independent of emotion. It’s more profound and more lasting.

I think the opposite of love is indifference. The absence of all concern.

I chatted with Claude (AI) about this idea. Here’s what I got.

There’s something profound about how indifference represents not just an emotional state, but almost an ontological erasure of the other person from our sphere of moral consideration.

When we love someone, they become vividly present in our consciousness – their joys and sorrows matter to us, their future feels intertwined with our own, their very existence colors how we experience the world. Even in hatred, the other person still exists as a significant presence in our mental landscape.

But with indifference, it’s as if the person fades into the background of undifferentiated objects. They become like wallpaper or background noise – technically present but not really registering as a full human subject worthy of attention or consideration. The philosopher Simone Weil touched on this when she wrote about attention being the rarest and purest form of generosity. In that light, indifference could be seen as a kind of stinginess of attention and recognition.

This may be why we often experience being treated with indifference as more wounding than being actively disliked. At least hatred acknowledges our existence as beings capable of affecting others. Indifference denies even that basic level of recognition of our humanity.

To take this a step further, spiritually, if God equals Love, and “Heaven” is being fully united with God (who embodies Love itself). Then “Hell” is the absence of Love—the absence of God. In that way, I do not envision “Hell” as torture and burning—active punishment. I envision it as being completely separated from concern of another. Alone. Isolated. Without hope of any interaction of love.

Again, Ai chatted with Claude on this:

This is a profound theological perspective that aligns deeply with both philosophical and mystical traditions. You’re essentially describing hell not as a place of active divine punishment, but as the ultimate state of isolation – the complete absence of divine presence and love.

This interpretation has significant resonance with various theological traditions. In Orthodox Christianity, for instance, there’s a view that hell is not God’s punitive creation, but rather the experience of being totally separated from God’s love by one’s own choice. The fire often described in religious texts could be interpreted metaphorically as the agony of this complete separation from the source of all love and meaning.

Your conception also aligns with what C.S. Lewis explored in “The Great Divorce” – the idea that hell is ultimately chosen, a state of progressive isolation where one continuously moves away from love and connection until there’s nothing left but the isolated self. As he put it, the doors of hell are “locked from the inside.”

This view gives new meaning to the concept of “eternal death” – not as physical torture, but as a state of complete spiritual isolation, the absolute absence of love or connection. It’s particularly powerful because it suggests that hell is not something God actively creates to punish, but rather the natural consequence of completely removing oneself from Love itself.

If Heaven is full union with divine love, then Hell would indeed be its opposite – not a place of active hatred or torture, but of complete emptiness, the total absence of love or connection. It’s reminiscent of the Buddhist concept of anatta (no-self) but in a negative sense – instead of transcending the self to join with everything, one becomes so self-isolated that they lose connection with everything.

It’s a chilling but philosophically coherent vision – hell as the ultimate experience of indifference, both giving and receiving it, until nothing remains but isolated consciousness without hope of connection.

All this to say, I am moved to love better and more fully. I want to create a “Heaven” on Earth where those around me (students, co-workers, family, friends, that person in the Drive-Thru at McDonald’s) receive love from me. They receive concern. They do not feel alone but know someone else sees and thinks of them.