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“Most disturbingly, if unilateral power is the ability to remain safely unaffected by others, then unilateral power seems to be the opposite of love in one important respect. For surely, to love someone is to be affected by them. The more deeply we love someone the more we are affected by them. Their joys and sorrows become our joys and sorrows. To have a child, it has been suggested, is to have your heart walking around outside your body.  Unilateral power seems, in this respect, the opposite of love.

…

This illusion of independent existence, expressed in the exercise of unilateral power can easily lead unilaterally powerful people to treat less powerful people as abstractions.  Since, as Leibniz and others had argued, “A created thing is said to act outwardly insofar as it is perfect, and to suffer from another insofar as it is imperfect,” inequality of power justifies the master’s position by showing the inferiority of the servant, wife, child, or worker.  Thus, persons of great unilateral power–whether slave master, patriarchal husband and father, or simply the boss at work–need not deal with weaker persons in depth.  They can treat them as mere tools—in Kant’s language, as means only.  The master seeks to have a relationship to the servant which is purely “external” to the master, having little or no effect on them.  But it is “internal” to the servant because it imposes itself on their personhood, usually against their will.  The masters are therefore free to pretend that true personhood, their own, is atomic, that they exist independently and that they are “self-made,” needing nothing but their own power to exist. This pretense, however, is a lie.  All relationships are internal.”

These passages above are yet more snippets from Bob Mesle’s recent presentation at Claremont School of Theology on God and relational power.

Tags:Bob Mesleprocess theologyrelational powerunilateral power