On Self-Love
Three methods I hear proposed for self-love are as follows: a) look past your faults to see your greatness; b) love yourself as you would a friend; c) love your faults just as much. The former seems to me to be a prescription to disengage with reality. In asking to “look past”, it concedes that the “whole” you is not worthy of love, while asking you to ignore elements of who you are. When you see something about yourself, put your fingers in your ears, sing “lalala” and look at a nice part of yourself. Ridiculous. The middle erroneously assumes that one has a similar relationship to others as one does to themselves - one does not. There is space, distance. One does not have to deal with a friend’s brain, body, behaviours, and other difficulties every waking second. The latter, at least, does not commit us to error - but love your faults? How?
Perhaps the whole enterprise is faulty to begin with. After all, if I could love myself, with all my faults, my problems, my nattering mind, my darkest thoughts - would not I end up loving all sorts of straightforwardly negative things?
As a Nietzschean, however, I believe in “amor fati”. Does that not precisely ask of us to love our fate, even when there are straightforwardly negative aspects of it? Does the eternal recurrence not teach that one must view even the so-called “negatives” in our lives as formative, important, necessary? And, as such, is not amor fati directly analogous to amor sui?
The analogy holds, but not as cleanly as I’d like. Amor fati is not only acceptance: Nietzsche asks us to will the recurrence, not merely to tolerate it. An inability to love myself may reveal that I am still operating under the error that fate is out of my control but myself is within it, a remnant of free-will thinking corrupting my thoughts. But if amor sui inherits amor fati’s structure, it inherits the tension too: how do I will myself, overcome myself, create myself, while also loving what I already am? The proximity of self sharpens the challenge - and perhaps this is the true test of whether I believe amor fati at all.