Amour Propre, Amour de Soi

Amour propre is the self esteem that comes through the esteem of others. It's also more popularly refers to the image or reputation for esteem associated with those with higher status in society. In essence though, it refers to regard one gets from others and then feels oneself.

Armour de soi is literally, love of self. It is innate self regard. We are born that way. Our regard for ourselves is fused intimately with our existence and is indivisible from our awareness of that. Just like other living creatures. It doesn't occur to us to not like ourselves.

It doesn't actually feel like romantic love, which is often a false and hyped up idea of what love can be when mixed with sexual desire and some other stuff we won't go into here. 

Human beings especially seem to be made up of both inside out and outside in self love. Though it seems to be observable in (other) animal kingdoms.

What we learn is not so much to hate ourselves, or even to love ourselves. We learn to put things in between our inner self love and develop an armour propre. And they either support or cause our ability to heart ourselves to implode.

Too many clauses in the way of what just was, before.

We do need to learn to defend that self love from attacks not all of which by any means come in hate. And moreover, when the inevitable fall from the grace of self love is pressing enough, we must learn to repair and restore it.

It is a strange feature of our modern era that amour propre seems to have outstripped the latter to such a degree that the latter is dismissed by some as almost mythical, 'fake' or even oppressive imposition. This is a product of many influences mainly commercial inclined. Here provides a steady stream of routes in which to love oneself from the outside in.

Fat people who have other social value are learning what those of us accorded less all round have had to realise sooner. That a revival of the amour de soi is indeed possible and inevitable once ones amour propre is trashed by all and sundry.

You can see some of the above reactions are what can occur when the fat, nor other imperative isn't present. The cultivation of amour de soi feels somewhat artificial, irritating, if not down right vulgar.

Some of it is class. Middle class self regard is rigidly regulated from the outside, in the groupings they form together. Amour de soi, associated as it is with our original 'wild' animalistic lower status can feel almost grotesque in comparison to the subtle internalized cues of bourgeois esteem.

Self love, does not have to be perfect, nor can it be. We humans have not evolved to that point. If you participate in society's built more on AP, you can't expect to transcend that wholly. But changing the balance in favour of A de S is perfectly legitimate and does not need to be justified or even explained to anyone who doesn't feel the need for it.

That's sometimes how it is when you're not seeing things from the same angle.