Love and Anxiety

The Dish has picked up a couple of blogs analysing a certain scene in Terence Malick's Tree of Life.

Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other.Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then?
Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

Here is Terence Malick, one-time Heidegger scholar, putting his finger on the special sauce of consciousness and calling it love.  I had the same intuition weakly in my thinking on my screenplay, but I have found it is already well expressed in Hegel, though it is hidden in dense 'reasoning'.  Hegel's 'self' is engaged in a restless, endless, relentless attempt to re-unite with the Other which is its essence.  This division is in consciousness at every level, but the uniting across the divide is the special sauce. 


Last night we read Luke 6:

²⁷ “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹ If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. ³⁰ Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. ³¹ Do to others as you would have them do to you.   ³² “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. ³³ And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. ³⁴And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. ³⁵ But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. ³⁶ Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

This is anxious stuff to try to live, but it is also what Hegel prescribes for the self's self-relation. Stoicism (accepting experience overruling what rationality might expect) and Scepticism (doubting experiences except rational understandability) are simply modes of anxiety covering the self's difficulty with itself.  Heidegger's commentary on Hegel renames 'Absolute Knowledge' as 'Absolving Knowledge.' These verses are about that absolving, about living in Love.  If someone's ideas compel you to go one mile, you can go another with them. If something slaps you across the face and makes your eyes water, you go back for the rest.