Love (Hegel, Höderling, Unitrinity, Schelling...)

by Maria Odete Madeira

Hegel and Höderling introduced a new thinking about sensitivity, in opposition to the anguish and insecurity before alterity (natural, personal and social), that were at the origin of Aufklärung.

This new thinking tried to capture and recuperate the pulsional dynamism and the affective dimension that constitute the human being.

The issue of love was developed as a reply to intrinsic problems and to an internal determinant dialectics, that operated as function of synthesis in the system, that is, a middle-term between the theoretical order and the practical domain.

Love was incorporated, in Hegel’s logical system, as fundament of the harmony of the “Spirit”, in its function of unification of reflexive and effective synthesis of the thought and the feeling.

Love configurated, in Hegel, the dialectical motion of reason, as exposition, negation and return of reason to itself, surpassed. The loving dynamics adequately described the character of the “Absolute” as a fundament of itself, that is, the reconciled return to itself, from its other (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Theorie Werkausgabe).

A different thinking about the feeling of love, seems to come from the notion of Unitrinity, that inscribes itself in the kenosis of the Son (Christ) that reveals God’s mystery as love, a gift that inscribes in space and time an ineffable exchange within the divinity itself. That is, the love as a feeling towards the other, because God as unity does not exclude the other (Son), the Son is already within divinity itself as object of intentionality, for the realization of the love, realizing what can be considered a Superunity (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite).

In the unity, the feeling of love is already a communion with the other without negation, unlike Hegel, and closer to Schelling.

One cannot find, however, in any philosopher, a feeling without an intentionality, without an underlying reason for its being, in the case of Hegel this reason is to be negated and surpassed.

In a neurobiological framework and in a philosophical framework, both feelings and emotions possess an unsurpassable intentionality, they are always about something (their object of intentionality) that relates the individual/agent/subject with his/her environment (culture, civilization, people, recollections, artifacts, etc), possessing a fundamental adaptive value.