Liking yourself

Harry Frankfurt’s (and Baruch Spinoza’s) idea of self-love interests me, despite sounding New Agey and schmalzy, rather like that Whitney Houston hit Greatest Love of All.

Frankfurt suggests that the reflective self would do well to stop nagging the spontaneous self and find a way to accept it just as a mother loves her child, despite it often being bloody annoying. He recommends changing what can be changed among your vices and accepting the rest with good grace. This relaxed attitude has little to do with being smugly pleased with yourself.

I have begun to wonder if the familiar advice to live in the present moment might really be a counsel to spend more time in your own company. If you are in the same room as someone who gets on your nerves you do all you can to avoid looking at them and listening to them. You read a book, watch TV, anything rather than interact with them. Yet if you are with someone you love you want to engage with them. Maybe the same is true of yourself. If you don’t much like yourself then best to try and forget yourself and read a book, watch a film or listen to music. However, if you like yourself as you might a friend, then such distractions become unnecessary. The following poem, Love after Love by Derek Walcott, gives a taste of what this might be like:

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

I have to confess that imagining this makes me dizzy. Though I sometimes talk to myself, occasionally even addressing myself by name, at no point have I ever thought of myself as two persons. Still, if the human condition forces self-consciousness upon us, making us reflect upon ourselves, why not go the whole hog and treat the ‘me’ that I’m thinking about as I’d treat a friend?

Even so, I remain sceptical. I just can’t imagine being both lover and beloved. Still, no harm in trying and self-love must surely be preferable to self-hate, as demonstrated here in the final scene of the French film, The Piano Teacher.

As I said at the start, I like Harry Frankfurt and that fact may make a me a little biased. Anyway, I wrote a little more about him here.