The Emergence of Apathy
Apathy is particularly important because of its close relation to love and will. Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. The opposite of will is not indecision – which actually may represent the struggle of the effort to decide, as in William James – but being uninvolved, detached, unrelated to the significant events. Then, the issue of will never can arise. The interrelation of love and will inheres in the fact that both terms describe a person in the process of reaching out, moving toward the world, seeking to affect others or the inanimate world, and opening himself to be affected; molding, forming, relating to the world or requiring that it relate to him. This is why love and will are so difficult in an age of transition, when all the familiar mooring places are gone. The blocking of the ways in which we affect others and are affected by them is the essential disorder of both love and will. Apathy, or a-pathos, is a withdrawal of feeling; it may begin as playing it cool, a studied practice of being unconcerned and unaffected. “I did not want to get involved,” was the consistent response of the thirty-eight citizens of Kew Gardens when they were questioned as to why they had not acted. Apathy, operating like Freud’s “death instinct,” is a gradual letting go of involvment until one finds that life itself has gone by.
Love & Will, Rollo May
Relationships Don’t Work
“I want to talk about the illusions we have that relationships are going to work. See, they don’t. They simply don’t work. There never was a relationship that worked…It’s the fact that we want something to work that makes our relationships so unsatisfactory.
In a way life can work – but not coming from the standpoint that will make it work. In everything we do in relation to other people, there is a subtle or not-so-subtle expectation. We think, ‘”Somehow I’m going to figure this relationship out and make it work, and then I will get what I want.” We all want something from the people we are in relationship to And even if we avoid relationships that’s another way of wanting something. So relationships just don’t work.
Well, what does work then? The only thing that works (if we really practice) is a desire not to have something for myself to support all life, including individual relationships. Now you may say, “Well that sounds nice, I’ll do that!” But nobody really wants to do that. We don’t want to support others. To truly support somebody means that you give them everything and expect nothing. You might give them your time, your work, your money, anything. “If you need it, I’ll give it to you.” Love expects nothing.”
- Charlotte Joko Beck
