Our knowledge of otherness is part of our ipseity, not of our alterity.

Alterity is not a matter of knowledge, but of a stance, an attitude: an expectation of surprise.

Once a surprise is experienced, remembered and understood, it is now part of us, but the source of the surprise remains surprising.

*

Ipseity comprises all our knowledge.

*

To love an other — and love is specifically a relationship we form with others — is to form a being that both involves and exceeds oneself, within which one is a participant. We are no longer only ourselves; we participate in and subsist within a greater being.

*

Love is our smallest greatness.

*

Ironically, to “other” an other is to deprive the other of otherness: to subsume alterity in ipseity.

*

We can other with hate, or with indifference, or with what is mistaken for love.

*

The beloved is the familiar and surprising other within a greater being who comprises us, a being brought into existence by the ongoing act of loving.

*

Some philosophies preclude love. They arrest love’s progress at selfish lust or selfless altruism.

Love requires a modestly great self, a selfhood that transcends the limits of ego, and gives itself over to We with no diminishment of I.