Abstract
Love and hatred are often seen as opposites. From a standpoint of emotion classification, love can be defined as a mixture of joy and acceptance, the joyful acceptance of and by another. The opposites of joy and acceptance are sadness and disgust, respectively. From this it has been inferred (in the previous chapter) that the opposite of love is not hatred but rather loneliness–forlornness. Hatred and loneliness share the primary emotion disgust, as the object of hatred is rejected and even seen as morally disgusting. But hatred does not involve sadness; hatred rather involves a dynamic of anger and fear. More specifically, three primary or basic emotions—anger, fear, and disgust, are the hypothesized elements of hatred. These three emotions combine in pairs to form three secondary emotions: frozenness/tonic-immobility (anger & fear), revulsion (fear & disgust), and contempt (anger & disgust). This chapter identifies an absence of love as a causative factor in the mentality and behavior of hate-infused violent criminals, their hatred of life, and their hellish experience of life as the living death. A comparison is made of the present hierarchical-classification theory’s model of hatred and Sternberg’s triangulation theory of hate.
[H]ate is the unmet wish to be loved, the inability actively To love anyone (self or other), and the consequent abject dependency on others to magically fill with love a bottomless pit, an inferno—the self—that is utterly empty of love.
James Gilligan (1997, p. 54)
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Notes
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In everyday talk, the terms ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are used very broadly. For example, Locke ([1689] 1995, p. 161) definition of love ranged from loving grapes to finding continuous delight in one’s family members; hate, from hating spinach to feeling pain over the presence or absence of an object or being.
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Descartes ([1649] 1988, pp. 94, 96) argued that hatred “is never without Sadness.” However, whereas hatred is a motivation for destructive action (inhibited primarily by fear), sadness is characterized by inaction. Descartes implicitly acknowledges this, as he described sadness as “bestowing caution and apprehension, disposes one in a way toward Prudence.” the opposite of sadness, Descartes saw as more problematic than sadness insofar as it predisposes individual to “abandon themselves to it unthinking and rash” actions.
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TenHouten, W. (2021). Hatred, Life Without Love, and the Descent into Hell. In: Mayer, CH., Vanderheiden, E. (eds) International Handbook of Love. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45996-3_37
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