In Support of MLK's Love of Enemies

We started off our class with King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, and I though I love King's rhetoric, I think it mostly serves to subtly warp his logic into emotive force for his point. Plato would have a problem here with King if he were to view, as I do, that King's dabbles in Sophistry from time to time and- even being a philosophy major- he tends to handicap his fierce logical mind with a pre-occupation with a particular locality of interest.

However, I recently read a speech that King gave about loving your enemies and I greatly agree with his intuitive insights.

Here, I treat King unto himself. In a later blog I will want to compare Aristotle and King in this area of loving your enemies.

King delves into his process for “loving thy enemy” as prescribed by Christ in the Book of Matthew. His method starts with self evaluation citing that loving an enemy is intrinsically related to self analysis. This is the type of self analysis that is introspectively aware, delicately yoked and honest enough to admit that it may be responsible for the very actions that have incited the contempt of an enemy. Starting from this vantage, it is easy to see where King is moving with this and how his model of “love” has global implications especially in context of the tumultuous political and social conditions of his era. King’s next step is to contend that it is inherent to contain goodness being created in the image of God, and that to overcome the obvious hurdles involved with loving an enemy, the individual must seek and dwell upon whatever shard of goodness lies within the enemy as it is “within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good”. Now, essentially, we are to put this love into practice by proving our heartfelt understanding of “goodwill for all men” by “refusing to defeat any individual” when the opportunity presents itself. This has a parallel in the modern, mainstream religious maxim: “love the sinner, hate the sin.” For King, this is accomplished though his highest form of love: “love of others for God’s sake”, which he borrowed from Plato and “Bernard of Clavicaux.” Though it is agreeable that this is a plausible plan for transforming perspective into humanistic love, the problem of its obvious lack of modern application lies within the tendency to be abstract and paradoxically objectifying of the actual individual. When the individual is loved for the sake of something else, it is causal that the individual is not loved for his reasons alone. Most anything becomes lovable in the abstract where an idea of the person is conjured to take the place of his existential qualities. Though King’s system requires much adherence, the objectifying and abstraction of love for people stands as an obvious impediment to its universal presence today. King does not stop here. The impact that hate has on the “hater” is described by King as to turn inside out the very perspective and values of the individual. And it makes experiential sense that a preoccupation with things that an individual hates is really more telling of that individual than it is of those things. King contends in his speech that even what was ugly to the person turns beautiful and what was hailed as bad becomes the good. Conversely, it appears true that love has the power to build individuals. This provides sounds experiential reason for finding ways to avoid hate and to love your enemy. The anecdote posited by King referring to Abraham Lincoln seems to embody King’s philosophy of love here while cleverly (though it may not have been his intention) turning the popular phrase “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” into a fanciful oxymoron.