Chapter 52 Stealing affection?

Stealing affection? (Seventh of the Ten Commandments) This is another ethical exception. Stealing someone else's property (purse, car) is a criminal offence.The legal protection of personal private property is one of the basic conditions of individual external freedom. If the private wealth of the human mind cannot be protected by law, is it possible for an individual to obtain inner freedom?Is it a crime to steal someone's emotional possessions?What kind of crime? It is quite difficult to determine what is meant by stealing the private wealth in one's mind, but in real life, it may indeed happen that one person steals another's spiritual things frequently.For example, a person says to another person that he (she) loves him (her), gets his (her) affection, and then turns around and walks away, but he (she) changes his destiny because of these love words, and falls into misfortune from then on. , does it count as spiritual things being stolen?

Meika's mother had a difficult labor when she gave birth to Meika. Although the mother and daughter were both safe and sound in the end, Meika's mother could no longer have children. She wanted to have another child very much. Meika made her infertile.Her mother often lost her temper with Meika for no reason, and Meika developed a melancholic temperament since she was a child because she was deprived of maternal love.My father loved Meika very much, and when Meika was sad, he would play the flute for her. When Meika was seventeen years old and was about to graduate from high school, the art teacher Poitek told her a lot of ambiguous love words.Meyka, who has been depressed for more than ten years, finds the comfort she cannot get from her father in Poitek's love words, but Poitek makes her pregnant.Poitek told Mejka that he was not yet mentally prepared to be a father, and that having a child would ruin his artistic career.He advised Meika to have an abortion, but Meika couldn't accept it.

Meika's mother also opposed abortion, but she told Meika that she was still a student, how could she have children?For the sake of Meika's future, the mother said that as her own daughter, she would register the household registration of Meika's children, and the problem would be solved. The child was born and it was a girl.Today, Meika has graduated from university, and her daughter Maja is six years old.Meika wanted to return her daughter, but her mother replied, "You can see Majia once a week, but she belongs to me, and it will belong to you after I die." Meika felt that her mother had stolen it when she said it was for her own good. Her own daughter, Poitek, was complicit in her mother's theft, and they stole their affections for their own will. "Actually, Poitek was trying to avoid a scandal. His relationship with me was just one of countless. He told me that an artist needs to be constantly stimulated by new emotional experiences in order to maintain his art. The exuberance of vitality. It is not the artist's business to bear the consequences of feelings."

Meyka is determined to take Majia abroad. She applied for a passport, took the opportunity of a children's party, hugged Majia and coaxed her to play in the park, and "stolen" Majia away. Meyka takes Maja to find Poitek, trying to get back her past love.Poitek was cold, unwilling to return the emotion he had borrowed from Meyka.Either send Maja back, or he go elsewhere, he told Meika.Poitek, like Meika's mother, is unwilling to return the daughter he stole from Meika. Who is the thief? According to the law, Majia is the daughter of Meyka's mother. From the child's emotional experience, Meyka has indeed stolen the child, and even stole the child's feelings.Majia always called Mayka's mother "Mom", and Mayka begged Majia to call her "Mom", and Majia always called her by her first name.Majia often cried in the middle of the night, saying that she encountered evil spirits in her dreams, and Meika's hugs didn't work, she was used to Meika's mother's hugs.

Meika's mother refused to admit that she had stolen Meika's daughter, saying that Meika herself had agreed to give her her daughter.Poitek also denied that he stole Meika's affections, saying that Meika voluntarily had sex with him at the time.Meika was only seventeen at the time and didn't know much.Her mother and Poitek didn't think that was a reason.They ask, is it true to steal from another person spiritually, emotionally?The person who was stolen would say that he was careless and young, just like a person who did not put his wallet away and was not too vigilant (be careful of mind pickpockets).However, do people carelessly place their hearts and emotions at will?Mind and emotions need to be kept safe?Can the emotional entanglement between people be defined by "stealing"?

Is it considered stealing to take other people's emotions and hearts casually? Such questions, Kieslowski would say, are not easy to answer. A person who steals does not say that something was stolen, but that he took it by hand.To steal is to take something when someone is off guard, and if one takes emotion when another is emotionally vulnerable or exhausted, one is stealing one's emotion.However, the reasons that mother said to be good for Meika at the beginning were all true, and she did not intend to deceive her.The love words that Poitek said to Meika at the beginning were also true, but his feelings for her changed later.It is impossible to find the moral right or wrong of this matter; the emotional and spiritual entanglements and injuries between people cannot be investigated for moral crimes.

Meika had no choice but to flee with her daughter.The next morning, Mother and Poitek overtook Meika and Marja at a small train station—Maja called Maika to Maika's mother and ran over. With her stolen heart empty, Meika boarded the train and left alone.Her mother shouted on the platform: "Daughter, you come back." Judging from Meika's eyes that were pressed against the window glass and wanted to shout to Majia, depression would accompany her throughout her life. The occasional nature of individual life does not coincide with the normative nature of the ethical order of society.Thinking about ethical issues is completely different whether it starts from the normative nature of the ethical order or from the contingency of the individual life.The ethical thinking of Kieslowski and Piswitz started from the contingency of the individual life, but they named their thinking after the "Ten Commandments", and the ethical thinking of the "Ten Commandments" obviously started from the ethical order normative departure.

The narrative of "Ten Commandments" is written according to the meaning of the "Ten Commandments" in the Old Testament "Deuteronomy".It took Kieslowski and Piswitz a year and a half, studying several commentaries, to write the script.However, they did not intend to make modern commentaries on Yahweh's "Ten Commandments" conveyed by Moses, nor did they take the standpoint of moral legalism or moral idealism to think about modern ethical issues.Searching for the hermeneutical relationship between the Ten Commandments and the Ten Commandments is not only futile, but also misses the opportunity to understand the Ten Commandments.The "Ten Commandments" of the Old Testament is just a symbol used by Kieslowski to stimulate the ethical feelings of individuals in modern social life, as he said: "The most appropriate words to determine the relationship between the Ten Commandments and the Ten Commandments of the Bible It should be an excuse."

In Poland, there are both socialist people's morality and Catholic canon morality, both of which are the normative ethical order of society. Without such normativeness, the moral cracks of the individual's occasional nature are revealed.In this sense, the ethic of freedom must be a hard ethic.Kieslowski said: "I believe that there are some mysterious knots in everyone's heart. A hidden corner." The narrative of "The Ten Commandments" is not only about the indifference of moral consciousness, but more about the difficulty of moral behavior. The ethical thinking of "Ten Commandments" starts from the contingency of individual life, and avoids the involvement of social system and its ideology and ethical issues. "The Ten Commandments" is based on the people's democratic system of Poland as the narrative background, but Kieslowski deliberately erases the life symbols of socialist ideology and avoids details that can be reminiscent of socialist life scenes.This is not to escape the scrutiny of the ideological prosecutors, but to let the narrative of "The Ten Commandments" explore "pure" ethical issues-ethical issues as modernity issues, becoming a narrative meta-ethics.

This kind of thinking is valid for individual people in modern society—no matter what kind of political system it is. Whether it is in a people's democratic society or a free democratic society, what is honesty, lies, friendship, family affection, and guilt are important to everyone. Personal questions that individuals face from time to time in their own lives: What is right?what is wrong?What is a lie?What is the truth?What is honesty?What is dishonesty?What is their nature?How should we treat them? That, Kieslowski says, is the fundamental question posed by the Ten Commandments.