Asia Sakchatchawan: 'Being Loved and Being Anchored'
Chair: Lewis Williams
Murdoch’s concept of attentive love, where love involves the challenging task of recognising the other person’s reality, faces the problem of being too meditative and not interactive enough. I propose that this issue, at least partly, arises from her silence on the experiences of the person at the other end of the equation, that is the beloved. In this paper, I flip the common question asked by philosophers of interpersonal love – “What is it to love someone?” – and address the crucial question about the phenomenology of the beloved: “What is it to be loved?” After all, we have a desire to be loved in the Murdochian sense. This paper delves into our longing to be loved attentively, defining it as the desire be ‘anchored’, which is the desire to be deeply understood. By doing so, we come to see that our wish to be truly known isn’t a desire for someone to accumulate mere facts about us but a desire to share world with another. Consequently, we understand that attentive love is inherently interactive. I characterise the phenomenon of being anchored in terms of its (1) weightiness, (2) lightness (where together render love as pro-ambiguity) and its (3) grounding-ness, defined as an interactive interpersonal relation.
