LEVELS OF LOVE

"...there is what I would refer to as utilitarian love. This is love at the lowest level. Here, one loves another for his usefulness to him. The individual loves that person that he can use. A great deal of friendship is based on this, and this why it is meaningless pseudo-friendship, because it is based on this idea of using the object of love. There are some people who never get beyond the level of utilitarian love. They see other people as mere steps by which they can climb to their personal ends and ambitions, and the minute they discover that they can't use those persons, they disassociate themselves; they lose this affection that they once had for them.

Now we can easily see what is wrong with this love. Number one, it is based on true selfishness, for in reality, the person who engages in utilitarian love is merely loving himself through somebody else. The second thing wrong with it, is that it ends up depersonalizing persons. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant said, in what he called his Categorical Imperative, that "Every man should so live that he treats every other man as an end, and never as a means." Kant had something there, because the minute you use a person as a means, you depersonalize that person, and that person becomes merely an object. 

This is what we do for things. We use things, and whenever you use somebody you, in your own mind, thingify that person. 

A great Jewish philosopher by the name of Martin Buber wrote a book titled, "I and Thou", and he says in that book, that life, at its best, is always on the level of "I and Thou", and whenever it degenerates to the level of "I and It", it becomes dangerous and terrible.Whenever we treat people not as thous, whenever we treat a man not as a him, a woman not as a her but as an it, we make them a thing--and this is the tragedy of this level of love." 

~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.