In José Ortega y Gasset's book What Is Philosophy? can be found the following quote:
Truth descends only on him who tries for it, who yearns for it, who carries within himself, pre-formed, a mental space where the truth may eventually lodge.
On reading that I immediately thought it would be interesting to substitute "love" for "truth", resulting in this:
Love descends only on him who tries for it, who yearns for it, who carries within himself, pre-formed, an emotional space where love may eventually lodge.
I was primed for this substitution because a few pages prior Ortega had made a connection between love and truth:
He who fixes his attention only on what awakes and fires love does not understand what love is. If the love of a woman is born of her beauty, it is not pleasure in that beauty which constitutes love and the process of loving. Once awakened, love consists in the constant beaming forth of a favorable atmosphere, a loyal and affectionate light in which we envelop the beloved being, so that all her other qualities and perfections can reveal themselves, make themselves manifest, and we will recognize them. Hatred, on the contrary, puts the hated being in a negative light, and we see only its defects. Love, then, prearranges and prepares the possible perfections of the beloved. Hence it enriches us by making us see what we would not see without it. Above all, the love of a man for a woman is like an attempt at transmigration, at going beyond ourselves, it inspires migratory tendencies within us.
This is a topic which I explored a few days ago in a post (also inspired by Ortega) on love and attention. In relation to both love and attention, Ortega interestingly uses the word "transmigration" and sees the possibility that one can engage in truthful perception of the other person or being. Far from holding that love is blind, he insists that the perception discovered in the "favorable atmosphere" engendered by love and attention is more truthful since it "makes us see what we would not see without it". In his book On Love, which I discussed a few months ago in a post about enchantment and surrender, Ortega locates the essence of love and friendship in uprooting your vital depths and transplanting them into the soil of another soul, which is an activation of your capacity for transmigration. It is only by migrating out of yourself to some extent that you can see and love another person for who they truly are.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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