a little bit more on love

I thought I'd write a little bit more about the quote from Karl Rahner, partly in response to Colin's comment. Rahner's idea of love is based on the basic structure of human existence. To use a very simple example, if I want to perceive the cup sitting on my desk, I have to open my eyes and focus on that cup. Whatever thought of self-awareness I may have had is displaced as the thought content of 'that cup' fills my mind. The structure of this movement from self-focus to focus on an external object requires a certain 'openness' toward the world. The root of Rahner's idea is that this openness is basic to human existence - we are designed with the purpose of being open to the world. Therefore the person who is open, more fully realises their humanity than the person who closes themselves from the world. This is true at the basic level of looking at a cup, or the more complex level of other persons. When perceiving inanimate objects, our openness operates at a low level because the object only makes a visual (or aural, or auditory) demand on us. The object is static and able to be controlled and manipulated by us. However a human person, unlike a cup, has their own goals and aims, and thus our openness to them works at a deeper level because their subjecthood will make all sorts of other - moral - demands on us. Hence the love of neighbour is the fullest form of humanity because it is the action that maximally realises the openness required by the fundamental orientation of human beings to the external world. The 'Thou' is the formal idea of the other, of the external, of the 'not me'. Insofar as human persons have two basic thoughts - the thought of self, and the thought of the other - the other translates into other "I's". And so the 'Thou' is perhaps equated formally with other people in distinction from oneself, but the Thou is never equated with 'us' as in "us humans". Now obviously, the most different 'other' is the Creator himself. While all other created things seem very different, they all share this - that they all instantiate created being. Yet God is not created, and his being is fundamentally different from ours, and therefore God stands as the most 'Other' that calls forth the most radical openness that calls us not merely to forget ourselves, but to die, that we may gain life.