Is love and hate truly what we call It or just the absences of the other?

Do we truly love or do we just have a loss of hate?  And on the other fence, do we truly hate or is there just a lack of love?  Well both are correct, aren't they?  Within the passage on page 38 of The Assault, Mulisch explores this idea of love and hate in the eyes of light and darkness.  "In the poem I wanted to compare love to the kind of light you sometimes see clinging to the trees right after a sunset: the magical sort of light.  That's the kind of light people have inside them when they're in love with someone.  Hate is the darkness, that's no good."(38)  Explore the quote, love is the light that lingers, but who's to say darkness doesn't either, the significance of using light and darkness in this passage was to give it this lingering effect, to show that not only can the 'light on the leaves' linger but the darkness can still be there just the same.  We've got to become a little bit like them in order to fight them- so we become a little bit unlike ourselves."  The author goes into the fact that to win a fight we must fight as our opponent does, but keep ourselves together in the process.  Now the significance of placing this with the hate and love is that, though we hate the enemy or whatever it is the hate consumes us, causing us to become the exact thing we hate, but the love within us is still there.  So is love, love or just that absence of hate, they can't survive without the other therefore the irony is anything that a person hates could possibly be something they can't live without or depend on in life.