The Nature of Love A Phenomenological Ap PDF

Honors Thesis
on
The Nature of Love:

A Phenomenological Approach
by
Samantha Schroeder
_______________________________ _______________________________
Michael Strawser, Ph.D. Bruce Janz, Ph.D.
Thesis Committee Chair Department Chair
Department of Philosophy Department of Philosophy
_______________________________ _______________________________
Sabatino DiBernardo, Ph.D. Alvin Wang, Ph.D.
Thesis Committee Member Thesis Committee Member
Department of Philosophy Department of Psychology
_______________________________
Jason Danner, MA.
Thesis Committee Member
Department of Philosophy
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................ vii

Chapter One: The Role of the Affective Sphere ........................................................................................... 1
The Heart in Western Philosophy ....................................................................................................................... 2
Men without Chests ............................................................................................................................................ 4
The Tenor of the Heart ....................................................................................................................................... 7
Rehabilitation of the Heart ...............................................................................................................................10
Chapter Two: The Ontology of Love ...........................................................................................................13
Love on the Mind .............................................................................................................................................19
The Phenomenological Approach .......................................................................................................................23
Chapter Three: Max Scheler’s Stratification of the Emotional Life .........................................................26
Radically Individual Personhood .......................................................................................................................29
The Structure of Feeling ....................................................................................................................................33
The Realm of Value.........................................................................................................................................34
Chapter Four: A Radical Reappraisal of Self-Love .....................................................................................39
Self-love in Scheler ............................................................................................................................................40
A Radical Love of Self? ...................................................................................................................................44
Voices of Critique ............................................................................................................................................46
The Impossibility of Self-love in Marion ............................................................................................................50
Chapter Five: Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Phenomenology of Love ........................................................55
Value Phenomenology .......................................................................................................................................55
Attraction and Attachment ..............................................................................................................................57
Irreducibility of the Other ..................................................................................................................................62
Subjectivity and Objectivity in Love ...................................................................................................................65
Chapter Six: Love’s Knowledge .....................................................................................................................67
The Morality of Love........................................................................................................................................71
The Metaphysical Beauty of Love ......................................................................................................................72
The Gift of Love ..............................................................................................................................................79
The Overall Response to Value ........................................................................................................................81
Chapter Seven: The Ordo Amoris....................................................................................................................87
A Brief History................................................................................................................................................87
The Ordo Amoris and Value Realism ..........................................................................................................88
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Love as the Task of Philosophy.........................................................................................................................95
Loving and Being .............................................................................................................................................99
Conclusion: The Meaning of Love ............................................................................................................. 103
BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................................. 108
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ABSTRACT
Since the time of Socrates, the idea of love and the conception of the human heart have
been devalued by thinkers who, by definition, are known as “lovers of wisdom.” Considered
pejoratively as “the passions,” the subject of emotion was deemed inferior to thought centered upon
the human faculty of reason. Many studies in the sciences, from biology to psychology, claim to
have pointed us to the source of the human experience of love—but do they help us to understand
love properly? In order to provide a full consideration of love in my philosophical research, I will
focus my analysis on love under the philosophical lens of phenomenology. Known as the study of
firsthand human experience, phenomenology became the influential school of thought for many
German philosophers in the early twentieth century. My research will closely examine the writings of
Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Jean-Luc Marion within the context of this tradition.
Moving from a justification of love in philosophy to the topic of self-love, I hope to define
effectively what it means to love another. I shall also attempt to disambiguate the common
assumptions regarding the nature of love. Is there a fundamental difference between the
phenomenon of “falling in love” and of love itself? I question whether love, in its essence, is
defined by the element of choice—of a willful emotional giving of oneself to another—and whether
it can be distinguished from a passive feeling and an active loving will. I aim to bring the human
affective sphere into the full light of philosophical inquiry, considering whether love is a moral act of
the will that involves a total participation of the self—in mind, body, and spirit. Love is arguably the
most powerful of the human emotions, one that elevates the human sphere of emotions and the
ethical existence beyond simple desire. As I hope to show, a philosophical study of love is highly
relevant today, since the sciences have not adequately answered the perennial question: What is love?
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DEDICATION
In loving memory of Jake Gibbs.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To
My family for allowing me to become who I am,
My mother for handing me so many books in my youth, and for believing in me,
Tyler for nourishing my philosophical eros and awakening my understanding of personalism,
Dr. Nguyen for leading me to the path of philosophy, and Dr. Strawser for helping me continue on
my journey.
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INTRODUCTION
What is the nature of love, and how should it properly be spoken of in philosophical
discourse? The meaning of the word philosophy is derived from two Greek words, philo meaning love,
and sophia meaning wisdom, and yet the particular nature of the phenomenon of love has been a
question neglected, ironically, by philosophers—those considered by definition to be lovers of
wisdom. For many, love is a private topic of discussion, a notion that is so personal it is often passed
over in silence. It is often left for the artists—the poets, painters, and musicians—but do they help
us to properly understand love? Some consider the topic as belonging to the realm of the ineffable,
an emotion that is in essence so subjective that it is left unquestioned, cast aside to make room for
other philosophical matters. Many disagree as to the nature of love, whether there is a fundamental
reality, and even argue that love itself is a human construct. Can there be one fruitful definition of
love great enough to satisfy the human appetite for knowledge of the heart’s deepest emotion? In
order to address these questions in the deepest sense, I shall consider the love primarily under the
philosophical lens of phenomenology, a way of knowing that will be particularly helpful in grasping
love’s essence. This work will attempt to bring the concept of love into the full light of philosophical
inquiry through exploring the possibility of a unified philosophy of love.
Multiple studies in the sciences, from biology to psychology, claim to have pointed us to the
source of the human experience of love. Yet the biological explanation of what truly constitutes the
human experience of love may have fallen short of a thorough answer. Although a basic empirical
understanding of human love is valuable in our pursuit of knowledge, philosophy essentially picks
up where empirical study—in both neurology and psychology—leave off. I shall nonetheless
consider reductionistic or naturalistic explanations as to what constitutes love—from biological
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theories of attraction and attachment, to the psychoanalytic conception posed by Freud—in order to
discover what limitations there are with this view from a philosophical perspective. As I hope to
show, a philosophical study of love is relevant even today, since science has yet to properly satisfy
our appetite for answers to the essential, perennial question: What is love?
Since the time of Socrates, the status of love and the conception of the human heart have
been devalued, deemed supremely inferior to the human faculty of reason. Plato’s conception of the
soul devalues the human affective sphere, otherwise known as “the heart.” Although love has often
been overshadowed by other intellectual pursuits in the history of ideas, many profound visions of
love can be found in philosophical works, which may provide answers to these myriad questions of
love.
One way of achieving this goal is to consider the argument that love is, to some degree, an
“ethical art’” a notion that should be explored, in theory and practice, to properly address the central
question of philosophy established by the ancients, which is, “How should we live the good life?”
Socrates, a proclaimed expert in the ‘art of erotics,’ spoke about love in the sense of both erôs and
erôtan—love is both an expression of passion and of conversational inquiry. Is love thus best
understood as an emotion, an ethic, a way of life? Does loving require—or at least seek—an
understanding of the beloved, and does love grow inextricably with knowledge? Beyond merely
abstract reasoning, viewing love as a moral task elevates it from emotion to action in the life and
social sphere of an individual. I shall argue that love is necessarily a moral act, as it occurs between
two human persons and is an act that involves a total participation of the self.
The nature of love has been explored by many thinkers since the time of Socrates, but it is
with the advent of the phenomenological tradition that an exciting new way to explore the nature of
love was opened. Conceived by German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the tradition of
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phenomenology took root in the early twentieth century thought of the Munich and Gottingen
circles. Phenomenology, the study of firsthand human experience, became the influential school of
thought for Max Scheler and Dietrich von Hildebrand in the twentieth century. Scheler’s Nature of
Sympathy, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, and Ordo Amoris provide a
phenomenology of the emotions and a profound ethical analysis of the human affective sphere that
influenced thought a century late, and von Hildebrand provides a thorough account of the human
affective sphere, the heart, and its most powerful and misunderstood spiritual emotion—love—in
his works The Nature of Love and The Heart. A contemporary of Scheler, von Hildebrand’s philosophy
complements Scheler’s theory of emotions and offers an account that takes the philosophical inquiry
even further. Looking at the most recent work in the phenomenology of love, Jean-Luc Marion’s
The Erotic Phenomenon continues the thread of thought drawn from Husserl in examining the erotic
intentionality of human love. These works will be examined in detail below.
Both Scheler’s phenomenological “order of love” outlined in the essay Ordo Amoris and
Kierkegaard’s espousal of love’s duty in his Works of Love serve as two perspectives central to this
study that represent the dichotomy between theory and practice. This view of love as both
conceptual theory and ethical practice arguably best helps in understanding the nature of love, and
its normative value that can transcend the self in the social sphere to cultivate a more loving attitude
in the world. Throughout my thesis, I shall attempt to disambiguate the common assumptions
regarding the notion of love, and through extensive research from I shall seek an answer as to
whether or not a unified conception of love exists. By closely studying the works of Scheler and von
Hildebrand within the context of the phenomenological tradition, I will be able to thoroughly
examine my philosophical question in all its complexity and richness.
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I shall begin my thesis with an exploration of the heart in Chapter One, for the sphere of
affectivity forms the basis of Scheler and von Hildebrand’s conceptions of love. I discuss the role of
the heart in the history of Western philosophy in the first chapter, examining the role of subjectivity
and will in our affective response to others. In Chapter Two I will begin a discussion of love’s
ontology, that is, to explore the being of love, to establish the claim that love is objectively real—
beyond the realm of merely subjective feeling that many scientific studies suggest—and is worth a
consideration as an intrinsically moral act. In Chapter Three I will examine Scheler’s phenomenology
of emotions, outlining the stratification of the emotional life and the formation of the human
person. One of the assumptions I shall analyze in Chapter Four is that in order to love, one must
first love oneself. I shall focus on an exploration of the love of self, seeking to uncover whether or
not self-love exists, and to question whether a phenomenology of emotions provides insight into the
love of self.
In Chapter Five I shall attempt to determine the nature of love for the other, and consider
how it may also manifest itself in authentic and inauthentic forms in Chapter Seven. Providing the
reader with an account of love’s phenomenology within Scheler’s Ordo Amoris, I question whether a
working concept of “proper,” “ideal,” or “authentic” love in the normative sense can be uncovered
in his work. I anticipate juxtaposing views of love that differ in terms of a passive and active sense. The
idea of love in the passive sense embodies the character of love in its primal nature. That which is ruled
by passive feeling we have no control over; the passive sense encompasses the notion of falling in
love, the Kierkegaardian idea of the “first love” and the rule of passion that befalls us. The initial
instance of love, with regard to the notions of temporality, caprice, feeling, and other conditional
senses of love’s experience, falls within the sphere of passivity. This passive aspect of love stands in
contrast to love in an active sense, one which is inscribed by will and, ultimately, stems from a sense of
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duty to love one’s neighbor as oneself. I differentiate between these phenomena of love as “falling in
love” (passive) and “choosing to love” (active). As I expect to demonstrate, the essence of love goes
beyond the merely subjectively passive experience, and into the transcendent and active ethic of
choice. I shall argue that the human experience of actual “love” is an active emotion with an element
of choice. The role of choice in love is a distinctive phenomenon of the human experience of love.
The element of choice is a prominent feature of our human capacity for love, one that takes us
beyond the sphere purely sensual feeling toward a higher ethic of loving. That love in essence is
defined by this distinctive element of choice, of a willful emotional giving of oneself to another
serves ultimately to distinguish the passive loving feeling from the active loving will.
I shall finally question whether or not, within the nature of love, a normative ideal, proper
order, or authentic phenomenon of love leads one toward communion with the other, a love which
goes beyond the self toward edification and unification with others. I shall further explore in
Chapter Four the relation between love and knowledge to examine the correlation between
understanding and loving, which one, if either, precedes the other, to discover how the interplay of
love and knowledge can transform one’s love for another. Love is arguably the most powerful of the
human emotions, one that elevates the human sphere of emotions and the ethical existence beyond
the self. It is a force that compels individuals toward a greater existence, not only for oneself or
one’s neighbor, but for many, love drives one toward a compassionate attitude in life. With a basic
understanding of the fundamentals of love, it will be the task of the reader, or the lover, to put into
practice his or her understanding of love as it relates to the human striving of “the good life.”
Beyond these readings involving my research I wish to acknowledge some of the teachers
who have been indispensable in my philosophical journey. I wish to acknowledge Dr. Nam Nguyen,
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the first teacher to introduce me to philosophy. My mentor, my teacher, and my friend, Dr. Nguyen
placed my very first readings on love in my hands when I was a freshman, a chapter on love from M.
Scott Peck’s work, The Road Less Traveled. It was at this moment I realized that in matters of love, I
had a great deal to learn. Our conversations inside and outside of class initially sparked my inquiry
on the meaning of love, and continue to challenge me today, both academically and personally.
I wish to recognize the debt of gratitude I owe to my research mentor, Dr. Michael Strawser.
He has guided, enhanced, and challenged my research questions on the nature of love since my first
class with him on the philosophy of love in the Spring of 2010. Without his support and guidance,
my projects, travels, grants, and presentations would not have been possible. Without his dedication,
I would not be where I am today in my understanding of key philosophical concepts in our field.
Furthermore, I wish to acknowledge my personal communication with scholars in
philosophy that I have encountered outside of my university. During my stay at the Hong
Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in the Summer of 2011, the many office hour conversations
with Kierkegaard scholar and library curator Gordon Marino helped guide and focus my research.
Dr. Marino provided much-needed advice for advancing the development of my ideas and
furthering my understanding of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on love. For the past year, Franciscan
University professor, von Hildebrand scholar and translator of The Nature of Love, Dr. John F.
Crosby has enriched my philosophical understanding of love. In continuing my correspondence with
Dr. Crosby, I have exchanged ideas on the philosophy of love and von Hildebrand’s work, and he
has given me guidance and suggestions on improving my research. He provided me with an
unpublished chapter of the English translation of von Hildebrand’s work Aesthetics, which brings a
deeper comprehension and appreciation of his thoughts on value-response and the essential
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connection between love and beauty. Dr. Crosby also provided me with resources—from articles to
his own philosophical lectures—which aren’t readily available to students at my university.
Another scholar integral to my discovery of von Hildebrand is the founder of the Dietrich
von Hildebrand Legacy Project and co-translator of The Nature of Love, John Henry Crosby. During
my stay at the Legacy Project’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, I was allowed access to a myriad
of invaluable resources, sharing Mr. Crosby’s wealth of personal and academic knowledge of both
Max Scheler and Dietrich von Hildebrand through our conversations during my stay. To these men
and many others I owe my gratitude for keeping the love of wisdom alive in philosophical discourse
today—a task I seek to enhance in this thesis.
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To feel for none is the true social art
of the world's stoics — men without a heart.
Lord Byron
Chapter One: The Role of the Affective Sphere
For centuries, many philosophers have defined the human person as ens cogitans—a thinking
being. Two contemporaries within the German phenomenological tradition, Max Scheler and
Dietrich von Hildebrand began, instead, from the conception of humans as ens amans—loving
beings. Deeply imbedded within their works is the primacy of the heart. Why did each thinker begin
from this philosophical standpoint? Why the heart? This chapter will explore the role of the heart in
the philosophy of love in the works of Scheler and Hildebrand.
While teaching in Germany, both philosophers were colleagues and close friends, writing in
many areas with coinciding interests. How closely are their ideas on love interrelated? An eminently
important aspect in their philosophies can be seen in “the pride of place” given to the affective
sphere.1 Elevating the role of human emotion in philosophy, both Scheler and von Hildebrand have
formulated a phenomenology that places love at the center of man and the philosophical task.
Through examining von Hildebrand’s key philosophical works, including The Nature of Love and The
Heart, and Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy, I will uncover how Scheler and von Hildebrand’s work in
the phenomenology of emotions may help us understand the phenomenon of love.
1 John Henry Crosby, "Introduction to Dietrich von Hildebrand's Mozart: Dietrich von Hildebrand
in His Unknown Role as Master Phenomenologist of Art," Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 7, no. 2 (2004):
176.
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The Heart in Western Philosophy
Since the ancient era, philosophers have generally privileged the human faculty of reason,
logos, over that of emotion, pathos. Many of these philosophers maintain that “our passions and our
feelings are unnecessary to the search for truth about any matter whatever. What is more, feelings
can easily impede that search, either by distracting the searching intellect, or, still worse, by distorting
its view of the world.”2 Such an attitude has been prevalent for centuries. An idea held by many
philosophers is that to involve the affective sphere is to “move the passions, and thereby mislead the
judgment.”3 It should be no surprise that philosophy has remained historically silent on the topic of
love, as:
The secondary place assigned to the sphere of affectivity and to the heart has remained,
strangely enough, a more or less noncontroversial part of our philosophical heritage. The
entire affective sphere was for the most part subsumed under the heading of passions, and as
long as one dealt with it expressly under this title, its irrational and nonspiritual character was
emphasized.4
This betrayal of matters of the heart is reinforced by Western thought since the time of ancient
philosophers. The heart—and its associated affective activities—has been discussed and dismissed in
ways that diminish general attitudes toward a relevant aspect of what it means to be human. I wish
to argue however that the human affective sphere is not only a subject for philosophical exploration;
it is a vital topic of inquiry that leads us to a greater understanding of love, and ultimately, unlocks
the nature of the human person.
The neglect of the heart hearkens back to ancient Athens, as “the Aristotelian position
2 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 262-263.
3 Ibid., 263.
4 Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart (Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2007), 3.
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towards this sphere unequivocally testifies to a disparagement of the heart.”5 Von Hildebrand
explains that, according to Aristotle’s concept of the soul, “the intellect and the will belong to the
rational part of man; the affective realm, and with it the heart, belong to the irrational part in man,
that is, to the area of experience which man allegedly shares with animals.”6 This sentiment has only
evolved to damage the merit of the heart throughout the history of philosophy. Returning to the
ancient conception of love in philosophy, “it is true that we find in Plato’s Phaedrus the words, ‘the
madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings,’” von Hildebrand writes, “but when it comes
to a systematic classification of man’s capacities (as in the Republic), Plato did not grant to the heart a
rank comparable to that of the intellect.”7 This places our discussion at a point of contention, which
both Scheler and von Hildebrand address in asking us: what can be more essential to man than love?
The bias toward the cognitive faculty in experience throughout the history of philosophy is
on the decline, as many phenomenological thinkers have brought intellectual attention to the
experiential and moral value of emotions. As this work develops, it will become clear how both
Scheler and von Hildebrand were committed to “rehabilitating the dignity of the affections”8 in
their works of phenomenology. According to John Drummond, “Our ordinary experience from the
beginning encompasses cognitive and affective—and, I might add, practical—dimensions.”9 It is
natural, even necessary to consider both the cognitive and affective elements of human experience, as
it is clear that both “things and situations affect us; they evoke feelings in us.”10 To divorce the
5 Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart, 3.

6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 John Henry Crosby, “Mozart,” 176.
9 John J. Drummond, “Feelings, Emotions, and Wertnehmungen” (invited plenary address at the meeting of the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für phänomenologische Forschung, September 30–October 3, 2009), 1-2.
10 Ibid., 2.
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affective from philosophical inquiry would be to provide an incomplete picture of reality: “The
phenomenologist…must describe how a world filled with physical, affective, practical, and cultural
significance is disclosed by any experiencing subject.”11 We cannot reduce the meaning of what is
human to one aspect of our soul or personality. Our world is filled with many elements, from the
affective to the rational. To deny the importance of one aspect of our approach to reality is to deny
the fullness of our experience of reality.12 Von Hildebrand retained this attitude throughout his life,
and “considered the implied standard of emotional detachment and affective neutrality to be
tantamount to an inauthentic form of objectivity.”13
Men without Chests
The Vienna Circle—a distinct group of intellectuals in the 20th century—began a dialogue
that sought to expunge philosophy’s contemplative endeavors of all metaphysical notions, including
any talk of love or the heart. In an attempt to achieve a scientific world-conception as close to the
“truth” as language would allow, branches from the philosophical tree were broken off with the
intellectual force of positivism. The movement was an effort to achieve the utmost clarity and
concision in the work of philosophy, comparative to the scientific achievements at the time. Even
philosophers could not ignore the intellectual successes of the scientific community, which included
thinkers from Helmholtz to Einstein. Many wished to achieve a standard of philosophy that reached
11 Drummond, “Feelings, Emotions, and Wertnehmungen,” 3.

12 This is a hallmark move of von Hildebrand away from his teacher Husserl (who desired an atheist phenomenology):
The phenomenological approach is not… restricted to the philosophical analysis of genuine essences, that is, to
philosophical a priori knowledge. It is also indispensable for the deeper understanding of man data which play
a predominant role in the humanities, such as a great individual personality, or the cultural epoch baroque, or
an individual work of art (What Is Philosophy? Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973).
Furthermore, the discrepancy between Husserl’s philosophical idealism seriously conflicted with von Hildebrand’s
phenomenological realist leanings such that, upon von Hildebrand’s completion of his graduate work, Husserl denied his
student a post-graduate recommendation due to the Catholic influence on his philosophy.
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a level of accuracy on par with the hard sciences. Such philosophical disciplines expelled by the
positivists included the pursuit of metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics.
Many philosophers of his thread of thought attack the emotive and impassioned aspects of
the written word, and presuppose that these features are irrelevant to the “grasp of truth,” rendering
them unspeakable in the whole of philosophy. For some, philosophers who approach ideas, objects,
or others with an “intuitive” way of knowing are disregarded by the many philosophers who “have
in fact forsaken love, dismissed it without a concept and finally thrown it to the dark and worried
margins of their sufficient reason—along with the repressed, the unsaid, the unmentionable.”14 Yet
for these purely cerebral men, as C.S. Lewis warns us, “their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it
is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”15 As we shall see, the human heart
can fall into affective atrophy—a loss of one’s connection with emotional affectivity—and this trend of
thought may be a result of philosophical “affective atrophy” that befell those philosophers overruled
by the faculty of reason. Perhaps positivism is what C. S. Lewis was referring to in his essay The
Abolition of Man; the contemporary positivists are the “men without chests.”
The reverberations of the positivist movement can still be felt in the tradition of philosophy
today. It is echoed in the response of those of the school of Wittgenstein who hold steadfastly to the
seventh proposition in the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”16 The
mention of the emotions—from the sphere of affectivity to love— often falls on deaf ears in
philosophical discourse. Perhaps Marion is correct in saying that “this silence is for the better,
14 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1.
15 C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms
of Schools (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 25.
16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1922), 27.
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because when philosophy does venture to speak of love it mistreats or betrays it.”17 The aim of this
work, beyond seeking clarity on the hazy notion of love in philosophy, is to serve as a clarion call to
philosophers that emotion is not only a valid, but necessary topic of exploration.
C.S. Lewis reminds us that, “without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless
against the animal organism.”18 We are not speaking of “emotion” in the strictly Platonic sense, as
unrestrained passion, but of emotion as a sanctioned center of affectivity. I speak of “emotion” as
not a fleeting physiological response to an object, but of emotion as representative of an entire
spectrum of human feeling, ascending from simple sensual response (pleasure/pain) to complex
spiritual response (love/hatred). The sensual or vital level of feeling is simple in the sense of its non-
intentionality: there is no object of such feeling-states, no specific response to a specific external
object at this level of feeling. This lies in contrast to emotions of intentionality; in reference to
‘intentional,’ “we refer to a conscious, rational relation between the person and an object.”19 For
both von Hildebrand and Scheler “intentionality is a mark of the higher, spiritual part of man,
distinguishing it from the lower irrational part.”20
What it means to be human cannot be reduced to the material, through studies in science or
psychology. Missing from these studies is the ontological level—a consideration of the heart. The
scientific type of knowledge is acquired by a “seeing from without,” an empirical way of gathering
facts of the world. Throughout his work, von Hildebrand sought to clarify the difference between
scientific seeing “from without” to philosophic seeing “from within.” The nature of love deals with
not just the physical—the measurable view from without that psychosomatic studies seek to explain,
17 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 1.

18 Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 24.
19 Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Ethics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1972), 191.
20 Ibid., 217.
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but the metaphysical—the realm beyond purely physical appearance—which is accessed by a sight
from within, from the spiritual center of man, from the heart.
The Tenor of the Heart
Throughout this work I have explained that the heart is the center of affectivity, the spiritual
center of the self. What is the overall significance of the heart in the experience of the human
person? The primary goal of this section is to delineate the significance of love, which is “the voice
of the heart, an affective response, indeed the most affective of all responses.”21 The heart is
responsible for the human range of emotions, hence why the term sphere of affectivity is the
philosophical equivalent of the more poetic, metaphoric heart. This center of affectivity is given a
place of importance in the phenomenology of von Hildebrand and his value-realist counterpart,
teacher, and friend Scheler. Both philosophers recognize the limitations of the Platonic conception
of emotions. Although Scheler vehemently elevates affectivity above the other faculties, emotion,
volition, and cognition hold an equal rank in the formation of man for von Hildebrand.
The sphere of affectivity is responsible for emotions simple and complex, the highest and
most powerful of which being love and hatred. With the human response to emotions, are hearts are
actualized, and we are moved, affected by the object, person, event, and so on. According to von
Hildebrand “this actualization of the center of the value response, “the charitable, reverent, humble
center,” excludes the simultaneous actualization of the center from which hate, envy, and revenge
derive.”22 If love and hatred are the highest powers of the heart, it follows that there is on only
“space” for one eminently powerful value response in the heart at one time. We cannot
simultaneously love and hate an individual. How can humans gain control of their affectivity? How
21 Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love (Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), 54.
22 Von Hildebrand, Ethics, 409.
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can it be possible to allow love to descend into hatred; how can we allow love to transfigure hate? A
full consideration of the relation between love and hatred is beyond the scope of this work. Let us
now consider the role of the will in the vale responses in the heart.
If emotions are indeed, according to von Hildebrand, on par with, and not subservient to
reason or the will, how does he reconcile the power of human affectivity? On this point, let us look
at von Hildebrand’s view on the relation between love—the voice of the heart—and will:
One cannot deny that love is not free in the same sense as the will is free. We cannot give
ourselves love even if we want to. It is not in our power freely to posit such a response of
the heart like we can posit a response of the will, nor is it in our power to command love like
an action. Between the mere will to love someone and real love for that person there is an
abyss. 23
The spontaneity of love, the freedom of the value-response is retained in von Hildebrand’s
interpretation of volition. We are free to love, but we are not free to force our heart to respond to
another in love. He preserves the voice of the heart as a personal recognition of the other, the
“tenor of the heart” in the sense of love as being a response to value. Von Hildebrand indeed
acknowledges the difference between the heart’s free response to the other—love as value
response—and the command to love others as a neighbor—love as willed ethic. The theme of this
work is the former. This response does not arise from will or intellect, but from the heart:
Even if one were blind to the role of love in human life, it is still true that whether one
considers the main source of earthly happiness to be beauty, knowledge, or creative work,
the experience of happiness is something affective, for it is the heart that experiences
happiness, and not the intellect or the will.24
The will does not respond to value, nor does it serve as the voice of the heart. The value response of
love lies in the recognition of the heart. In his emphasis on spontaneity and freedom in the response
of the heart, von Hildebrand does not intend to relegate his personalist concept of love to a purely
23 Von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 54.

24 Von Hildebrand, The Heart, 17.
8
free, unsanctioned response of the heart. He means to point to the approach to the other in love as
motivated not through a willing, but by a giving, for “the commitment of the heart is that is proper
to love is not a result of the will but a gift.”25 The dignity of love as an affective response lies not in
its willing extension to the other, but in spontaneous givenness. For von Hildebrand, value and gift
are thematic elements proper to love, not duty. What value, what insight can we glean from the
heart’s response when it is strictly a willed ethic?
On this point—the role of the will in love—we can immediately separate von Hildebrand’s
value phenomenology from Kantian deontology, and even the Thomist approach to love. For love
qua love cannot merely be willed into action to retain the dignity of the value response to the other
qua person:
Whoever loves realizes that this love is not really returned as long as the other person only
has the will to love him but without any involvement of the heart. If the other does not
yearn for our presence and is not delighted by it and made happy by it, if his heart does not
speak, then he does not love us, even if he makes the greatest effort of will to love.”26
Love is not will; collapsing the two in an attempt to properly identify love is equivocation. Although
human affectivity is a valid motivation for love, this is not to be confused with sentimentality, sort of
aesthetic stirring of the emotions for the sake of feeling itself. Sentimentality is a form of emotional
aestheticism, “a merry-go-round of the heart which spins only to spin again.”27
Von Hildebrand cautions of the danger of “men without chests,” individuals who forsake
the tenor of the heart out of a fear or disdain for emotion. This leads to a closing-off, a hardening of
the heart that severely limits not only our understanding of the other, but our experience of the
world. Such a person “avoid[s] the unique surrender of his heart and of the entire rhythm of his life.

26 Ibid.
27 Fulton Sheen, Three to Get Married, 6.
9
His is an attitude which…also resists any total love in which one gives one’s heart.”28 The
hardening of one’s heart points to “the lack of freedom that comes from remaining stuck in one’s
subjectivity and being too preoccupied with one’s interests. By being preoccupied like this, one cuts
oneself off in a sense from the objective logos, from the rhythm of the world of values, and from
one’s neighbor.”29 The heart is key to opening up our subjectivity—our Eigenleben—in order to
enter communion with others.
In opening up our hearts, how can our affectivity change our response to others? Under
what conditions of the heart are we led to respond to others with love or hatred? Perhaps we can say
that an individual with a strong Eigenleben is more receptive to the value of others, more engaged in
the intersubjective, I-Thou communion that will open our hearts to recognize “the charitable,
reverent, humble center”30 of others. Perhaps a “withered” Eigenleben can inhibit our ability to
respond to others with love. Considering the role of the will in love, can we say that our love
overpowers our hatred with the sanction of the will? Perhaps hatred, if we allow it to, can also
overpower love. The next section will touch on a historical example of hardened affectivity and its
effects on the individual and society, exemplified in the affective atrophy of Germans under
National Socialism. I will consider the consequences of von Hildebrand’s rehabilitation of the heart,
the effect of opening up our affectivity to others.
Rehabilitation of the Heart
In his time, von Hildebrand took upon himself the task of reminding us of the importance
of the heart in a time when “many were oppressed by the mechanical and artificial rationality that

29 Ibid., 217.
10
dominate[d] modern life.”31 Living in European society during the rise of National Socialism, von
Hildebrand knew that his people “were longing to get beyond this sterile rationality and to
participate in forms of life that were more abundant and organic.”32 Von Hildebrand’s philosophy
has an undoubtedly personalist element in his emphasis on the meaning of subjectivity in the
philosophical task. The unique status of the human person is eminently important to the task of the
philosopher, whether it is discovering the nature of reality or the nature of love. Throughout his life
as an academic, von Hildebrand vehemently pronounced the necessity of valuing the human
person.33 Von Hildebrand saw the inherent dangers of Nazism, and “was quick to detect an
opening for the anti-personalism of the age.”34 John F. Crosby shares his view on von Hildebrand’s
emphasis on value and the importance of our subjective response to value. He claims that, for von
Hildebrand, “what is authentically personal cannot be reduced to artificial rationality.”35
For von Hildebrand, affective responses are proper to objects like fine art and music, as well
as persons as intrinsically valuable subjects; these responses to value are “not just instinctual and
vital but are properly and eminently personal.”36 His delight in the abundance of value found in
31 John F. Crosby, “The Witness of Dietrich von Hildebrand,” First Things (December, 2006), 8.
32 Ibid.
33 On the history of von Hildebrand’s personal experience with extreme opposition to his ideas at his university, John F.
Crosby writes:
So Hildebrand opposed his Christian personalism to the anti-personalism of the time. And it was on the basis
of this personalism that her resisted anti-Semitism; he was in fact one of the most resolute voices in all of
Europe on the evil of anti-Semitism…. He apparently lost the support of many Austrian Catholics over this
issue; many of them agreed with him until he spoke about the Jews (“Witness ,” 9).
The consequences of his ideas led to an intellectual unrest at his university during the World War II. Students,
professors, friends turned against him in his authentic pursuit of truth and value in the face of moral and value
relativism, and a national exchange of truth for propaganda. Von Hildebrand’s philosophical convictions, his inability to
compromise his authenticity, forced him to evade the wrath of National Socialism, escaping European cities—Munich,
Austria, Florence, and Toulouse—for Sao Paulo, and finally, to safety in New York City.
34 John F. Crosby, “Witness,” 8.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
11
everyday life was not merely aesthetic. In fact, as John Henry Crosby points out, von Hildebrand
recognized the power of beauty as a symbol pointing to the realm of value, which grounds the
entirety of his philosophical outlook. Rather than viewing beauty as a merely subjective category of
personal appeal, he recognized the objectivity of it, and how beauty relates intrinsically to both love
and morality.37 Von Hildebrand had a “preternatural sense for the sacred,” which led to an
“aesthetic sensibility [that] was bound up with a strong moral sense.”38 This sensibility, often
devalued in philosophy today, is essential to the phenomenological account of love espoused in this
work. Far from the shallow aestheticism that von Hildebrand considers with caution, “these feelings
are not just filling up our hearts, making us feel good or bad; they help us see things for what they
are and understand the world for what it really is.”39 I will explore further below the connection
between philosophy and affectivity, and how the sphere of emotions plays a vital role in the
phenomenology of von Hildebrand and Scheler. For these philosophers, “getting in touch with
reality is one of the most important things our emotions are for. That’s why reason and emotion—
thinking and feeling—belong together: they both help us get at the truth about reality.”40 These
themes will be explored fully throughout this work. For both Scheler and von Hildebrand, there can
be no more fruitful an account of what it means to be a human being than an investigation into the
affective sphere, into the phenomenon of love.
37 In his first presentation as a student of philosophy, von Hildebrand “attempted to distinguish between the intrinsic
aspects of a work of art and those that are extrinsically related to it.” (John Henry) This sensitivity to beauty, and a
proclivity toward pointing out the objective in a seeming field of subjectivity was a foretaste of one of his lifelong tasks
and commitments to both philosophical and aesthetic truth.
39 Phillip Cary, Good News for Anxious Christians: Ten Practical Things You Don't Have to Do (Grand Rapids: Baker
Publishing Group, 2010), 102.
40 Ibid., 103.
12
We must close the eyes of the body,
to open another vision.
-Plotinus
Chapter Two: The Ontology of Love
Building upon my apologia of the heart in Western philosophy, can we now speak of love—
the fundamental act of the affective sphere—in a meaningful way? Perhaps I should now establish
love as an ontologically real phenomenon. Whether love is intangible, illusory, meaningless, or
mundane will be questioned; these common objections to the reality of love will serve to answer the
fundamental question: on love, should philosophers remain silent? I will further explore the
possibility of a unified definition of love as a complex and spontaneous phenomenological act that
involves emotion sanctioned by the will that recognizes and responds to the intrinsic value of the
other. In defense of love as having a unified essence, I claim that if one is to consider love as having
an ontological existence, its nature must be of something more than a passion reflected in the
Romantic ideal, more than a relative, subjective experience in the pejorative sense of the term. In
spite of the varying characteristics and categories of love, it remains a unique and personal
phenomenon, the essence of which I will attempt to adequately describe in the subsequent pages.
The idea of an “ontology” of love is perhaps best expressed in the words of Paul Tillich,
from his essay Love, Power, and Justice. He expresses how these three concepts “are metaphysically
speaking as old as being itself. They precede everything that is. They have ontological dignity. And
before having received ontological dignity they had mythological meaning. They were gods before
they became rational qualities of being.”41
41 Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications (New York: Oxford University Press,
1954), 21.
13
Although many disciplines describe love in term of the poets, attributing to it such words as
ephemeral, attraction, attachment, and even addiction, love is ontologically real. This attests to an accepted
pluralism of accepted ideas on the topic. A definition that transcends the cultural, historical, or
psychological interpretation of love is missing from many emergent understandings of the concept.
Philosophical work within traditions as old as that of Aristotle, and the medieval school of
Aquinas—and as young as the phenomenological tradition of Scheler— have attested to the truth of
love having an essence that is real, ordered, and even transcendent. The approach of this paper
emerges from the phenomenological tradition, a method that Scheler and von Hildebrand consider
to transcend the scientific, biological, psychological, historical, and cultural interpretation of love:
phenomenology attempts to “see,” to “get at” what love is at the personal level.
The first objection commonly raised is that love is an imaginary concept, that it is mere
poetic fancy, and bears no “tangible” effect on reality. Throughout much of his work, most notably
in his text What is Philosophy? Von Hildebrand seeks to establish that love is objectively real. Here he
clearly defines the difference between the subjective and objective existence of things:
To be subjective may mean, first of all, to pertain to the personal world, as opposed to the
impersonal world; it would mean something belonging to the personal subject of knowing,
willing, loving, and so forth. In this sense everything which is a real “part” of a person may
be called “subjective.” An act of knowledge, an act of will, an act of love or joy are all
subjective in this sense; a rock or a tree would not be subjective in the same sense.42
A part of the human experience is the subjective, personal experience of love. While loving may be
an inherently subjectively felt or experienced phenomenon, this in no way renders the act of love a
purely subjective phenomenon that does not exist outside of one’s subjective reality. On the contrary:
But let it be clearly marked and known: the acts of knowing, love, and so forth are fully
objective realities. They are at least as “real” as a stone or a tree. Thus the term “subjective”
42 Von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?, 153-154.
14
refers to the ontological feature of being a “subject,” a person, and not to the
epistemological feature of being an appearance for a subject.43
Love is an ontologically real essence, but exists in varying degrees of expression; each has his or her
own interpretation or experience of love’s existence. However, ontologically speaking, love can be
considered a unified concept. The love for a romantic other, a brother, or a friend differs in some
form, yet we call each a variant of a fundamental love of the other. Love exists as both an affective
response to the intrinsic value in the other and as a choice in the sense that our response is
sanctioned by the will. What it means to love is to both respond to the value of the other experience,
and into the transcendent and active ethic of choice. Human experience of actual “love” is an active
emotion; it is the love that Aquinas speaks of when he talks of its “power” beyond mere
“passion.”44
Nussbaum attests to the knowledge of such love, and the reality, for “knowledge of our
heart’s condition is given to us in and through certain powerful impressions, impressions that come
from the reality itself of our condition and could not possibly come from anything else but that
reality.”45 In this small insight, Nussbaum touches upon a fundamental idea that serves as a thread
throughout the work of Scheler, that “impressions” or insight are the intuitions of reality that
phenomenologists seek in the pursuit of philosophical knowledge of reality, especially in our
response to the personal value of the other.
To continue the discussion of love’s ontologically unified essence, we will consider an idea
that is recurring in the writings of von Hildebrand. On the irreducibility of love’s essence, he writes:
43 Von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?, 154.

44 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
45 Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 266.
15
Many necessary essences stand in their fullness before our minds and are grasped as things
which cannot be broken down or reduced in any way. Such, for example, are the color red,
the essences of love, space, time, and so forth. Here intelligibility means a unique “meaning-
fullness” which renders it possible for our minds to grasp the object “From within.”46
There are two fundamental ways in which we can perceive objects, by way of a “seeing from
without,” part and parcel of an incomplete perception, and a “seeing from within,” which is the
essence of philosophical perception. Regarding such differences in perception is to realize the
difference in position between the philosopher and the scientist:
Philosophical distance, on the contrary, entails freedom from all arbitrariness. It renders
possible our allowing ourselves to be borne along in knowledge by the main theme of the
object in question. Above all, in this remoteness of the spiritual position from which
philosophy considers the object, there is no “seeing things from without.” We saw, in our
analysis of a priori knowledge, that the mind is able to know “from within” only those objects
having an essence that can be grasped intuitively. We saw, furthermore, that this knowledge
from within is one of the deepest characteristics of philosophical knowledge.47
These two stances on seeing are intricately tied to love and perception of the other. He explains this
way of seeing as one which “leads us to consider the beloved person under a false external
aspect.”48 This aspect is devoid of the profound seeing or apprehension of another in full light of
their uniqueness and individuality, their subjectivity. He explains the danger when one sees strictly
“from without” as a “source of a typical misunderstanding of the other person and is radically
antithetical to love.”49 Here von Hildebrand makes clear the moral accountability of one whose
vision is restricted to the first intent of seeing. One’s vision is flawed, and von Hildebrand even
considers this an attitude “antithetical to love.”
46 Von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?, 133-134

47 Ibid., 204.
49 Ibid, 334.
16
When we behold our lover from this phenomenological stance, we are in fact “seeing the
other ‘from within,’ which holds a special significance for philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand. He
goes so far to say that “love is by nature a ‘seeing from within.’”50 This involves an active perceiving
where one lives “in his or her depth.”51 This depth-seeing means that this sight, beyond the passive
or receptively-seeing in the first sense (with the sensual eye), involves a deeper commitment to
seeing beyond the physical sense of self, much like our love of neighbor commands humans to love
with a willing that is beyond our primitive human faculty of love.
In considering the ontology of love, it is important to account for the relational aspect, the
intersubjectivity of two persons in love. While love is a non-physical existence—you cannot point to
it in any physical sense—there are aspects of the relationship between man and woman that point to
love’s mediating presence. Yet, although one cannot effectively “point to” love, it can be known by
its fruits. I will speak of this notion in terms of two aspects of this interpenetration of selves, that is,
in terms of “mine” and “we.” Firstly, love is often considered in the sense of a shared “we,”52 a
love that transcends each lover’s unique experience and brings each person into a unique
communion bound by love. It is an experience that is reflected in a play of shared moments, in a
reciprocated relation of two subjects joined by this new shared experience in love. In this new
relation we find a communal orientation marked by an intentio unionis and an intentio benevolente—the
desire for union and a willing of the good for the other—that brings two persons in love together in
this shared “we.”

51 Ibid.
52 For a more in-depth discussion of the new “we” that arises out of merging solitudes in love, see Nozick’s The
Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
17
Let us consider the relation between the qualities of personality and our motivation for love.
Poets and plebeians alike seek to convey the particular characteristics of another in an attempt to
explain their motivation for love. We may be drawn to the other by an attraction via the
characteristics of personality; however, to love a person for a set of characteristics is inaccurate.
Many romantics tend to glorify particular traits of the beloved—a sanguine pallor or a waterfall of
auburn curls—in order to express their love. This impassioned “fall” into love, although aesthetically
appealing when framed poetically, is a different category of experience, and not constituent of love
itself. In an example cited by Fulton Sheen,
If one is asked why he is in love with a particular person, he may, if he is a logician, put his
argument into some such form as this:
It is our nature to love goodness:

But X is good:
Therefore, I love X.53
What is missing from this argument is the personal element. We are “attracted” to individuals for
characteristics X Y or Z. We love individuals, however, not for X, Y, or Z, but for the sake of the
individual him or herself, for his or her intrinsic value. We are missing that which is eminently
personal, as Scheler and von Hildebrand would say, if we love the other because they bear goodness.
For “goodness” to be a premise for our love, the argument would have to be amended to
personalize the X in terms of the individual, overall value-response. Love aims at the irreducible
subject, the unique and wholly other person. There is a fundamental distinction between “loving for
X,” where X is a characteristic, and “loving X,” where X is an individual. This marks the ultimate
difference between mere attraction, affection, or lust and genuine love for another person. This
irreducibility of love is precisely why phenomenology is the methodology used in this work: it
53 Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married (Princeton, N.J.: Scepter Publishers, 2004), 16.
18
encompasses the attitude of “letting things be,” which is—quite apart from qualitative
measurements—precisely what it takes to account properly for our value-response, our love of
another human person.
Attraction, affection, and lust are examples of what von Hildebrand terms “pseudo-loves,”
or “passive” feelings—or the vital or psychological for Scheler—which, in the case of attraction and
affection, may in fact ultimately lead to love. These three examples are ontologically lower emotions,
and, in Schelerian terms, they are closer to the vital level than the spiritual level. The task of this
work is to outline the emotion of love, which is the ontologically highest emotion for both Scheler
and von Hildebrand. Before I begin to outline the nature of love in phenomenological terms, let me
begin with a brief analysis of the realist phenomenological approach underlying this thesis.
Love on the Mind
Can the sciences allow us to come to a deeper understanding of love? When arguing in favor
of the objective reality of love, a scientific consideration should be considered given recent progress
in the field of neurology. In contemporary research, neurological studies have claimed to pinpoint
areas in the brain that correlate with human receptivity to love. Such empirical evidence can, at least
in part, provide insight into the phenomenon of love. Multiple studies in neuroscience claim to have
pointed us to the source of the human experience of love. Is it accurate to say that we “love” with
our mind? Although studies in neurology have focused on pinpointing “love on the brain,” this is
only a one-dimensional picture of the human experience of love. This does not mean, however, that
this evidence is irrelevant to the pursuit of truth.
The work of Helen Fisher points toward a scientific correlation between brain activity and
the limbic response of a lover: “Regions of the prefrontal cortex monitor the pursuit—one's
19
progress toward the goal: emotional, physical, even spiritual union with the beloved.”54 That is to
say, both the joy and suffering of a person “in love” has been charted as a neurological
phenomenon. A basic empirical understanding of human emotion—evidenced by the growing
research on the correlation between the brain and emotional response— is valuable in our pursuit of
knowledge:
The prefrontal [lobe] is the brain of involvement… It gives us the taste, the enthusiasm for
what we choose. It does not give us merely a barren notional knowledge, but makes us
assent with our whole hearts to what we know. And this is what would appear to be the full
significance of the prefrontal. Its real name is the brain of the heart, the organ of love.55
Many philosophers and theologians refer to the heart as the origin of emotion, an allusion that
serves to ground affective discussion in a non-physical, metaphorical realm of the body. Many
scientists, however, would consider this reference to the heart more metaphor than anatomical truth.
Further, knowledge of cognitive correlation between reason and emotion “made for the wedding of
emotion and intellect, a ceremony that perhaps took place in Paul Chauchard’s ‘brain of the heart’ –
the late-arriving prefrontal brain—to produce that exhilarating experience we call love.”56 This
“wedding” of emotion and intellect is an idea that only recently received scientific illumination.
Neurology, it seems, relegates “love” to merely an “exhilarating experience.” This discussion will
reconsider the recurring confusion between ephemeral feeling and willing emotion. The neurologist
reduces the complex range of human emotions to one specific response, and appears to have
empirically measured the human phenomenological act of love.
54 Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: H. Holt, 2004), 267.
55 Anthony Walsh, The Science of Love: Understanding Love & Its Effects on Mind & Body (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books,
1996), 90-91.
56 Ibid., 185.
20
This scientific conception confuses the fundamental difference between the limbic responses
of pleasure—associated with lust, attraction, and the romantic conception of “falling in love”—with
the profound value response of love for another person.57 One aim of this work is to exemplify the
difference between the feeling of falling in love with being in love, as “what some people love is not
a person, but the experience of being in love. The first is irreplaceable; the second is not.”58 While
the manifest presence of love might appear in synaptic relations in the brain, love remains essentially
intangible. This work will argue the higher relevance of love as a response to value, and the reality of
love as an ontological category that is not reducible to impulses in the brain. Although neurological
studies have mapped the cognitive response of the human phenomena of falling in love, they have
not fully accounted for the human experience of love. There is a need in both the sciences and
philosophy for a “rehabilitation” of the heart for our understanding of love; “can the role of the
most affective of all affective responses be ignored?”59 The goal of this work is to serve, at base, as
an apologia for the heart and emotions as vital pursuits in philosophy. I further seek to outline what,
at base, value-realist phenomenology is in order to ground a phenomenological exploration of love.
Perhaps both the scientific and philosophic thinker will begin to recognize the value of the
affective response, as perhaps “the remedy for all the sufferings of the modern brain lies in the
enlargement of the heart through love, which forgets itself as the subject and begins to love the
neighbor as the object.”60 As it stands, science can only explain the response of falling in love, it
cannot, however, explain the why of our love. Biology can and will only explain the physiological
57 Von Hildebrand writes: “The fact that love is a value response, essentially implying an intentio unionis and an intentio
benevolentiae, and the fact that there is a difference between the imago Dei and the similitudo Dei are all apriori facts and
typical topics of philosophy. They have not, however, the obvious character of “Two plus two equals four” or “Moral
values presuppose a person” (What is Philosophy? 137).
58 Sheen, Three to Get Married, 1.
59 Von Hildebrand, The Heart, 17.
21
reactions of human love. It cannot chart the raison du couer, the inner workings of the human
affective sphere. Only when the effects of love become manifest in human thought and behavior,
visible enough through sight “from without” for scientific inquiry to begin its measurements, is love
subject to any sort of empirical analysis. Everything prior to and beyond this outward appraisal of
love falls under the lens of philosophical inquiry. In listing the different aspects of the mysterious,
von Hildebrand numbered love as among life’s mysterious phenomena. Love can be considered one
of life’s mysteries,61 in that:
because of its depth and richness, is inaccessible to a purely rational penetration meo
geometrico, in a geometrical fashion. In this sense the human person is a mystery; love is a
mystery; beauty is a mystery. Though they are not supra-rational, although they in no way
contain antimonies, these mysteries escape the kind of rational explanation which is to be
found in logic or mathematics.62
Precisely because of its profundity, love cannot be assessed solely meo geometrico. While there is
undoubtedly a cognitive element—as this work will attempt to illustrate in the section titled love and
knowledge—love is beyond reduction to reason.63 Of course, there are “reasons for love,” but they
do not read like a checklist of items. This is precisely the mistake of reductionism, as I have outlined
earlier. In the words of Fulton Sheen, “love needs no reasons… love never asks "Why?" It says, "I
61 For another phenomenological perspective on the person and love as essentially mysterious, see the work of Gabriel
Marcel. He discusses the difference in philosophy between “problems” that do not essentially involve the knower, and
“mysteries” which involve the knower in a personal, existential way: Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being I: Reflection and
Mystery, Trans. G.S. Fraser. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2001).
62 Dietrich von Hildebrand and Alice M. Jourdain Von Hildebrand, The Art of Living (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), 55.
63 We find this idea of our love for the other as mysterious clearly articulated by John F. Crosby:
The more you come to know and love some person, the less you find yourself able to express what it is that
you know and love. You find something in the other that is unutterable, ineffable, unspeakable. You can
describe well enough the various qualities of the other, the types and kinds that he falls under, but there is
something else, something deeper in the other that escapes your expressive and descriptive powers. You see
and experience this something else as you come to know and love the other as person, but you cannot render it
in clear concepts, and you just stammer when you try. What you are encountering is precisely the other as
unrepeatable person. The problem is that our language is only suited to expressing properties that are common
to many; it fails us when we try to give expression to that which is unrepeatably some person’s own (John F.
Crosby, “Persons are Unrepeatable,” Lay Witness, May 2000).
22
love you." Love is its own reason.”64 The reasons for love indeed “are so deep that we can never
exhaust them with our knowledge. 65 Perhaps Gautier is correct in intertwining the heart and mind
in the task of loving. This work will attempt to point toward the underlying aspects of love’s nature,
and address the essential structure of love according to the phenomenological value-realists, Dietrich
von Hildebrand and Max Scheler. Let me begin by clearly establishing love as a subject of
ontological inquiry.
The Phenomenological Approach
As I already explained, I wish to focus on the phenomenological tradition, as it is the best
lens to approach the nature of love and it is through this lens that both Scheler and von Hildebrand
view the meaning and task of philosophy. The meaning of the word “phenomenology” is the science
of appearances or of appearings.66 It is an essential approach of the discovering of, the seeking of
truth of things-in-the world. Phenomenology is a philosophy centered in the descriptions of the
revealing or unconcealment of phenomena, and each philosopher within the tradition presents an
array of different phenomenological “themes” within his or her work. Ricoeur describes such
themes as the “melodic lines of existential phenomenology.”67 The main “themes” of existential
phenomenology which Ricouer explicitly describes include:
(1) The “owned body” found in the work of Marcel, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty.
(2) The “freedom” found in Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
(3) The theme of “the Other” found within the work of Sartre.
The primary philosophical voices I will reference in this essay—Scheler, von Hildebrand, and
Marion—are phenomenologists whose work indeed contains existential themes, and do not fall

65 Von Hildebrand, The Art of Living, 55.
66 Paul Ricœur, Husserl: an Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
67 Ricœur, Husserl, 208.
23
quite easily into any one of these three categories.68 Perhaps the theme of “the Other” is the best
categorization for Marion. Although von Hildebrand was a student of Husserl, his work departs
explicitly from Husserl’s strict phenomenological methodology. I would consider the main “theme”
of von Hildebrand and Scheler, two “value realists,”69 to be that of the value-response, an affective
intentional act in which we find a “deep, meaningful, and intelligible relationship between the act
and its object.”70 Value-realists respond to the value of different categories of objects, from “the
beauty of noble music or the nobility of a moral act,”71 to the beauty of a virtuous person or the
beauty of our beloved. Perhaps, then, a new class of existential phenomenologists needs to be added
to include the thinkers I reference in this work, namely, von Hildebrand, Scheler, as well as Karol
Wojtyla. Having briefly outlined the phenomenological approach, I will move to a brief overview of
two predominant areas of philosophy that are related to the philosophers referenced in this essay:
existentialism and personalism.
While scientific inquiries and answers deal predominantly with the empirical human object,
philosophical inquiries of the existential thread deal with the particular human subject. The themes
of existentialism and personalism both deal primarily with the concretely unique individual.
Although this claim is backed by the science of biology—there has never been and will never be
again another genetic “you”—this explanation does not adequately explain the philosophical theme
68 In recent scholarship, the idea of Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist has gained popularity (see Jeffrey Hanson’s
Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010]). One scholar focused on
the theme of Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of love is my thesis chair, Dr. Michael Strawser.
69 This term I borrowed from John J. Drummond’s description of Scheler in his introduction to Phenomenological
Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook, page 9:
For Scheler, values rather than objects are the primordial phenomenon; values precede their objects, and our
apprehension of the object as valuable depends on a prior apprehension of the value, an apprehension that in
no way depends upon any inductive or causal inferences from sensory experience.
70 Judith Stewart Shank, "Von Hildebrand's Theory of the Affective Value Response and Our Knowledge of God,”
Aletheia: An International Journal of Philosophy 5, (January 1, 1992): 155.
24
of personalism. This example serves to further von Hildebrand’s claim that philosophy “stands in an
incomparably deeper relation to the spiritual life of the person.”72 This is, of course, to presuppose
a spiritual element of man. The existential/personalist phenomenological accounts of Kierkegaard,
Scheler and von Hildebrand move from the claim that humans are more than physical beings; we are
fundamentally spiritual beings. Philosophy “requires a much more essential awakening, a much
sharper eruption from the ordinary attitudes of life than do all the other sciences.”73 This existential
notion, that philosophy deals with an “essential awakening” of the self is central theme of
phenomenology. Many philosophers of his tradition consider the “ordinary attitudes of life” as the
“natural attitude,” one which philosophy leads us away from, toward a more “awakened” sensitivity
to the world around us. The next chapter will serve to develop further the phenomenological
attitude as it pertains to love. I will begin with a discussion of Scheler’s phenomenology of the
emotions, which greatly influenced the von Hildebrand’s work. My examination of the value-realism
of Scheler and von Hildebrand will take root in a phenomenological analysis of the sphere of
affectivity in an attempt to shine light on the philosophical complexities of the human heart.

73 Ibid.
25
Love is always what awakens both knowledge and volition;
indeed, it is the mother of spirit and reason itself.
Max Scheler
Chapter Three: Max Scheler’s Stratification of the Emotional Life
In his work The Nature of Sympathy, Max Scheler provides a phenomenological account of the
emotions, from love to hatred. This section will focus on Scheler’s phenomenology of love, for his
“insistence on the primacy of emotions over cognition, love over control, or recognition over
cognition…provides a welcome antidote to the reifying tendencies that mark the contemporary
human sciences.”74 It is important to note that toward the beginning of his study, Scheler begins
with a declaration: “the ultimate essences of love and hatred, as inherent in acts, can only be
exhibited; they cannot be defined.”75 Although he claims it is impossible to define the essence of
love, Scheler indeed provides a full account of what love is and is not. How he attempts to account
for the existence of love is to be examined at length in this chapter, as I will draw primarily upon
three of his main texts, The Nature of Sympathy, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, and
On the Eternal in Man.
Scheler begins by disambiguating the common assumption that love is derived from a sense
of fellow-feeling, that its reality can be reduced to a feeling of benevolence for another.76 He
explains that while we can love intrinsically valuable things, like knowledge, beauty, and God, we do
not necessarily feel “benevolent” towards them. This opening discussion served as a response to
74 Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Sociology of the Heart: Max Scheler's Epistemology of Love,” Theory, Culture and Society 25,
no. 3 (May 1, 2008): 18.
75 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970), 152.
76 Ibid., 140.
26
what Scheler perceives as “one of the gravest errors… of British moralists,”77 and what he
considers to be a return to Greek and Christian ethics in placing an ontologically independent value
on the reality of love, without attaching to it, or placing before it a lesser term of feeling to dampen
the power of the emotion.
The philosophical anthropology of Scheler is founded upon the understanding of human
emotion. Once we unlock the phenomenon of love, we come closer to an understanding of
Scheler’s concept of individuality, for “[a]cts in which [a] person reveals himself most deeply are
emotional acts.”78 He presents an existential-personalist worldview, in which human persons are
subjects oriented toward participation in the world of value, an absolute value-laden reality that we
have access to by our human faculties, of which emotion is primary. Scheler’s concept of value-
realism is indivisible from his concept of person-in-the-world, for “who the person is is revealed in
and through the life that he is creatively living out…the person unfolds in reciprocal relation to the
unfolding of the concrete existential situation in which he finds himself.”79 The overarching
“theme” of Scheler’s “existential situation” is, according to A. J. Luther, the theme of value.80
Our intentionality in the world unfolds under this ultimate aspect of value. Hence Scheler’s
zealous approach to the emotional in man’s experience in the world; how often in philosophical
circles is this integral aspect of human experience overlooked and disparaged in the pursuit of
77 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 140.

78 A.J. Luther, “Scheler’s Interpretation of Being as Loving,” Philosophy Today 14, (September 1, 1970), 217.
79 Luther, Persons in Love: A Study of Max Scheler’s Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Netherlands: The Hague, 1972),
217.
80 Scheler’s particular brand of value-realism is rooted in a Catholic pre-phenomenological tradition since Augustine:
Following Augustine and Pascal, he argued that the primordial relation to the self, the other, the world and
God emotional, and that emotions constitute and disclose the world as a world of values. Correcting the
cognitivist bias of Husserl’s phenomenology of perception (Wahrnehmung), Scheler went on to develop a
phenomenology of ‘value-ception’ (Wertnehmung)” (Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Sociology of the Heart: Max
Scheler's Epistemology of Love,” 21).
27
reason? In his phenomenology, the emotional sphere of man is the core of his being, for “love
grounds the meaning of all other acts, whether emotional, rational, volitional, etc.”81 Love is the
central act of the affective sphere, the most powerful and defining feeling. Love reveals the human
person at his inmost depths, “thus [love] reveals [the] person concretely.”82 Love is feeling at the
highest level of Scheler’s stratification of emotional life: the spiritual. What is love’s essential relation
to value? For Scheler, love is an intentional act “fundamentally directed towards value.”83 A value-
realist par excellence, for Scheler “the perception of value, in this case, love, is a unique irreducible
emotional act.”84 Love, a response to the value of another human person, is not reducible to any
single factor; aspects like rationality, volition, or sexuality cannot alone or together point to the truth
of love.
Scheler does not attempt to merely justify a reconsideration of the relevance of emotion in
the life of a human person; he elevates the role of the human affective sphere above all other human
faculties. His justification, according to Luther, is that feeling is “the dynamic presence of a person
in the world, is value perception, the unique unveiling of the world in its dynamic actuality.”85 What
constitutes the individual person? I will now examine Scheler’s concept of the human person, and
how the idea of the person grounds the phenomenological relationship between love and value.
81 Luther, Persons in Love, 218.

82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 219.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 218.
28
Radically Individual Personhood
For a richer consideration of what Scheler means by the “dynamic presence” of an individual
person, it is important to note the fundamental philosophical strands of personalism that are
revealed throughout his works. The agents of love are persons—unique, unrepeatable individual.86
To be a person is to be unique; “[t]o be unique is to be irreducible, which is to be in such a way that
confusion of one person with another is radically impossible. Strictly speaking, for Scheler, being is
personal, absolute, unique, irreducible.”87 Every human person, for Scheler, “has an essence all his
own, that is, an essence that could not possibly be repeated in a second person.”88 What is at the
core of this uniquely individual person? The person is irreducible because of individual value, thus
each person is constituted individually by a unique value-essence. This essence “stands at the center
of the individuality of a person, [and] has nothing to do with logical constructions,”89 meaning that
a person is not constituted by external characteristics either unique to the self or in relation to
others. For example, Sophia’s individual personal essence can be no more understood in terms of
her humility or height than by her identity as daughter or dancer. This is the premise of the value-
realist phenomenology of both Scheler and von Hildebrand: to be a person is to be an essentially
irreducible subject of intrinsic value. The complexity of the human person is realized in the
86 Noting the difference between “person” and “individual” that is found in the tradition of personalism, John F.
Crosby makes it clear that:
Scheler does not posit the antithesis of ‘person’ and ‘individual’ that is found in many personalist authors, such
as Maritain, Mounier, and (even if he is not usually reckoned to the personalists) Hans Urs von Balthasar… in
each case ‘individual’ forms some kind of antithesis to ‘person’ and it expresses something lower in human
beings something in contrast to what is highest and best in them, which receives the designation ‘person’
(Personalist Papers, 148).
88 John F. Crosby, Personalist Papers (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 149.
89 Ibid., 150.
29
complexity of personal individuality. The individual is so radically other that it is unutterable
(individuum est ineffabile).90
That the person is irreducible points to the fact that “[t]he mystery of personal being is rich
in content.”91 Thus, the mystery of person qua person is profound. However, because this mystery
of the person is irreducible, Scheler does not mean to allude to a center so ambiguous that it has no
foundation in reality, no real content. The element of the person, the unique “theme” if you will, is
value. To understand the personal value that Scheler speaks of, we must understand that the basic
constitution of the person is that of subject, and not object, for “[p]erson as person is never an
object.”92 He describes objects as things “finished, complete, static…susceptible to empirical
observation of some kind.”93 Hence, the role that phenomenology plays in adequately accounting
for acts of the person that are irreducible and mysterious as persons themselves.94 The subject,
persons, are not “susceptible to empirical observation,” but subject to a phenomenological
investigation in which one “must cultivate an openness in which what is actual in the real may reveal
itself to him as it is in itself.”95 This phenomenological openness is related to Scheler and von
Hildebrand’s “fundamental moral attitudes” that at once informs the philosophical approach to the
object—in humility, reverence, and love—as it informs the personal approach to the subject of our
love.
90 John F. Crosby, Personalist Papers, 150-151.

92 Ibid., 50.
93 Ibid., 51.
94 For another phenomenological perspective on the person and love as essentially mysterious, see the work of Gabriel
Marcel. He discusses the difference in philosophy between “problems” that do not essentially involve the knower, and
“mysteries” which involve the knower in a personal, existential way: Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being I: Reflection and
Mystery, Trans. G.S. Fraser. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2001).
30
Returning to the ineffable character of love, this idea attests to speak of our love in terms of
qualities or characteristics attributed to the other. In attributing our love to a set of characteristics or
even a central one, we are tending toward a reduction of the other in the sense of an object. Yes,
one can adequately capture the “essence” of a tree by describing its characteristics—the greenness of
the leaves, the woodenness of the trunk—but we cannot account for the essence of person qua
person by listing qualities available to our sense-perception. In our attempt to speak of the other in
this way, we reduce the person to an object constituted by an array of qualities that are seen, felt, and
heard. This is difference is pronounced in our love of the other, for
the love which has moral value is not that which pays loving regard to a person for having
such and such qualities, pursuing such and such activities, or for possessing talents, beauty,
or virtue; it is that love which incorporates these qualities, activities and gifts into its object,
because they belong to that individual person.96
It can be said that we are drawn to certain qualities of others; we are attracted by intelligence,
kindness, and beauty. However, we do not love a person for their qualities or possessions. That we
are motivated to love another by desiring or recognizing wealth in the property or personality of the
other is a frequent category mistake. These features may draw us in to an initial interaction or
relationship with another. Desire or attraction is motivated by qualities, which perhaps involves the
sensible or vital sphere of affectivity. One may derive simple pleasure in the other by virtue of their
possessions or personality. In this instance, individuals would pursue the maximally valuable other,
consistently seeking a person of desirable traits until a need or desire is satisfied. If love was
determined by, say, intelligence, we would naturally seek out the maximally intelligent person to love.
Yet, this would only increase our immediate pleasure by way of intellectual enjoyment; this is not an
example of love. One would be forever seeking to intimately engage the mind of others, thus
96 Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 166-167.
31
reducing the other to a mere instantiation of a particular trait. The relationship would be cheapened,
for who would desire to be loved in virtue of a need or interest that is satisfied by another?
Love, however, is motivated by the person qua person, in a personal response to value. The
lover desires the response to be eminently personal- I love your intelligence, your beauty, your
kindness. As Scheler said, “it is that love which incorporates these qualities, activities and gifts into
its object, because they belong to that individual person.97 Without a personalization of the other, a
movement beyond the sensible recognition of the other, our relationship cannot move to a spiritual
act of love. Our response to value is not a general inclination toward merely agreeable qualities, but a
personal affective response to the other by virtue of it belonging to our beloved.
The way in which we must understand person and love is from a supremely relational
standpoint. How we understand persons is through relations, and how we understand love is
through personal relations:
The difficulty of approaching being from this perspective lies in the paradox that, although
personal being is absolute being, absolute being as personal is relational. Personal being is
not personal, absolute, or unique, ‘outside’ the relational unity which constitutes the concrete
existential situation. The deepest describable structure of this relational unity is love, more
concretely persons in love.98
It is the personal act of love that gives us the most adequate insight of others. This “insight” of
which Scheler speaks is of “the essence of another’s individuality, which cannot be described or
expressed in conceptual terms (individuum ineffabile), [and] is only revealed in its full purity by love or
by virtue of the insight it provides.”99 What does Scheler mean by love? The subsequent sections
will attempt to uncover how love as a relational act reveals the person. Let us now begin to analyze
97 Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 166-167.

98 Ibid.
99 Ibid., 160.
32
this structure of feeling more clearly, to uncover just where love fits into the spectrum of emotional
life.
The Structure of Feeling
The order of the emotions in the sphere of affectivity moves from levels of ontologically
lower feelings to higher emotions—the highest of which Scheler considers love. This order ascends
from the more primitive “vital” emotions of pleasure and displeasure, toward the highest “spiritual”
emotions of beauty, truth and a sense of the sacred, or what Scheler describes as “feelings of the
personality."100 Moving beyond the strict method of Husserlian phenomenology, Scheler takes into
account the particularly spiritual nature of man, and emphasizes the intuitive knowledge of man—an
epistemology rooted in love— that is key to approaching his form of phenomenology.101 Scheler
defends these claims of an “investigation” into the realm of love, as “love relates, in the first
instance, to what has value, and to man only to the extent that he is endowed with value and capable
of advancement in this respect. These acts and their laws can be investigated by means of a
phenomenological reduction.102 According to Scheler there are four levels of values, which he calls a
“stratification of the emotional life,” which move from simple sensible feelings to the vital, and from
psychological to spiritual emotions. The first two levels are labeled “feelings” in particular because
of the passivity of their nature; they “do not have a lasting duration, are not divisible in space…are
devoid of deeper levels of satisfaction, and are localized in a particular part of the body.”103
Through these faculties we arrive at a “sensuous” understanding of reality, which is essentially the
100 Eugene Kelly, Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, 32.
101 For a further elaboration, see his essay The Nature of Philosophy, in which Scheler moves from the modern western
philosophical consideration of love as mere passion, and integrates it into his philosophical attitude, within the text On
the Eternal in Man, 92.
102 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 155.
103 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 90.
33
“natural attitude” through which we approach life as mere spectators or inductive scientists.104
Furthermore, this distinction between “feeling” and “emotion” is important because, for Scheler,
“sensible and vital feelings are properly called feelings rather than emotions because they are
experienced through the body, while psychological and spiritual emotions are called emotions
because they transcend the felt experiences of the body.”105 Hence, there are two essential “modes
of intentionality,” falling under the category of the sensual and the spiritual. Love is an emotion,
therefore it is best understood as a spiritually intentional act. This is an important point to consider
when comparing the work of phenomenology with scientific research: biology and neurology can
only reveal “love” or feeling at the sensual or vital level, for they are inductive sciences that measure
“facts” on the common-sense or scientific level of the Schelerian spectrum. Therefore, to deny or
ignore a philosophical intuition is to essentially miss an important aspect of the experience of love
that cannot be mechanically or statistically quantified: the spiritual.
The Realm of Value
It is immediately evident from this preliminary glimpse into the mind of Scheler that he is
presupposing a realist worldview, that there is an independent reality of values that lay just outside
the subjective human experience of them, and that our love is a relation to these values. An element
of his personalism is also revealed here, for man is “endowed with value,” and is ethically
accountable for his love of value, for his apprehension of values in the world makes man “capable
104 These basic levels of feeling correspond with Scheler’s epistemology. He distinguishes between three kinds of
“facts” in our world-experience: common-sense experiential, positive scientific, and phenomenological. The first two
correspond to a “natural fact” that we arrive at through our basic faculty of sense-perception. See: “Max Scheler’s
Epistemology and Ethics,” by Alfred Schutz. Schutz also draws a comparison between Scheler’s phenomenology of
feeling and his ordering of values, which ascend from ontologically lower (vital) to higher (spiritual) in the same way as
his order of emotions.
105 Rainier R. A. Ibana, “The Stratification of Emotional Life and the Problem of Other Minds According to Max
Scheler,” International Philosophical Quarterly (December 1, 1991): 462.
34
of advancement.” 106 As sensible feelings form the primitive origin of man’s spectrum of emotions,
the communion shared in love is something “which a sensible feeling cannot bring about and to
which it is blind.”107 Hence, a full understanding of the order of emotions is the key to
understanding Scheler’s concept of the value-drive movement of the emotional life, and his ontology
of love.
Let us look for a moment at what Scheler considers the “five value realms for the human
person.”108 In his philosophy, the five realms of value consist of the spiritual or divine value, the
value of the person (moral, intellectual, artistic), the vital value (the appetites, including the sexual
drive), the useful or practical value, and lastly, the sensual value: the only one differentiated from all
other values.109All value culminates in love, the highest response to value for both Scheler and von
Hildebrand. In addition, “love, and the intuitions of the heart, form the core of the person,”110
which leads naturally to Scheler’s conclusion that it is the heart that forms the center of
phenomenological intuition. Love, then, is a form of knowledge, following the line of thought since
Pascal of the heart’s “own reasons of which the mind knows nothing, and can know nothing.”111
This, however, is a false dichotomy of terms, as I have shown in the previous sections. The mind
and heart, in fact, are deeply intertwined faculties. A character flaw of Scheler lays in his overzealous
defense of the heart. He reverses the hierarchy privileging reason to emotion, and instead replaces
this binary with a privilege of emotion to reason.
106 Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 155.

107 Ibana, “The Stratification of Emotional Life,” 462.
108 Rebecca S. Bifefeld, “Max Scheler: An Essay Commemorating the One-Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth,”
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5 (October 1, 1974): 212.
109 Biefeld, “Max Scheler,” 212.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid., 213.
35
Beyond the establishment of love as a willing of the subject, in act or movement, Scheler
proposes that the phenomenon of love is, rather than simply an ephemeral or passive emotion, a
cause of emotional states, and not simply the effect of them.112 Regarding the emotional eternality
that love holds, Scheler writes:
In love…between human beings these acts remain wholly independent of changes in the
state of feeling, as is shown by the fact that throughout such changes they remain fixed upon
their objects, as with a steady, unwavering light. Our love for someone does not alter, for all
the pain and grief the loved one may cause us….113
The concept of love is twofold: it is both a spiritual emotion that arouses knowledge and a spiritual
act of the will. Love’s reality is similar, in a way, to the nature of light itself. Light acts as both a
particle and a wave, depending upon the context. Love is indeed a spiritual emotion, the
ontologically highest response of feeling found in the sphere of human affectivity. But love is also
sanctioned by the will, and is manifest in an act that can be discerned, as I have mentioned before,
by its fruits. While it is clear that Scheler means to emphasize the willing element in love, the specific
relation between love and the “activities of the soul”—the cognitive, the volitional, and the
affective—is a topic I will explore in-depth below. While he considers love to be “entirely concerned
with the positive values of personality, and with welfare only so far as it promotes such personal
value,”114 Scheler does not discount the initial instance of love that is derived beyond a mere sense
of extended goodwill and a positive feeling paired with an idea of the Other, what I termed earlier as
a feeling of “benevolence.”115 Is love merely a positive emotion tied to the thought of another
112 Scheler, On the Eternal on Man, 148.

113 Ibid., 147.
114 Ibid., 140.
115 Here I draw a parallel in opposition to a commonly considered presupposition of love as simply a willing of the
good extended from the self to another, and the modern western definition proposed by Spinoza in his Ethics. On the
first page of his chapter on love’s phenomenon, Scheler writes of “the complete futility of Spinoza’s definition: ‘amor est
laetitia concomitante idea causae externae’” (140).
36
human? Along the lines of Spinoza’s reasoning, love becomes merely “a positive feeling
accompanied by the idea of an external cause.”116 It appears here that Spinoza is relegating love to
the sphere of sensible feeling, in Scheler’s terms, to that which is merely pleasure or displeasure.
Here he confuses love proper with attraction. Although it is beyond the scope of this work to fully
investigate Spinoza’s philosophy of love, I simply wish to draw a connection between Spinoza and
one of his most ardent critics, Scheler. If this is the case—that love is a positive feeling evoked by an
external cause—it would follow that any proper ethic tied to the phenomenon of love becomes
merely an application of moral emotivism. Speaking of “love” in this sensible or vital (passive) sense
is to confuse the spiritual (active) nature of genuine love. For Scheler posits a definition of love that
has “an intrinsic reference to value, and for that reason alone it cannot be a fellow-feeling.”117
Henceforth, love in relation to the human affective sphere will be strictly mentioned with reference
to emotion, rather than feeling. This assertion of love’s relevance beyond mere feeling is explored
further, as Scheler directly claims that “love is not a ‘feeling’ (i.e. a function), but an act and a
movement.”118 Accordingly, he elucidates that it is appropriate to consider love an emotion; the claim
that love is a ‘feeling’ or ‘affect’ is disregarded necessarily by Scheler’s elaboration:
All feeling is passive or receptive, whether it be feeling for values or for circumstances (e.g.
suffering, enduring, tolerating, etc.), and we describe it therefore as a ‘function’. But love is
an emotional gesture and a spiritual act. It does not matter here whether,
phenomenologically speaking, the gesture is mainly called forth by its object or is felt to
proceed from the self.119
The phenomenological nature of love is not primarily concerned with the inspiration of love. Love
could arise as a value-response to the object, or as a spontaneous act proceeding from oneself,
116 Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1992), 27.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid., 142.
37
unprompted by an attribute of the object of love. This emphasis on the gesture, as opposed to mere
function establishes love as a conscientious act in the intellect and heart of the willing individual. A
gesture is clearly an example of an active emotion, that is, an emotion that is not a mere happening-
to, but a bringing-forth. A gesture involves the element of human will; it is a decision and act of the
spirit. Scheler places an importance on the idea of love as an ‘act,’ in that “the person… can never
be treated as an object.”120 This notion of love between two subjects, as opposed to one or more
objects of love is an essential point in understanding Scheler’s ethical personalism. The mutual
recognition as subjects is a necessary relation of love between two persons. This intersubjectivity—
the recognition between two individuals as dignified human subjects—implies a sense of mutual
respect, and a presupposition of valuing others.
With regard to his idea of a concept of love that is ontologically higher than “passive or
receptive” feeling, Scheler calls into question the significance of the contrary notions of “active” and
“passive” emotions. The former is a higher order of feeling, the latter, lower. Ontologically superior
is the “active” emotion—love and hate—while the ontologically inferior is the “passive” feeling—
pleasure and displeasure. A fundamental aspect of love involves the will. Although willing is not a
sufficient cause or constituent of love on its own, the will is undoubtedly a necessary aspect of love.
Our experience of love for the other is not purely a passive happening-to, but a creative activity that
draws upon our whole self.
How, then, is love related to the self? Can love be directed toward oneself? This next chapter
will begin with a focus on Scheler’s philosophy of self-love, serving as a foundation for a critique of
common conceptions of the love of self.
38
Himself the worshipped and the worshipper,
he sought himself and was pursued, wood, fired by his own heat of love.
Ovid
Chapter Four: A Radical Reappraisal of Self-Love
In the tale of Narcissus, a word of prophecy was uttered, that “he [would] love himself
alone, and yet fail in that great love.”121 Ovid’s mythological tale reveals the dark side of self-love, a
love that is all-consuming to the point of death. The history of philosophical discourse on the topic
is vast. However, the question remains insufficiently answered: is self-love a real phenomenon? Or
when we speak of it, are we propagating a philosophical stance that is unfounded, one resting on a
mere truism? Does current philosophical discourse adequately assesses the possibility or
impossibility of a love of self? It appears that there are three schools of thought on self-love: that
self-love exists and is subject to normative restraint, that self-love exists as merely analogous to love
of the other, and that self-love does not exist, and is replaced by self-hatred. I shall analyze these
views, as well as Marion’s claim that it is ontologically impossible to love one’s self. I will begin with
a discussion of self-love in Scheler, followed by an analysis of the views two critics of self-love—
Paul Tillich and Jean-Luc Marion—and bring this views into dialogue with the more prevalent views
of self-love in Christian theology, to examine which theory, if any, properly account for a love of
self. This inquiry on self-love will serve to call into question the common assumption that love
ought to begin with the self. I shall determine whether the advent of a proper or ethical self-love
serves as a valuable beginning point for our love of others.
121 Ovid, The Metamorphoses (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 75.
39
Self-love in Scheler
In the essay “Ordo Amoris,” Scheler outlines a brief philosophy of self-love that poses a
normative distinction between “genuine” spiritual self-love and selfish love of self. He considers the
former a “certain type of love which must precede the knowledge of individual destiny.”122 Scheler
explains the former instance as:
Genuine self-love [Selbstliebe], or love for one’s own salvation, which is fundamentally different
from all so-called love of self [Eigenliebe]. In love of self we purposely see everything, even
ourselves, through our “own” eyes only. We refer every datum, even ourselves, to our
sensuous states of feeling, without having a distinct and clear awareness that this is what we
are doing.123
According to Scheler, “love of self” is a morally improper love of oneself, a view of subjectivity in a
selfish sense. In this case, one is “trapped” within one’s own perspective. The sight of this self-lover
[Eigenliebe] is limited to his own selfish vision. Unawares, he interprets everything from this self-
absorbed worldview. In this way of being, “[c]overed with a web of many-colored illusions and
phantoms, woven out of stupor, vanity, ambition, and pride, we see everything, including ourselves,
in the light of love of self. It is quite different in genuine self-love.”124 This Eigenliebe would
transfigure our perception in a radically negative way. We would be hindered by our self-love,
affected not only in our intersubjective relations, but in our approach to the world. Even our
philosophical approach, Scheler would say, would be affected by this fundamentally immoral
attitude. Given what we understand to be the essential moral attitudes of man—humility, self-
mastery, and love—it would seem inevitable that not only would our personality be hindered by
such a negative self-love, but our task as a philosopher.
122 Scheler, Ordo Amoris, 106-107.

123 Ibid.
124 Ibid., 107.
40
As regards “genuine” self-love [Selbstliebe], what Scheler deems “love for one’s own salvation,
our “sight” is transformed in a positive way. This self-love profoundly transfigures our interpersonal
and philosophical intentionality:
Here our spiritual eye and the ray of its intention is focused on a transworldly spiritual
center. We see ourselves as if through the eyes of God himself, and this means, first, that we
see ourselves objectively [as if with genuine self-knowledge] and second, that we see
ourselves as a part of the whole universe.125
Rather than viewing self-love as a simple ethic to live by, Scheler views the proper love of self as a
philosophically informative orientation. We achieve a kind of self-knowledge through this spiritual
love of self. In essence, this is the self-love that many theologians describe as loving oneself in the
way that God loves each one of us. This “agapic” self-love can be seen in imagining the love of God
when He considers the goodness of his creation, in a sort of divine value-response, so to speak. I
will address this idea of “agapic” self-love and the implications further later in this chapter.
The theme of sight, found throughout value-realist phenomenology of Scheler and von
Hildebrand, plays an important role in Scheler’s conception of genuine self-love. Only in God can
we cultivate for ourselves a proper attitude of self-love:
Indeed, we love ourselves, but always only as what we would be before an all-seeing eye and
only so far as we could stand before this eye…the self-shaping, creative hammers of self-
correction, of self-education, of remorse and mortification strike away all the parts of us
which project beyond that form which is conveyed to us by this image of ourselves before
and in God.126
It is sight that rests in God that saves us from the vanity and pride of Eigenliebe. Put another way,
this selfish love of self is a form of egocentrism. Luther explains the relation between egocentrism
and inauthentic self-love in his study on Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy. He writes:
125 Scheler, Ordo Amoris, 107.

126 Ibid.
41
Where feeling, that is, who the person is, is directed towards himself in terms of what is
pleasant or sensuously satisfying solely, this value perception becomes the root of ego-
centrism which is devoid of authentic self-love. Authentic self-love is disclosed where one’s
spiritual or personal presence and radiance is focused in a transcendent personal center.127
It seems that Eigenliebe as egocentrism is problematic because it limits our knowledge of the self and
others. We cannot see purely or truly; we are blinded by our selfishness if locked in this world of
self-love. If, for Scheler, “self-knowledge is a legitimate form of loving one’s self,”128 this
egocentric self-love is a catalyst for ignorance. Thus, Eigenliebe is rendered an improper love of self
because it inhibits our pursuit of knowledge—the goal of self-mastery— which Scheler does
consider a moral attitude required for the philosophical task. What shall we make of this
contribution to the scholarship on the philosophy of self-love? Scheler’s work on the love of self is
highly ambiguous, as he fails to leave the reader with a clear understanding of what exactly the love
of self is.129 Perhaps placing his work in dialogue with past and present voices on self-love will help
clarify what Scheler might have meant in his normative distinction between proper and improper
self-love. I will now open a dialogue among contemporary philosophers on the (im)possibility of a
love of self, proposing a radical critique that will hopefully clarify philosophical discussion on the
matter, and bring scholars to a clearer understanding of what we mean when we talk about the love
of self.

128 Scheler, Ordo Amoris, 107.
129 This tendency of Scheler to discuss ideas at once with vigor and ambiguity, without a detailed or extended
elaboration on his philosophy is prevalent throughout his work, especially the topic of self-love. On putting his thoughts
into perspective, Vandenberghe writes:
Although Scheler’s scattered reflections may not add up to a system, they nevertheless find their unity in a
single meta-anthropological question: Was ist der Mensch? What is Man? A thinking reed? A bundle of drives?
A toolmaker? A symbolic animal? No, according to Scheler, the human is, first and foremost, a spiritual being,
a zoon noetikon or animal spiritual (Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Sociology of the Heart: Max Scheler's
Epistemology of Love,” 20).
42
In his work Love, Power, and Justice, theologian Paul Tillich makes the bold claim that “Self-
love is a metaphor, and it should not be treated as a concept.”130 If he is accurate, his view is in the
minority of scholarly opinions on the idea. Whether or not Tillich is correct, it is my thesis that we
should carefully consider our view on self-love. The intent of this inquiry is a reevaluation of
popular opinion, the common idea that many hold as almost an a priori truth: before I love others, I
ought to love myself.
While von Hildebrand defends the claim that self-love cannot serve as the origin, the starting
point of our love of others, Tillich takes the argument even further, and argues against the
ontological reality of self-love. Whereas Marion rejects self-love as a sufficient bridge between
separate selves, the I and the me, Tillich argues against a separation within the self at all, rendering
any element of unity unspeakable in terms of self-love:
If love is the drive towards the reunion of the separated, it is hard to speak meaningfully of
self-love. For within the unity of self-consciousness there is no real separation, comparable
to the separation of a self-centered being from all other beings. Certainly the completely self-
centered being, man, is self-centered only because his self is split into a self which is subject
and a self which is object. But there is neither separation in this structure, not the desire for
reunion.131
Tillich differentiates between the “original solitude” of man, the ontological separation between
humans, and the “assumed” separation within the self that is amended by love. Neither Marion nor
Tillich identifies the self as a bridge between two to be crossed in love; there is no separation within
our self that is comparable to our separation from others. Tillich points out a fundamental problem
with belief in a love of self:
The lack of conceptual clarity in the concept of self-love is manifest in the fact that the term
is used in three different and partly contradictory senses. It is used in the sense of natural
self-affirmation (e.g. loving one’s neighbor as oneself). It is used in the sense of selfishness
130 Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 34.

131 Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 33-34
43
(e.g. the desire to draw all things into oneself). It is used in the sense of self-acceptance (e.g.
the affirmation of oneself in the way in which one is affirmed by God).132
Many Christian theologians often make a normative distinction between the first sense (natural self-
affirmation) as a “proper” form of self-love, and the second sense (selfish self-love) as an
“improper” form of self-love. This is seen in the distinctions posed by Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and
Scheler. Tillich proposes that, rather than attempting to continuously justify self-love in an
ambiguous and often mystical way, philosophers and theologians should begin to speak of self-love
by eradicating the term “self-love” entirely. He suggests that “it would be an important step towards
semantic clarification if the term ‘self-love’ were completely removed and replaced by self-affirmation,
selfishness, and self-acceptance according to the context.”133 Proposing a radical rejection of self-love,
Tillich leaves us with pragmatic advice on how to handle our talk of self-love. The nature of love is
within an ontologically separate category from self-affirmation (as most Christian theologians
conceptualize self-love), selfishness (as Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Rousseau call “negative,”
“improper,” or “selfish” self-love), and self-acceptance (as many psychologists or counselors advise
us all to achieve, perhaps via Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”). Let us consider a phenomenology of
self-love, bringing the concept into dialogue with recent phenomenological thinkers in order to
uncover whether love directed toward the self is compatible with the nature of love.
A Radical Love of Self?
To further my rejection of a phenomenology of self-love, I draw upon a contemporary
source of phenomenology in Jules Toner’s Love and Friendship. How can we experience “love” of
ourselves in any real sense if we are both lover and beloved? How can we transcend ourselves in the
132 Ibid., 34.

133 Ibid., 34, emphasis my own.
44
way necessary for self-love to be possible? Imagine the impossibility of actualizing the essential
aspects of love, as directed toward oneself. Is it a tenable position that self-love is, in any way,
comparable to love itself? I will revisit the key phenomenological aspects of love in order to defend
my thesis that self-love is indeed a phenomenological impossibility.
My next point of inquiry is whether or not the element of unity can in the phenomenon of
self-love. Can one phenomenologically unite with oneself? Can one make a gift of the self to the self?
These two elements are integral to the accounts of love provided by the aforementioned thinkers.
According to Toner, “the giving which is an act of radical love is a giving into, so that by it the gift is
in the loved… for it is myself who am in the loved one by my love, not merely my possessions, or
even my thoughts, my wit, my joy… It is I myself.134 This brings the discussion back to the
phenomenology of the gift in love. Here we find striking commonalities between both von
Hildebrand and Marion’s account of love. Again, we see how love is not directed toward our
possessions. Love recognizes the radically other self that is the beloved. Toner’s work furthers the
personalist theme of loving the person qua person, rather than the accidents of the person. In
addition, if love is a gift, it follows that it is a gift of the self, flowing from the loving core of the self:
the heart. How is this giving aspect of love related to self-love? We are of course, self-reflective
beings. But can this self-reflection begin to constitute a real sense of love for our own self? How can
we move from a recognition of our self to a love of this self? We reach an impasse when we attempt
to connect the unity of self-love with the unity of love between man and woman: “The lover wants
to be in the beloved, to have the beloved in him, to interpenetrate with the other without loss of
134 Toner, Love and Friendship, 127.
45
either self.”135 Can we actualize this intimate interpenetration with our self? Even if we can, would
it be comparable to the interpenetration of lovers?
Furthermore, when we speak of Toner’s concept of “radical love,” we invoke the language
of ontology, which presents a phenomenological account that is necessarily different than any
phenomenon of love. For Toner, “radical love is not a tendency affection but a being affection by
which I am in union with, am present with the loved one.”136 Can we direct this “being affection”
toward our own being? Can we form a unity with the self in the way that Toner describes as a
presence with the loved one? I will bring into dialogue several voices of critique into the discussion
to ground the theological and philosophical claims made by scholars both past and present in an
attempt to better understand what is meant by a love of self.
Voices of Critique
What is the position of “the self” in our love of others? For Toner, “the self…is only
actualized in loving others with a genuinely radical love, an affirmation of the other for the other’s
own sake.”137 While I disagree that the self is a necessarily other-oriented being—I hold that the
self is both subject and object, the subject as immaterial I and the object as narrative me, regardless
of its affirmation of others—the emphasis on the actualized self in love is a key point of discussion.
Toner is correct in holding that “genuine” love is an affirmation of the beloved’s radical otherness
for the other’s own sake. To bring into dialogue the language of many Christian theologians, it is
common to establish a dichotomy between eros as loving the other for my own sake, and agape as

136 Ibid., 120.
137 Ibid., 144.
46
loving the other for his or her own sake.138 I will avoid speaking in these strict terms, as I feel it is a
convoluted and problematic dichotomy. Of course, we can use eros in a purely descriptive sense, as
an analogy; agape as a comparative term for our apprehension of the other’s intrinsic value. Vacek
explains this dichotomy as it relates to self-love with the following: “The first [agapic] is a direct love
of self, the second [eros] is indirect. In the immediate object is something other than ourselves,
which we love as a way of loving ourselves. With the first, we love ourselves for our own sake:
agapic self-love. With the second, we love another for our own sake: eros.”139 This is an accessible
way of considering the normative implications of self-love, prescribed by theologians of Nygren’s
tradition of thought. Although this is a beneficial attitude to hold—we ought to love ourselves for
our own sake, and we ought to love others for their own sake—I do not think that this normative
distinction accounts for a phenomenology of self-love. Vacek is merely espousing what Tillich
words as an attitude of self-acceptance or self-affirmation. Of course: we ought to value ourselves in
the way we would imagine God would. We ought to affirm the value of others in the way we would
wish others to affirm our own value. This is an invocation of the classic “golden rule,” the Kantian
imperative that affirms the other’s intrinsic value, and bars the treating of the other as a means to an
end.
I am in line with von Hildebrand’s thinking, as he moves away from the radical sort of
distinction between the terms that many theologians (Anders Nygren, Christopher West) tend to
pose, and also “wants to avoid a dichotomy of eros and agape.”140 In the conclusion of his chapter
on Caritas, he reminds us that “an essential core of love qua love remains common to eros and
138 Edward Collins Vacek, Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 1994), 240.
139 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 240.
140 John F. Crosby, personal communication.
47
agape, in spite of their difference."141 The Christian critique of eros, most notably by Anders
Nygren, is derived from the self-seeking nature of eros. Thus, all pseudo-loves would seem to
originate in eros, and all (selfish, improper, prideful) self-love would also be eros . If eros indeed loves
another for its own sake, it is not love at all. It would seem extraneous, then, to even need to attach
any form of “agape” to love, for eros would cast out the meaning of genuine love entirely, and we
would be left with love itself, without need for “agape” as a descriptor. It would seem obvious for
self-love to be positive at all, it would need to rid itself of eros and only bother with expressions of
agape. If self-love is a tenable position to hold at all, it would most naturally need to mirror the
selfless love from God. In this way, “agape corrects for selfishness, which is ever ready to mask itself
as healthy self-love…. When the problem is overweening pride, agape enables us to appreciate the
value of others in and for themselves.”142 This is, however, a problematic dichotomy to draw, as
evidenced by the decades of books and articles dedicated to the Christian self-love debate. To begin
his analysis of self-love in Christian ethics, Vacek suggests that “[s]ome scholars, as we have seen,
reject self-love because, they say, love needs some separation to overcome. Indeed, it is not easy to
see how we can act in a self-transcending way toward our own self. But we do perform this self-
referential act.”143 Vacek draws upon the ideas of Karl Rahner in a defense of self-love’s possibility.
Rahner explains that “self-affirmation is not simply surrender to the instinctive drives of the
‘struggle for existence,’ but is based on an objective recognition of the value and dignity of the
subject within reality as a whole and in relation to God. This God-given excellence is not loved

142 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 241.
143 Ibid.
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simply because it is one’s own, but because it is and is of value.”144 This view of self-love as an
affirmation of our own intrinsic value parallels von Hildebrand’s idea of love as a value-response.
Again, as discussed by Tillich, “self-affirmation” is not comparable to love itself. The argument that
there is an ontological chasm between self-love and other-love still stands. While an aspect of the
nature of love is present in what many theologians defend as self-love, the complexity of love is not
comparable when we speak of the love of self. A higher-ordered self-love might be considered a
response to the “God-given excellence” and an “objective recognition of value and dignity,” yet the
element of unity present in the love between man and woman is radically different from unity we
have with ourselves. We cannot love ourselves, but we can affirm ourselves in a way analogous and
even identical to the way in which lovers affirm the value of the beloved.
We have the propensity to recognize the metaphysical beauty of ourselves, to cultivate the
spiritual dimension of our being; we cannot, however, love ourselves in the way that lovers do, the
way in which spouses love when affirmed in the marital vow. Self-love is, as Tillich explains, merely
analogous. In his discussion on self-love, von Hildebrand speaks of it primarily in the sense of the
impossibility for self-love to precede other-love. It is impossible, according to von Hildebrand, “to
derive the love of other persons from the love of oneself.”145 The idea that other-love can originate
in one’s love of self would be to reduce love to “the natural solidarity of a person with himself.”146
The love that one has for another is of an ontologically different category than the self-love that
philosophers tend to speak of. In his illustration of self-love and its normative categories, Scheler
merely echoes the ambiguous claims of philosophers before him, without adequately justifying self-
144 Karl Rahner, in Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 241.

145 Von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love¸365.
146 Ibid., 202.
49
love as a phenomenon subject to the same philosophical inquiry that both he and von Hildebrand
subject other-love to. The next section will examine a criticism of self-love from a contemporary
phenomenologist, Jean-Luc Marion. Beginning with a unique approach to his critique of self-love,
Marion outlines “three absurdities” of self-love, arriving at its phenomenological impossibility.
The Impossibility of Self-love in Marion
In his book The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion begins an inquiry into the nature of
erotic love with a fundamental question “Does anyone out there love me?” From a query derived
from the point of vanity, the one caught amid love’s contemplation moves from this egocentric
question to an external impasse. Marion asserts that while a “love of self can indeed be
proclaimed...[i]t cannot be performed.”147 The contemporary French thinker replaces the Cartesian
rationalism of the ego cogito with a new ontological outlook. He begins with a new ontology of the
ego, the ego amans, concluding that I love, therefore I am.
In effect, no one is closer to one’s self than the reduced ‘me,’ absolutely immanent to the
self, with an immanence rendered more tangible by the awful solitude that is provoked by
the erotic reduction. In this solitude, I discover my self reduced to my purest self, melted
into a new metal, a kernel of egoity so dense that no nuclear reaction could ever fissure it, or
separate me from myself.148
It is immediately clear that Marion takes a different approach to the self in its “awful” solitude. Here,
Marion is presenting the I of the ego, the self that is inaccessible to others. It is not the “narrative”
self, the self extended in time, with an external identity and social presence. Marion reduces the self
to its simple ontological category of being, before he asks us: could this “strictly reduced

148 Ibid., 42.
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me…suffice to love me and thereby assure me of myself?”149 Marion presents us with “at least
three reasons for this absurdity”150 that is a self-assurance derived from the love of self:
First, because if I had to love myself like an other than myself, it would be necessary for me
to precede myself. Those who have loved me originally (in principle, my parents) could only
do so because they preceded me and they loved me before I was even in a state to receive
their love; loved without yet being.151
It is ontologically impossible to love oneself because we simply cannot precede our self, we cannot
separate from our self in the way in which it is required of loving. Marion is not satisfied with man’s
ability to derive self-love from our own self. We must be loved first by another, a wholly other
person outside of our own being. He continues to write, “thus, to love myself, I would have to go
beyond myself, in order to respect the measure of love, which has none. I would demand of myself
an excess of myself over myself. But who can add one cubit to his stature?”152 This “original” love, it
would seem, can come from either our parents or God. For God indeed “loved without yet being,”
because he loves all beings before creation. Not only can we not love our self, but it would seem
equally “absurd” to place any value of self-assurance on any other being except for God. For in
God, the Being who came before all being, our self-assurance, self-love, and even our very sense of
self would be most safe.
In an attempt to address the common explanation of self-love as possible out of the human
capacity to self-reflect, Marion writes:
The concern is not that I (as transcendental I) think of myself (as empirical me); the concern
is loving myself. Loving requires an exteriority that is not provisional but effective, an
exteriority that remains for long enough that one may cross it seriously. Loving requires
distance and the crossing of distance. Loving requires more than a feigned distance, or one

150 Ibid., 45.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid., 46.
51
that is not truly dug out or truly crossed. In the drama of love, actions must be accomplished
effectively over distance—distributing, going, coming, returning.153
Loving oneself is not reducible to self-reflection. I cannot as I think of Me and be considered “loving
myself.” Marion defends the radical alterity of the lover that “requires an exteriority,” and a
“crossing of distance.” Love is, then, an essentially interpersonal act. For, if we can “love” ourself,
does that imply that we are two selves, that we can “divide” our self into both lover and beloved,
object and subject? Marion further explains the importance of alterity in the loving act:
Without the distance of this elsewhere, no one would ever love me. Thus I cannot love
myself—except by leading myself astray into the insane illusion of imagining myself as my
own elsewhere. Thus, unable to precede myself, to exceed myself, or to cross the distance, I
can neither think nor perform the formula ‘I love myself.’154
This “distance” is another way of looking at love’s interpersonal nature as inherently mutual
participation, as reciprocity. How can I reciprocate my own love for myself? Self-love, then, seems
an ontological impossibility. Going further with his argument against the possibility of self-love,
Marion tells us that we actually hate ourselves:
Thus all love that begins as a love of every man for himself (impossible) ends up, by self-
hatred (actual), in the hatred of the other (necessary). If I claim to love myself or to make
myself loved, in the end I hate, and make myself hated. Thus the assurance from out there
remains inaccessible. Vanity in the end bears it away.155
We become frustrated by our need of assurance “from elsewhere;” our lack of assurance in love
leads to self-hatred. Marion asserts that all claims of self-love are false, and can only become a vain
self-hatred. What is primary, for Marion, is the advance one makes towards the other. We cannot
assure ourselves of our own love but we can know when we have initiated the love of another. At
153 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 46-47.

154 Ibid., 47.
155 Ibid., 64.
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best, we can be open to the gift of love in return, but our advance is not conditioned on a response,
otherwise it would not be a free act of love.
Marion concludes—in alignment with both Scheler and von Hildebrand— that rather than
viewing human beings as essentially thinking beings, they are more– humanity is composed of a
totality of loving beings. He argues in opposition to the human ability to be self-loving. One begins in
self-hatred, incapable of achieving a sense of self-love independent of the affirmation of the other.
For Marion, in the phenomenon of the erotic “the other loves me more than I hate myself.” Loving oneself
in his philosophy is a movement beyond initial self-hatred. One is not ontologically able to love
oneself in a way comparable to the love we receive from another. Marion holds that our only hope
for a love of self is derived from the love of another:
In the end, I love even myself, because the other lover, through her own advance, has made
me a lover, and thus lovable in her eyes and, because I believed her, loveable in my own
eyes… I wind up by loving even myself because I have believed, seen, and experienced that I
too, even I, could play the lover… I believe what she tells me more than what I have ever
told myself.156
Even at this point, Marion merely proposes the possibility of “loving even oneself” in the sense that
one recognizes the lovability in oneself. This love of self is the recognition of the self as lover, an
attitude of belief that the advance is achievable, that we are worthy of an advance: we are lovable.
Self-love, in this sense, appears as an attitude, a kind of self-assuredness that we receive from the
beloved. It remains, however, entirely dissimilar from love in the general sense that I have been
discussing throughout this thesis. There is room for this concept idea of self-love in von Hildebrand,
for as long as self-love is not attributed as the grounds or motivation for other-love, a love of self
remains a subtle possibility. Only through the love of another can we begin to love ourselves. The
relevance of man as an ego amans—a loving being—which Marion espouses is the underlying
53
significance of this essay. The distinction made in the prior discussion of loving oneself serves to
ground the argument for apt theory and practice: proper grounds for self-love. There is a delicate
normative distinction between “self-love” and “love of self” that is drawn by philosophers from
Kierkegaard to Scheler. However, I argue that to remain phenomenologically accurate, in accordance
with our account of love in the preceding sections, that “self-love” is an impossible phenomenon. If
we replace, as Tillich suggests, this concept of “self-love” with affirmation or esteem where
appropriate, we can escape the phenomenological absurdity of loving oneself.
Drawing the previous account of Marion into this discussion, it would seem absurd that the
self can love itself in any conceivable way. Again, to echo the philosophy of Tillich, we can only
speak of self-love as a metaphor. It is inconceivable to account for a phenomenology of self-love
without invoking a metaphor. Self-love has no basis in reality. It is an attitude, an affirmation of
value. But it is not a phenomenal act.
54
Love responds to the overall beauty of the person who is loved.
Dietrich von Hildebrand
Chapter Five: Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Phenomenology of Love
In the first chapter of his work The Nature of Love, Dietrich von Hildebrand roots his theory
of love on the claim that love “in the most proper and most immediate sense is love for another
person.”157 Von Hildebrand specifically isolates love as particular to human relations. This
distinction also implies intentionality, that love is essentially for another, that is, it is directed toward
another human person. A core aspect of von Hildebrand’s philosophy is the value-response; these
responses are “related to their object in a highly spiritual, rational, and meaningful way.”158
Therefore, we can say that the act of loving presupposes a person; our involvement with this person
affects us in a profoundly personal way.
Value Phenomenology
Let us now consider the concept of value phenomenology, as “love relates, in the first
instance, to what has value, and to man only to the extent that he is endowed with value and capable
of advancement in this respect. These acts and their laws can be investigated by means of a
phenomenological reduction.”159 Both von Hildebrand and Scheler presuppose that love is just one
of the many acts comprising the value-laden world around us, to which we react in a value-
responding way. This response is an emotion, for example, of “joy in response to the beauty of a
piece of great music or sadness over significant personal loss.”160 These two examples of values

158 Judith Stewart Shank, “Von Hildebrand’s Theory of the Affective Value Response,” 155.
55
both material and immaterial will be explored later in this chapter, in connection with the morality of
beauty as I will examine how affective responses to moral value and disvalue can elicit both
reverence and disgust, respectively. Von Hildebrand’s theory of “value phenomenology also lies at
the base of his untiring defense of beauty as a genuine and objective value.”161 Such events, from
beholding the beauty of a great work of art, to witnessing the moral disgust of a crime against an
innocent person elicit a profound response in persons because of their capacity to move us
affectively. These responses “are either appropriate or inappropriate, and it is part of our moral
vocation that we form our affections in the light of truth.”162 Because the value-response is an
affective intentional act, we find a “deep, meaningful, and intelligible relationship between the act
and its object.”163 We respond to the value of different categories of objects, from “the beauty of
noble music or the nobility of a moral act,”164 to the beauty of a virtuous person or the beauty of
our beloved. It is within the nature of human persons to be receptive to value to a certain degree:
Some people have a greater capacity than others to be affected by values, a greater capacity
for ardor and awakedness in their responses to values. Their overall relation to the world of
values, to the important in itself, to all that contains a message from above, is deeper, more
alert, more intensive, more ardent.165
It will become clear in this work that von Hildebrand and Scheler are value-realists par excellence in
their phenomenological revelation of the world of values. It is through love that we gain the most
intimate access to this value affectivity. Love—the most profound response to value in which
humans can partake—discloses the world to us in the most personal way. Where does this revelation
of value begin? Let us begin with attraction, the nascent stage of the phenomenology of love.

162 Ibid., 176.
163 Shank, “Von Hildebrand’s Theory of the Affective Value Response,” 155.
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Attraction and Attachment
Von Hildebrand further differentiates love from the common analogy of “being attached,” a
comparison prevalent in the sciences. A common model for “love” in disciplines such as psychology
is describing it in terms of an “attraction-attachment” model. Humans are initially attracted to
another, whether incited by a physical, emotional, or intellectual interest. This attraction, however, is
more often reduced to a sexual desire in some way. A refinement of our conception of what
“attraction” is can be gleaned from philosophers of the personalist tradition. Karol Wojtyla devotes
a section to his text Love and Responsibility to the role of attraction in love. His thesis is captured in
this phrase: “attraction is of the essence of love and in some sense is indeed love, although love is not merely
attraction.”166 Rather than placing sex at the basis of attraction between man and woman, Wojtyla
suggests that this sexual urge “insists on being raised to the personal level.”167 For our attraction as
human persons is not purely carnal, but emotional, psychological, and spiritual as well. Ergo, our
attraction for others rests on our apprehension of the beloved as a person. This founds his position
on a view of attraction that “does not possess a purely cognitive structure.”168 Our attraction for
another need not be considered one-dimensionally, as most traditions tend to speak of human
attraction. We are not directed solely by our sexual drive, and we rarely operate with a purely rational
decision regarding the object of our attraction.
This anti-reductionist theme that we have explored earlier in the philosophy of von
Hildebrand is also present in the work of Wojtyla. Reductionist thinkers tend to place a singular
focus on one element of attraction. For Wojtyla, “we must recognize that not only extra-intellectual
166 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 76.

167 Ibid., 74.
168 Ibid., 75.
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but extra-cognitive factors, namely the emotions and the will, are involved in that cognitive
commitment which has the character of attraction.”169 This point exemplifies our theme that love
involves more than a passive feeling of the lower affective sphere; it involves elements of both heart
and will. It is a higher, spiritual emotion sanctioned by the will.
The element of attraction in our love of others possesses no shallow commitment for
personalist philosophers. Wojtyla holds that the attraction of human persons is oriented toward the
good. That attraction retains a theme of importance points to the value Wojtyla and others attribute
to individuals: “For every human person is an indescribably complex and, so to speak, uneven
good.”170 Therefore, it would be most accurate to consider attraction on the basis of more than just
fleeting feeling or carnal fulfillment. Attraction, the prelude to the overture of love, possesses both
an intellectual and affective component. Our ordinary human experience is comprised of both
intellectual and emotional experiences. Wojtyla is careful to point out the affective importance of
this prelude:
The emotions are present at the birth of love because they favour the development of a
mutual attraction between man and woman. Man’s emotions are in general not oriented
towards intellectual knowledge but towards experience in a broader sense. This natural
tendency expresses itself in an emotional-affective reaction to the good.171
Our knowledge of the beloved does not simply increase in a general sense, but in a way specific to a
couple in love. The self that is disclosed in love is radically different from the self that is disclosed in
the public eye. For most, in the sphere of love, a rare glimpse into the inner self is reserved for those
in the special loving relationship. This epistemology of the heart, our knowledge of love presents us:
169 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility , 65.

170 Ibid., 76.
171 Ibid., 75.
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A certain way of disclosing a person’s intimate being and the beauty that the person takes on
by loving—goes far beyond all of this. It is a knowledge of the loving person that is only
granted to the one to whom his or her love is addressed. It is a deeper and more intimate
level that arises in the one who loves when he discloses himself to the beloved person.172
Many can attest to the experience of a new “love world” that emerges from two persons in love; not
only does the experience of the world around them change, but the experience of each other, and of
themselves is profoundly altered by this love.173 This idea is explicitly conceptualized in von
Hildebrand’s work, and how we “dwell” in the world of our love:
However conscientiously we may be attending to an outward task, we remain in the world of

the beloved one. Our love of that person, not the activity of the moment, colors the
atmosphere in which our soul is moving. At every moment it is present to our mind
(however discreetly) that what we are just doing is not the real thing that fills and guides us;
that we are not centered in this petty, peripheral section of our life but continue dwelling in
the depth.174
Here we find the profundity of love’s affect. Love is not a mere happening-to, as I have said, it is
much more. Love is a happening-with, a mutual indwelling, a shared being-in-the-world. Our love
“colors our atmosphere,” our relations with others, even our relation to philosophy. This is what
von Hildebrand refers to as a superactual response, a concept which we will explore further on.
Perhaps we are led to a new “awakened” view, a new insight into reality that we were not open to
before. It has been said that some of the most paradigm-altering scientific discoveries have been
arrived at through creative imagination. Love plays a definite part in our creativity—we may write,
paint, think under its influence. Not only can love inhabit our participation in the world of values, in
our philosophical achievements, but it can affect our ethical life. I will discuss later the correlation
172 Von Hildebrand, Nature of Love, 234.

173 This concept of the “love world” is referenced in Robert Solomon’s About Love, as well as the memoir A Severe
Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. These philosophical and testimonial pieces provide a broader insight on this concept.
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between love and virtue, for “[t]he higher the realm of value, the more sublime the response of
love.”175
Furthermore, the effect of love resonates in our every human activity, whether prima facie
visible or hidden to the cursory glance. Love is a great example of a “superior motif resounding in
the background, while the foreground is filled by peripheral interests.” He explains how
A great love, for instance, which inspires our heart and lends wings to our whole existence, is
likely to resound with its melody throughout our external occupations; it never allows our
soul to be dulled by the wear and tear of our daily routine, nor silences the voice of our
deeper personality.176
Perhaps we are not fully cognizant of the permeating effect of love in our everyday lives. It may take
the loss, however transitory, for us to truly recognize its fruits.
When von Hildebrand writes of this great liberation of love, he writes in the specific context
of love’s requital as the source of happiness in love. Our attraction can lead us to
union, the interchange of looks that expresses love. On the one hand, there is the full duality
of I and Thou, the clear difference between them, the full consciousness of the Thou of the
beloved person and his unique individuality; on the other hand, there is the ultimate unity
that can only be granted by the interchange of looks that expresses love and by the mutual
sharing in the being of each other.177
Our love for another is far deeper than the “attraction/attachment” account given by psychologists.
Love cannot adequately be explained as a mere “attachment” to another person. For von
Hildebrand, this idea of attachment can be attributed to material or inhuman things: we can be
“attached” to money or clothing, but not to other humans. He cites the examples of humans who
are unhealthily attached to objects, and how this excessive attachment can be mistaken for love:
“The heavy drinker does not love alcohol; the greedy man does not love money. They are no doubt
175 Von Hildebrand, Nature of Love, 62

176 Ibid.
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attached to these things and are under the power of them; these things have an indescribable
attractive power for such people.”178 Although von Hildebrand does not deny the element of
attachment that is often found in love, he separates human attachment in the love of the other
distinctly from the excessive material attachment of objects.
An example of this clear distinction between attachment between human subject and
material object is given by von Hildebrand with reference to a warm bath. The pleasure that arises
from something considered “merely agreeable” is of a different kind than the response to value.
While beautiful music and human beings are considered “objective goods which are delightful on
the basis of their value,”179 objects that satisfy vital needs like comfort and fulfill us with mere
pleasure do not warrant a value-response.
When we fall in love, many of us find an unusual degree of attachment to the beloved. We
find our thoughts and our actions changing to encompass both the thought and action of the
beloved. We begin to incorporate the other into our sort of life-world: the way in which we
approach the world, objects, and other people begins to change. And while we may place an
unusually higher stake in the opinion, thought, and feeling of the beloved, our consideration of them
that is sparked by a newfound love is not merely due to a so-called “attachment” to the other.
Although our actions toward the beginning of a romantic relationship may signify a higher-than-
average sense of attachment to the other person, love cannot be reduced to this attitude. Although it
can be said that when one “falls in love,” as it is inferred from many psychological or neurological
studies, that one becomes “intoxicated” with his love of the other, the real phenomenon of love is of a
higher emotional order than mere pleasure or appetitive response to the beloved.

179 Ibid., 16.
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Irreducibility of the Other
When we limit our understanding of love to its purely biological aspect that cannot be
denied, as it is evidenced throughout the sciences—we limit the appreciation of the “awakened”
reality of love. To further a point I made in an earlier section, phenomenology allows for a proper
account of love due in part to its non-reductionistic approach to the nature of reality. We are indeed
“indescribably complex” beings, irreducible to any particularity. An account of love that
emphasizes—as von Hildebrand aptly does—the thematicity of the beloved as the intent of the
value-response does justice to not only the complexity of the human person, but to the complexity
of love itself.
This is why, as von Hildebrand and Crosby plainly state throughout their work, we are
unable to provide “reasons” for our love. We cannot reduce our “attraction” to the “accidents” of
persons. In other words, there is an “ineffability of the value-essence of the beloved person.”180
One cannot possibly put into words precisely that which we love about the other. Love is “essentially
inexhaustible… [and] essentially indescribable,”181 as Kierkegaard writes. This inability to reduce love
to its component parts is a personalist idea underpinning the entirety of this work. We do not love
any singular characteristic of the beloved, whether the characteristic is material (wealth or success) or
immaterial (intelligence or amiability). As John Henry Crosby explains:
The principle of the thematicity…is also revelatory of the deeply phenomenological spirit of
von Hildebrand’s thought, for in phenomenology there is a deep and conscious resistance to
anything that smacks of reductionism. Indeed one might say that the opposition to the
reductive spirit is a phenomenological leitmotif. Phenomenology wants things to be what
they are, whatever they may be, however desirable or undesirable this may be.182
180 John F. Crosby, “A Question About Marion’s ‘Principle of Insufficient Reason,” 249.
181 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5.
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The complexity of human experience, radically antithetical to the “reductive spirit” is indeed a
phenomenological leitmotif. Rather than impressing our ideas upon reality—in this case, love—the
phenomenologist allows the object to impress its reality upon us. To “explain” love in terms of our
particular world-view is to impress our subjective interpretation upon it.
In this way, phenomenologists allow for an “exegetical reading” of reality. It is an approach
to love with a full awareness of our subjectivity, allowing it to be what it is. The phenomenologist
appropriately recognizes when he is being subjective in the negative sense—in the case of a jaundiced
value-judgment in accordance with a non-philosophical, unfounded presupposition—and when he is
being appropriately subjective, in the positive sense, when personal insight into the nature of the
reality of the object of perception is actually a glimpse of truth into the nature of the other. Von
Hildebrand’s “genius for ‘letting things be’ is especially appropriate when the realities in question are
the ‘great things’—the all-encompassing laws of metaphysics, the great expanse of moral good and
evil, the reality of the sacred.”183 An example of an inappropriate response to objects is
aestheticism, what von Hildebrand often refers to as a shallow sense of value and beauty that stands
in the way of an accurate apprehension of realities. He holds a deep aversion to “an aestheticism
that, for one reason or another, refuses to recognize the intrinsic and interior bond that binds
together the realm of beauty with that of all other objective values (and, conversely, ugliness with all
forms of disvalue), and in particular with the reality of the sacred.”184 In both Scheler and von
Hildebrand’s life and philosophy, one can find a deep sense of the sacred, a reverence for the
objectivity of value, and an assertion of the objective value-laden reality.

184 Ibid., 183.
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Both thinkers take it as a given that the phenomenological approach to reality is a moral one.
Man’s place in nature is at once both animal and spiritual, both carnal and moral. In love, the two
meet. Modern science takes the former for truth and the latter for mystical untruth. It reduces the
complexity of human nature (denying, of course, that we are in fact human persons) to a
conglomeration of body parts, of cells with a particular function in the material world. We are no
more than the sum of our parts. The phenomenology that we encounter here accounts for both
aspects of man. It does not pretend that man is not animal, nor does it pretend that we live without
spiritual presence. How do we love when we love another, if the human person is irreducible?
Considering our prior claim, that the self is both subject and object existing simultaneously, we love
the other profoundly, “from the lover’s most personal self, with sincerity, intensity, endurance.” 185
It is from our mysterious center, from a place of love that Kierkegaard, Marion, von Hildebrand and
Scheler would consider the origin of our affectivity: the heart. Here a parallel may be immediately
drawn between Scheler’s “primary source” and Kierkegaard’s source of love that is the secret
nourishment of everything. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard alludes to the source of love within man:
Where does love come from, where does it have its origin and its source, where is the place
it has its abode from which I flows? Yes, this place is hidden or is secret. There is a place in a
person’s innermost being; from this place flows the life of love… But you cannot see this
place; however deeply you penetrate, the origin eludes you in remoteness and
hiddenness.186
Perhaps in describing this “hidden…secret” source, he alludes to the “innermost being” of the
heart. Although, for Kierkegaard, its origins may seem mysterious, this study will illuminate the
nature of love, and how it affects our lives, from our apprehension of objects in the world to our
understanding of other. It is from our hearts that we can “affectively affirm this unique person in a
185 Jules J. Toner, Love and Friendship, (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), 160.
186 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 8-9.
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response informed by full, detailed, knowledge which catches the delicate shadings of his
profoundest atttitudes, moods, likes and dislikes, ideals, fears, hopes….”187 This notion of an
“informed” response foreshadows a later discussion of the interplay between love and knowledge in
Chapter Six. Although a specified amount of knowledge is not required in order to love another, our
response inevitably becomes an informed one, for it is our love, our desire to love and be loved that
leads us to come to know the other. As Scheler might add, eros inspires us to step outside of
ourselves in order to apprehend the other as a unique, radical other worthy of our love.
Subjectivity and Objectivity in Love
Another way of considering the content of “value” in our response to it lies in von
Hildebrand’s proposed difference between that which is subjectively satisfying and that which is
objectively satisfying. This is directly correlative of our previous discussion regarding the difference
between appropriate and inappropriate subjectivity in philosophy. The former arises out of our
subjective interpretation of value, or that which is valuable to me in a purely subjective way—the
other is valuable because I deem them to be. The latter arises out of a genuine response to an encounter
with an object that possesses an objective value or that which is valuable apart from my subjective
like or dislike of it—the other is valuable because he/she possesses value intrinsically. While the former value is
subject to one’s unique taste, the latter value retains its status regardless of subjective
interpretation.188 We may not all agree on the value of chocolate; for some it provides the benefit
of health, for others the benefit of pleasure, and for a small minority, no benefit at all. In alignment

188 In placing the term “subjective” human experience here in contrast with “objective” moral value, I do not intend to
imply that human subjectivity demeans the reality of objective value. On the contrary: von Hildebrand argues that it is
precisely our human subjectivity that enables us to uniquely perceive and respond to the moral values that we encounter
in the world. Our subjectivity is wholly necessary for participation in the realm of objective values. Each of us is uniquely
attuned to the stratum of values in the world through our personal experience of it. Thus, a “value-blind” person is
either unaware of this value-laden reality, or unwilling to acknowledge or participate in it.
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with Aristotle’s third category of friendship, von Hildebrand argues that love, like friendship, “is
only possible when it is embedded in the good, because only then are we interested in the other
person as person; this throws clearly into relief the fact that love is a value-response.”189 Neither
love nor “true” friendship arises out of utility. A person can care about another so long as they
provide a service of use, or some aspect of their personality is deemed of use to the other—this is
not a friendship of love.
Now that we have considered love’s many aspects, what more can we draw from a
phenomenology of love? I shall discuss the knowledge of the affective sphere—a sort of
epistemology of the heart—in order to account more fully for the multi-faceted nature of love.
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It is possible to love more than we know.
Fulton Sheen
Chapter Six: Love’s Knowledge
One of the most difficult debates within the philosophy of love arises when we ask: Does love
precede knowledge, or does knowledge precede love? Many are left without a satisfactory answer. I will address
the handling of the topic by our phenomenologists of love. How can we properly found or direct
our love if we have no adequate content, no knowledge of the object at which our love is directed?
An “epistemology of the heart” will reveal that “at the beginning, knowledge is the condition of
love, in its latter stages love can increase knowledge.”190 This section will serve to illustrate how our
knowledge can inspire and intensify our love. While our perceptual knowledge of the other by way
of a cognitive intention may initially serve us in grasping the object of our love, the heart leads us
knowledge “deeper than any spoken word, or any scientific investigation; it is knowledge that comes
from love, a kind of intuitional perception of what is in the mind and the heart of the other.”191
In his book The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion provides an explicit answer to the
question of love’s knowledge:
Knowledge does not make love possible, because knowledge flows from love. The lover
makes visible what she loves and, without this love, nothing would appear to her. Thus,
strictly speaking, the lover does not know what she loves—except insofar as she loves it.192
For Marion, love is the guiding light of knowledge. In the pure sense of eros, the lover is wrought to
desire knowledge of the other through her love of the other. We do not know to love; on the
contrary, our loving precedes all knowledge. This is problematic, as how can we know if we are
properly loving, or whom we are loving, without a base level of knowledge of the other?

191 Ibid.
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Two serious problems may arise if we begin to love the other without any knowledge of the
heart. We may displace genuine love with forms of pseudo-love, namely, idealization and lust.
Examples of characters who illustrate the “love” of idealization include Masoch’s Severin of Venus in
Furs,193 Kierkegaard’s Johannes the Seducer in Either/Or194 and Stendhal’s discussion of
“crystallization” in his work On Love.195 These men prefer to remain in a “cloud of unknowing,”
prefer to keep the objects of their affection in the same haze as the lustful seducer, Don Juan and
Johannes the Seducer. Genuine lovers approach the beloved with a love of truth, in the same way
the phenomenologist approaches Reality.196
John F. Crosby critiques this view in his article, “A Question about Marion’s ‘Principle of
Insufficient Reason.’” In his essay, Crosby initially points out the problematic concept of insufficient
reason, as it ignores a fundamental reality of the experience of beauty in the phenomenology of love.
For Crosby, “Marion seems to exclude from his account of love this engendering power of the
beauty glimpsed by the lover in the beloved person, for he wants love to precede all that one
apprehends in the beloved person, and to bring it to light for the first time.”197 Even Plato writes in
his Symposium on the transformative power of beauty when we behold the other. On this point, we
might recall Diotima’s speech on the ascent of love that moves from the physical or temporal desire
193 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
194 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).
195 Stendhal, On Love (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Peter Pauper Press, 1950).
196 All forms of pseudo-love represent a fundamentally anti-phenomenological attitude. This approach to love
embodied in the characters of the idealizing and lusting lover is counterintuitive to the task of philosophy. They
represent an anti-personalist attitude, preferring to love objects rather than subjects. The object of their love, untainted
by genuine or even adequate knowledge, remains a figment of imagination, an object of desire. Therefore, one cannot
claim to be a philosopher—a lover of truth— and yet in love prefer to remain in the dark, in the shadow of wisdom.
This is essential blindness to the reality of the beloved. Such people do not “love” reality, and have not yet been
awakened to reality in love in the sense that von Hildebrand speaks of throughout this work. Instead, they choose to
propagate the created world (unreality) of idealization. They live, scripturally, in the darkness, rather than in the light of
truth.
197 John F. Crosby, “A Question about Marion’s ‘Principle of Insufficient Reason,’” in Quaestiones Disputate: Selected
Papers on the Thought of Jean-Luc Marion, vol. 1, No. 1., ed. John R. White (Fall 2010): 245.
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for the beauty of another person to the metaphysical or eternal desire for Beauty in its transcendent
form. We are at first moved by the visible aesthetic beauty of the beloved as we view the other
“from without.” However, our love moves us beyond this shallow dimension toward the invisible
depth-dimension of beauty, to apprehend the other “from within.” Only when our desire moves us
to seek the inner source of beauty do we discover the metaphysical beauty of the beloved which, as
Diotima teaches us, is superior to beauty that is purely physical. Both Crosby and Marion embrace
this interrelation between love and beauty. Marion speaks of an “objective” way of viewing the other
in an “act of me ‘sizing up’ a person’s qualities,”198 which misleads the lover in the same way that a
strict sight of the other “from without” lacks a full apprehension of the beloved’s beauty. According
to Crosby:
This “objective” way of looking cannot lead me to love this person. For this kind of looking
at another that yields only an object, a composite of qualities, and not a beloved person. It is
not difficult to understand that it takes a loving way of looking at another in order to catch
sight of the beauty of the person. This means that love does indeed in some sense precede
and make possible the appearance of the other as beautiful and loveable.199
So what does Crosby propose is the proper relation between love and knowledge? He proposes that
Marion’s Principle of Insufficient Reason “captures only part of the truth about knowledge and love
as they exist in the one who initiates love.”200 The natural answer from the phenomenological
perspective is that both love and knowledge are in an interplay in the response to the other. We
equally love to know as we know to love. Can not the mind and the heart be one? Is there not some
intimate relation between the two, an inevitable “bridge,” so to speak, between the faculties? In fact,
198 Crosby, “A Question about Marion,” 246.

199 Ibid.
200 Ibid.
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Scheler points to the influence of love over knowledge, claiming that “love is what awakens both
knowledge and willing; it is the mother of both spirit and reason.”201
In the phenomenon of love, there is no clear-cut progression either from love to knowledge
or from knowledge to love. The most accurate answer is provided by Crosby, in that “one would
think that the relation between love and knowledge would be a mutual relation, with the power of
love to disclose the beauty of the beloved person being only the beginning of the relation.”202 In
attempting to pinpoint the phenomenological priority—whether it is love or knowledge—the lover
would be, it seems, unable to definitively prove whether love arose before knowledge, as they are
deeply interwoven in the experience of love. It almost seems absurd that one would love before one
would have any knowledge of what one loves. In loving with adequate knowledge, we approach the
other with emotional maturity. Since our discussion of love is driven by the presupposition that love
is intentional, would it make sense to say that we naturally do not know the content of our love? If
love involves an element of the will, can our will have no comprehension of its direction? Certainly
not, for the act of love “is rather entirely opposed to the arbitrary.”203 These problems are
addressed by Crosby in the simple conclusion that “the priority of love over knowledge would seem
quickly to yield to a certain priority of knowledge over love.”204 Love is an irreducible dialectic
between knowledge and spontaneous loving; we cannot clearly distinguish the root of our love as
springing from primarily our cognitive or affective experience.
201 Biefeld, “Max Scheler,” 213.

202 Ibid.
204 Crosby, 246.
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The Morality of Love
As I have outlined before in the section on love as a value-response, the powerful effect of
love is undeniable, as it brings the other to full thematicity, and alters the lover’s perception of both
the beloved and the world itself. Von Hildebrand refers to a response to the fullness of the other’s
person. In love, the person becomes “fully thematic,” which means that “the value responded to is
the primary theme and not the relation to other goods.”205 The lover’s apprehension of reality is
profoundly altered for the better, and a new vision is revealed. Von Hildebrand writes:
In every intense and complete love a person undergoes a certain awakening. I begin to live
more authentically; a new dimension in my personal existence discloses itself and I am
liberated from the captivity of habits, from the bonds of convention, from dependence on
the opinions of others, from the social image I have of myself.206
Often considered negative for its “blinding” effect on the person, love can effectively open the eyes
of the lover to a new way of seeing and a new way of being through the experience of loving
another. This awakening, far from hindering the lover in his or her ability to act, or inhibiting the
lover to become, serves as a fertile ground for fully recognizing the idea of the human person, and
acting in accordance with this ethic, “for it is only when the other loves me that I discover entirely
new aspects and treasures of his being. With some persons the difference between loving and not
loving is so great that we are tempted to say that we do not really know them at all until they disclose
themselves in love.”207 We cannot know a person to the fullest extent of our ability without love’s
knowledge. This leads us to the question of the relation between knowing and loving. Do we know
to love, or do we love to know? Which comes first?

206 Ibid., 312.
207 Ibid., 233.
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The Metaphysical Beauty of Love
Beauty is a major theme in von Hildebrand’s philosophy of love. While he by no means
posits beauty as the theme of love—value is, in fact, what von Hildebrand considers the theme of
love—the apprehension of beauty is an essential element of our human experience of love.208 Von
Hildebrand explains the intrinsic connection between our apprehension of the lover’s beauty, and
“why beauty plays such a fundamental role in love.”209 This piece elaborates upon themes found in
The Nature of Love; von Hildebrand dedicated the second chapter of Aesthetics to outlining “the quasi-
sacramental function of the visible and audible,”210 an idea that John F. and John Henry Crosby
translates as “metaphysical beauty” [Sinneshonenheit]. He introduces his study with a word on the
importance of spiritual beauty in Plato:
This beauty is also expressed in the very important Greek word kalo-kagathon (the beautiful,
the good, the perfect). In Plato and Plotinus, the superiority of the beauty of spiritual things
to the beauty of the visible and the audible is emphasized, although both philosophers
explicitly acknowledge the latter in its value (especially Plotinus in the ninth Ennead).211
As regards the connection between love and beauty, von Hildebrand proposes that “Love responds
to the overall beauty of the person who is loved.”212 He continues to explain:
It is characteristic even of a purely natural love for a person, which is always love for the
person as a whole, that it is a value-response to the beloved person’s overall beauty,213
which also contains the reflection of all moral and spiritual values. How profound and
208 On the topic of the “thematicity,” von Hildebrand tells us in a footnote to the section The family of the artistic-creative
personal values that “In the gift of the philosopher, the theme is not beauty, but truth.” It would perhaps seem fair to
equate “theme” with the philosophical term telos—that which we consider thematic in a vocation we also consider its
goal. In three examples of the philosopher, the artist, and the lover, we may consider the theme to be truth, beauty, and
value, respectively.
209 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics (forthcoming), trans. John F. Crosby.
210 Dietrich von Hildebrand, The New Tower of Babel (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press), 157-175.
211 Von Hildebrand, Aesthetics.
212 Ibid.
213 Cf. von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, ch. 1.
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significant it is when Tristan, in his vision in the third act of Tristan und Isolde, cries out the
ultimate word that sums up everything, the deepest word of love: “Isolde, how beautiful you
are!”
The theme of personalism is abundantly clear in this excerpt. What can a lover say when another
asks: “Why do you love him?” Many lovers are left cold, speechless at the request to adequately put
into words such a profound emotion. In love, we do not respond to merely “aesthetic particulars.”
We are not moved by his face, we do not respond to her eyes. The apprehension of beauty in love is a
response to the whole person. While it is clear that the particulars of the beloved may in fact be
aesthetically pleasing, when we speak of “metaphysical beauty” [Sinneshonenheit], we are speaking of a
certain form of beauty that is beyond the visible and audible, in von Hildebrand’s words. This is the
type of beauty that one cannot perceive with the eyes or ears: we can be blind to the world, and still
“see” the metaphysical beauty of another.
Let us return for a moment to the theme of the irreducibility of the intentional act, in this
case, the value-response that is love. When asked to capture the essence of one’s love for another
person in the form of “reasons for love,” lovers are often rendered speechless. The irreducibility of
beauty found in personalist thought is seen in “[t]he inability to indicate the reasons for loving
someone.”214 The ineffable experience of love “only serves to point out the deeper and more
individual value datum that we call the ‘overall beauty’ [Gestamtschonheit] of a person.”215 The
ineffability of our love is not a sign of a lack of love, or an unfounded, irrational love of another.
Quite the contrary: our love is as complex as the human person; to attempt to reduce it to a quality
or a set of qualities is a disservice to the “essentially indescribable, inexhaustible” topic of love. If we
attempt to attribute our love for another to, say, the beloved’s agility with words, once we find
another person with a more developed poetic art, are we then justified in “leveling up” in our love?

215 Ibid.
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Is it inevitable for us to fall in love with the better wordsmith, seeing as our love is founded upon
our penchant for writers? Of course, the answer is no. This would betray the value-response to the
beloved as a unique person. In the face of silence, “[w]e should not doubt that love is a value-
response simply because when asked why we love someone we cannot indicate the value qualities
that motivate our love.”216 We do not love an amalgamation of a person’s characteristics; we love
the person as a primary subject, irreducible to the particulars.
There is an intimate relation between metaphysical beauty of the beloved and the theme of
the value-response. To recognize the metaphysical beauty of the beloved is to address the subject’s
being, to respond to the value of the beloved’s overall being. In The Art of Living, a work co-written
by his wife Alice, von Hildebrand specifically addresses this lack of reverence for the metaphysical
aspect of man. In a critique of the lack of reverence many exhibit—another example of seeing “from
without”—von Hildebrand asks, “how little attention is paid to the person’s being, his kindness,
generosity, humility, patience?”217 This theme of personal love—love for another person qua
person—is exemplified in this excerpt from the aforementioned work:
We are led to believe that success in life lies primarily in our being able to bring credentials,
and yet, who would dream of saying to another person: “I love you because you are the most
efficient secretary I have met in my life,” or because “you are the teacher who best organizes
the material.” Love is not concerned with a person’s accomplishments, it is a response to a
person’s being: this is why a typical word of love is to say: I love you, because you are as you
are.218
This is an example of personal love par excellence. Love is recognizing the beloved for himself, his
intrinsic worth, his radical otherness. Perhaps von Hildebrand’s phenomenological “genius for

217 Von Hildebrand, The Art of Living, 59.
218 Ibid., 60.
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letting things be” ought to be applied to our approach of loving others. Perhaps the
phenomenological attitude itself can lead to a more profound love, a deeper understanding of the
other. Phenomenology uncovers things as they are; personal love loves “because you are as you are.”
Beauty and Morality
There is a profound interconnection between the morality of love and beauty. Von
Hildebrand often equates love with the recognition of the intrinsic, the “metaphysical” beauty of
another. The influence of virtue on beauty is a topic of much discussion in the works of von
Hildebrand. The beauty of another person’s moral value “demands a value-response; and this is
equally true of the ugliness of the moral disvalue.”219 His work outlines the theory behind a
“spiritual beauty” that can be found in particular in the splendor of religious works of art. It is not
something purely or simply aesthetic; it is a beauty that resonates beyond the merely visible or
audible. Love engenders this metaphysical beauty in the beloved:
Suppose we know someone who has never really loved and suddenly is seized by a great and
deep love. Even in this case we can clearly see how much more beautiful he becomes, how
liberated from the chains of comfort and routine, how much greater he becomes, how much
less mediocre, how much more humble, more heroic.220
Not only does love augment knowledge of the beloved, it augments the beloved himself. This leads
to the uncovering, or the growth of our response to the metaphysical beauty of the beloved.
Often the source of heightened creative imagination, love has the power to draw a person beyond
that which he would normally be capable of achieving. It is the power in life that inspires
transcendence, leading man to experience the sacred, and seek a reality that is beyond “the bonds of
convention,” beyond the limits of what he formerly thought possible. In escaping the limitations of

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the self, or at least seeking to move beyond them, love leads man to seek his “true self,” to seek a
self that reaches a depth or magnitude that aspires to the heights of his love; this “true self breaks
through in love; by loving and giving myself in love I am able to receive as a gift my better and more
authentic self.”221 Von Hildebrand then ties in beauty with morality, such that love is an act that
creates a sense of the beautiful:
By loving I become more beautiful, and this precisely through the special commitment and
self-gift which is proper to love, and also through a certain humility. In loving, I grow in
humility because love is a gift and because I experience myself being “seized” by something
that is greater than myself. Before I had relied on my own strength… but now all of this
collapses when I love.222
The idea that there is a fundamental connection between morality and beauty is a common theme in
the work of von Hildebrand. This point made by von Hildebrand also points to the “economy” of
love. In giving our self in love to another, we do not “lose” a part of ourselves in the exchange;
rather, we become augmented by our love, by our very giving of self. This is why, when giving up
our autonomy in love, we do not “lose” strength; we begin to find our strength in another. This
points to the ultimate theme among the personalists in love, the theme of the “gift of self.” This gift,
when bestowed properly, does not detract from our “supply” of love. When we allow our self—and
what we may consider our ego-boundary,223 we begin to grow in love. Only through humility—one
of both Scheler and von Hildebrand’s fundamental moral attitudes—can we begin to truly love
another.
As regards the recurring notion of the fundamental attitude requisite of the lover, there are
two basic elements that are requisite:

222 Ibid.
223 See M. Scott Peck’s chapter on love in The Road Less Traveled. Thomas Merton writes extensively on the ego and its
barriers to pure love in much of his work, namely in Disputed Questions and Love and Living.
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The attitude of love implies, as we know, two basic elements: the intention of union (intentio
unionis) and the intention of well-wishing (intentio benevolentiae). In addition to these, there are many
other elements to be found in love: the tone of inner suavity, the elements of fervor and
audacity, and the act of a heroic self-abandonment.224
Quite common in Christian conceptions of love is the idea that union and benevolence (willing the
good for the other) are the primary or foundational elements of love. While these are necessary of
our loving attitude, they are not sufficient for our love. Since Aquinas, a common explanation of
love has been a wishing the good for another person. This thesis, however, does not provide the
complete picture of our phenomenological experience of love; hence, the Thomist approach to the
love between man and woman is lacking in its explanation of the nature of love. Of course, the
intent of unity and the intent of benevolence are valuable preconditions for a viable and happy love
for another. It is my thesis that, however, the fundamental attitudes posited by both Scheler and von
Hildebrand—namely, humility and reverence—are more phenomenologically relevant for an
explanation of love’s nature.
The transfiguring effect of love that arises from a proper foundation in the human person is
evident in the happiness of our love. The more reverent, humble, and self-aware we are as lovers,
the more joyful and happy the interpenetration of selves. We become more open and receptive to
the value of the other person qua person, and we are more able to enter into a personal communion
with our beloved. Von Hildebrand speaks of love’s tangible effect on our being in relation to our
loving attitude:
The aspect of which meekness embodies a specific expression is that of a serene mellowness
inherent in the perfect attitude of love: the softening quality of love by virtue of which it
becomes, as it were, a tangible substance, which might be described as fluid goodness.
Meekness is comparable to a seal which this element of love impresses on our whole
224 Von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ, 406.
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essence, thus conferring a specific stamp upon all forms of our communication and
intercourse with other persons.225
This “specific stamp” relates to the profound transfiguration of the self, the other, and the world
around us through our loving experience. This mark of love points to the idea that persons can truly
be known by their love.
A final note on beauty that I wish to make is regarding the “theme” of beauty in the love of
another person. Although von Hildebrand stresses the importance of our apprehension of the
beauty, and our response to it in a normatively appropriate way, “this role that beauty plays in love,
however, must not in any way be understood to mean that the beauty is the theme in love.”226 Von
Hildebrand seeks to clarify the difference of “thematicity” between our response to persons in love,
and our response to an object in recognition of its value:
There is a radical difference between the value-response of love to a person and the value-
response to a work of art, for in this latter case the beauty is indeed thematic. The beauty of
the beloved person is as it were an irradiation of all his or her other values. It is these (the
moral, “intellectual,” and vital values of this person) that are the theme. The metaphysical
beauty which is their irradiation does not interfere with the thematicity of these values; on
the contrary, it gives them particular prominence.227
Here, the language of Scheler is used to further the differentiation between the “moral,”
“intellectual,” and “vital” categories of value. In reiterating this point, von Hildebrand seeks to
clarify the appropriate order with which we should approach the value of metaphysical beauty in our
meditation on love. As he explicitly states, beauty is an “irradiation of all his or her other values,”
meaning that the root of love is the value of the beloved person, and the fruit of love is the beauty
225 Von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ, 406.

227 Ibid.
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that “irradiates” from the source of value. Metaphysical beauty is an accident of true value. The
“theme” of love is the value to which we respond, not the beauty:
Love would be undermined if one were to make the “glory” of the other values, the beauty
that emanates from them, the theme. In addition, the love refers to this real individual
person and embraces this person in his or her totality. This is why one cannot take the same
attitude to a beloved person that one takes to a work of art; such an attitude would be utterly
incompatible with the essence of love.228
While von Hildebrand greatly appreciates the value-responding power of a beautiful work of art, he
in no way confuses the categories of beauty. The objects of our value-response—love of persons
and appreciation of objects—are qualitatively different. Both “objects” may be objectively worthy of
a value-response, however they are to be approached with a different level of sensitivity. So far in
our analysis of love’s primary characteristics, the themes of beauty and value have been explored. I
will conclude this chapter by examining the character of love as a gift.
The Gift of Love
It was Shakespeare who wrote that “love sought is good, but given unsought is better.” This
aphorism is rooted in truth; the phenomenology I have explored in this work affirms that essential
to love is the element of the gift. However, many discussions on love involve distinctions in the
characterization of love that involve a binary of “gift-love” and “need-love.”229

229 See, for example, C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, in which he poses this distinction in a useful way, as in his delineation
between agape as essentially giving and child-parent love as essentially needy. The discourse I am referencing, however, is
of the tendency to discuss not categories of love (i.e., eros, philia, or agape) as having the character of gift or need. Rather,
I am referencing the tendency of thinkers in both academic and popular literature as describing literally two different
forms of love that are essentially “need-love” or “gift-love,” as if there exists “Love”—and I am referring to the general
idea of love with a capital L—that is essentially needy and a variant of love that is essentially giving. The nature of love in
this work deals with love in a singular sense, a love in which “gift” is a constituent factor—even “thematic,” to use von
Hildebrand’s language—and “need” is no more thematic or essential than is the desire for one to seek solidarity with
oneself. On this point in particular, I will draw a comparison between the absurd notion that need is the natural origin of
our love for another in the same way that one cannot view self-love as the natural origin or starting point for a love of
the other. Just as love of the other is qualitatively radically different than the solidarity one has with oneself, so is the
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In speaking of love in the proper sense, that is, in the unified sense that I have attempted to
describe in this work, there is no such thing as a “need love” that lies in opposition to a “gift love.”
To pair “need” with genuine love, the nature of which I have outlined, is an inadequate, incorrect
way of accounting for its nature. Love is radically opposed to “need.” For, if we grant that a
characteristic of our love is need, one might then ask what “need” this love satisfies. Say, for
example, one is wrought to love another out of a “need” for a partner in parenthood. It is common
knowledge—backed also by biological and psychological studies on the matter—that it is natural for
individuals, especially women, to experience at some point the “urge” for parenthood. Is the urge
for motherhood a sufficient “reason” for loving another? When this need is satisfied, what becomes
of our love?
To characterize the nature of love as needful undermines the basic tenet of the recognition
of personal value that founds and nourishes our love for others. When the need is satisfied, needs
from parenthood to financial gain, the love loses its foundation. Other needs, both seen and
unforeseen, may arise within the loving relationship that may become satisfied as a result of a
requited love. However, to say that love is a satisfaction of one’s need or particular desire is not love
proper—it is simply desire in the guise of “love.”230 Let us look for a moment at the possibility of
love being founded upon a more basic and perhaps justified need. Perhaps our love is founded upon
need for loving and being loved qualitatively different than the act of loving another, the value response that arises out
of a spontaneous encounter with another, and the will to gratify the response for the good of the other.
230 On this note, perhaps we can consider insights from Scheler in his discussion of the various forms of self-deception
which “fall within the empirical-psychological framework which have been confused with sympathy” (Luther, Persons in
Love, 28). In his analysis of Scheler’s ideas in The Nature of Sympathy, Luther writes that this self-deception in the guise of
love is in fact an “I” centeredness, and “reveals a purely egoistic attitude, which in no sense reaches the other as other”
(Luther, Persons in Love, 29). He proceeds to characterize various “character types” of self-deceivers, from the “vain”
[Eitlen] who is overly concerned with the perception of others to the “parasite” [Schmarotzertypus] who forms an identity
and character from a particular other. These characterizations are forms of self-deception that confuse forms of
sympathy, or love, with their fundamental need for others to constitute a self-identity. These forms of self-deception “have
nothing to do with sympathy because self-preoccupation isolates and disconnects one from another rather than reaches
towards another…[and ] a relational unity has been lost” (Luther, Persons in Love, 30). Thus, love is displaced by need.
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a need for being loved and loving. If this is true, can need be a constituent factor, and the love
sustain?
Need love in this sense is, if anything, a psychological dependency on another person. Of
course, this is not to say that humans don’t need love, and that to need love is a fundamental
psychological flaw. This concept of “need-love” that some consider an actual category of love is at
best a pseudo-love, and should instead be considered an improper attitude that leads one from true
understanding of love and appreciation of the other qua person.
I will conclude with the idea that persons are constituted by love—amo, ergo sum—and it
follows from my premises that love is constituent for a fuller human experience, in a myriad of ways.
That love is derived from a fundamental lack, from a need is not within the scope of a
phenomenological account of love. Although we may be aware of the benefits of love, although we
may think that we in fact need love for honest reasons, like the sharing of one’s self, be it in the form
of shared resources or life-experience, we do not approach love from the standpoint of one in need.
We seek the other’s love from the standpoint of the gift. In the next section, we will look at the
effect of love’s gift, how it colors our perception of the other, and our experience of the world
around us.
The Overall Response to Value
Love’s actuality brings one to a greater personal understanding of others, of themselves, of
life. This discussion serves to illustrate von Hildebrand’s conception of love as a value-response.
Our love for another human person is the highest response to value, the highest participation in the
realm of values, for “love goes beyond all other value-responses in its response, that the ‘gift’ of love
is greater than in any other value-response, and above all that it objectively surpasses the value of the
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good that merits a response.”231 The essential aspect of love as a “gift of self” is represented in its
(1) affirmation and “enthronement” of the beloved person, (2) the “credit” of love, and (3) the
referent of love as an individual, unique person.232 These three aspects, when understood in light of
von Hildebrand’s philosophy of the human person and the reality of the value-response, form an
adequate defense of the claim of love as gift. In love we are inclined to “enthrone” the other, that is,
to raise them above all others in our response to value. In this phenomenon of enthronement, “the
other emerges from the sphere of indifference not only into the sphere of the precious, the valuable,
the estimable, but also into the sphere of the enchanting and of the delightful [Beglückenden].”233 The
other becomes a prominent one among many, is “declared to be precious in love.”234 A significant
face, recognizably distinguished from a sea of indiscernible others, we imagine the other to be
valuable above all other persons. In the enthronement, the beloved “is crowned” the “king” or
“queen” of our heart,235 and directs our passions as we surrender to them our affectivity. How does
this enthronement differ from respect, veneration, admiration, or any other response to value?
Essentially, in love “the overall beauty of the other has to present itself to me if the response of love
is to be awakened in me.”236 We find in love a qualitatively different response to value in that our
heart is “conquered by another.”237 Our response to the other, in respect or reverence, is not in the
same category of response as love.

232 Ibid., Chapter 3.
233 Ibid., 67.
234 Ibid., 66.
235 Ibid.
236 Ibid., 67.
237 Ibid.
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The “credit of love” that we extend is the emphasis on the positive qualities of the other. It
is a vision of the potentiality of the other, a discovering of the positive. Kierkegaard might consider
this credit resulting from our presupposing love in the other, presupposing that the other is lovable,
worthy of our love, and will be open to respond to our love. The credit of love implies that “love
believes the best about the beloved person,” that love is slow to judge, a form of faith in the
goodness of the other. This credit is exemplified in the instance of character judgment; “when I hear
something negative told about him, I will not at first believe that it is true or at least not believe that
it has been adequately interpreted.”238 This credit of love is, in essence, a statement of faith in the
other.
Furthermore, the profound effect that love has on the life of an individual is illustrated by
von Hildebrand’s idea of love as a superactual response. By superactual, von Hildebrand intends to
distinguish the effects of love from other temporary responses, such as the response to pain in one’s
body as a result of physical injury.239 Such responses are responses that are “actualized from time to
time,”240 as opposed to an enduring response that lasts over time. Love’s superactuality is
experienced in the fact that
The veneration which I have for someone does not cease to exist when I am taken up with
other things; when I encounter this person it is identically the same veneration that is
actualized again. It endures as a personal reality even if I am not actualizing it at the moment.
It lives on superactually.241
The difference between “actual” and “superactual” responses is a valuable contribution to the
phenomenological account of love. The effects of love may not be felt as imminently superactual.

239 Ibid., 43.
240 Ibid., 44.
241 Ibid.
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The fact that a commitment to love is made in a promise, the fact that you have shared, spoken a
‘yes’ in love to another person colors your ultimate experience, regardless of the immediate “actual”
feeling or effect of love’s gift. The response is felt in an overarching way, in a superactual way. Here
we find an interrelation between the superactual response and the value response:
Love for another person subsists as a full factor in my soul, coloring every other situation,
deeply forming my life. It subsists not as any vague subconscious element, but as a
meaningful response to the beloved person. It tends indeed to be actualized, but in its
character of a meaningful response to the beloved it does not live only on its full
actualizations.242
Ever-present in our lives—whether hidden in potentiality or fully actualized—is our love for the
other. This amorous intentionality indeed “colors” every situation, the other appearing under an
aspect of our advance as lovers, our orientation as persons colored by our loving attitude.
A unique point made by von Hildebrand is that prior to the marital vows, which are essential
for the “gift” of love to become solidified, affirmed, and transcendent, a “spousal love” is already
present between lovers.243 What this means is that marriage is a consecration of a love that is
presupposed: two people can love like a married couple before the promise is made. This is a
fascinating claim made by von Hildebrand, for he makes the bold declaration that spousal love
can—and does necessarily—exist outside of marriage. The promise or gift of love espoused in the
marital vow is an affirmation of a love that is already present. Therefore, two people can have shared
the marital “gift of love” before the promise has been made. The commitment in its fullness should
predate any “requirement” of commitment. The spousal love is a foretaste of marital love; the latter
is an “eternal security” of the preexistent former.

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Considering von Hildebrand’s work in light of personalist phenomenology, the act of love is
inseparable from morality. To love is a moral act, hence Scheler’s tri-fold criterion of the lover of
wisdom: the same can be said for the lover of another human person. The gift of self is “proper” to
love, because love is to hold oneself accountable to moral preconditions. A relationship can be held
to this criterion of love to be considered a relation that is conducive to love proper, or exhibits a kind
of “pseudo-love” that von Hildebrand discusses throughout his work. Hence this is why von
Hildebrand, Scheler, and many others consider love to be the fundamental act of persons. To
become a human person in the truest sense, one transcends the self in the act of loving another. The
goal of human existence is to—in humility, and with a sense of self-mastery (which is the normative
criterion of a “gift of self)—overcome one’s self-centered and singular existence in order to reach
out to his or her fellow persons. It is not enough for us to reach perfection in vacuo we must share
our love, our happiness with others. Love is essentially a mutual activity. The goal of human
creatures is not singular, but collective. It is not self-perfection in isolation; however, it is self-
perfection in a community, within a shared communal experience.
When a relationship is founded with this tri-fold criterion—humility, self-mastery, and a
fullness of love—the inclination toward moral betterment is inevitable in the communion of two
persons in love. For Saint Augustine tells us, “Let the root of love be within, of this root can
nothing spring but what is good.”244 A love in full light of recognition of the other is not an object
in any sense of the word, but as a personal subject with a purity of heart—to will the good—is
bound to prosper. This purity of heart is a fundamental aspect of love; it is our “reverent, humble,
loving center”245 of human affectivity. This purity of heart leads to “a noble, great, and deep love
244 Augustine, quoted in Ethics by Dietrich von Hildebrand (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1972), 462.
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which is not bound up with any dark passion… the effect of this love is liberating and it challenges
us to heroism, and does so without any threat of enslavement or any moral danger.”246 While
passion in itself is not a detriment to human flourishing, there is a form of passion of both good and
bad nature. The morality of passion is derived from the root of “noble, great, and deep love” that
brings man outside of himself and leads him to strive toward a greater existence. A personalist
philosopher par excellence, von Hildebrand writes in a way that fully integrates the value of the
individual human person into his notion of love. I wish to extend this analysis of personalism in love
with a discussion of the ordo amoris and its history, to see how the ordering of love is exemplified by
Scheler and von Hildebrand.
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What we love we shall grow to resemble.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Chapter Seven: The Ordo Amoris
A Brief History
The theme of the ordo amoris dates back to the philosophy of Plato. In the Symposium,
Diotima speaks of the nature of eros, and how it “recognizes a scale of beauty and of good.”247 As
she narrates the movement of love, Socrates learns of the ascending order of love, a hierarchy
naturally beginning with apprehending the beauty of the beloved, ending with the Beauty of form.
The movement is an “ascent toward the things that are always, as opposed to those that come into
being and pass away.”248 This idea of the “ladder of love” influenced the philosophy of Augustine
and became manifest in his philosophy of the ordo amoris. Augustine contributes to this theme of
love’s ascent a moral order. Rather than a descriptive ascent into the abstract world of forms
proposed by Plato, Augustine outlines a normative ascent from earthly, temporal goods to heavenly,
eternal ones. According to Augustine, the man living in accordance with the ordo amoris:
Is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his
affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor
fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor
loves that equally which ought to be loved less or more, nor loves that less or more which
ought to be loved equally.249
Essentially, Augustine instructs us to order our desire in accordance with the natural moral order. It
seems that this normative order ought to be intuitive: while there is not a strict “list of loves,”
247 Brady, Christian Love, 79.

248 Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship, in Brady, Christian Love, 79.
249 Vincent Brummer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
119.
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Augustine calls us to weigh our loves seriously, not only in accordance with that which is objectively
good and desirable in the eyes of God, but to weigh our loves in reference to each other. Put simply,
we ought to love finite goods less than infinite goods. We are to love every finite good less than God,
even man. Our love for other persons is to be for the purpose of loving God; if we love others for
themselves, we are essentially loving them too much. We are to love everything in God, especially
other persons. Ultimately, we are to love God more than other persons, even more than ourselves.
If we love inordinately, we do not love in accordance with the ordo amoris. Our lives become
improperly ordered, and we are no longer on the pathway in alignment with the good.
In the Medieval Era, the Christian conception of an “ordering of love” is found within the
thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Continuing with the Augustinian tradition of thought, “Thomas
held that virtue is rightly ordered love: rightly ordered passions are good, and wrongly ordered
passions are vicious.”250 Ultimately, the ordo amoris founds the relation between the self and the
other in that “love is directed to someone else for the sake of the other's perfection.”251 Let us see
how this Medieval conception of love’s order influenced the value-realist phenomenology of Scheler
and von Hildebrand.
The Ordo Amoris and Value Realism
In the final chapter of his book, von Hildebrand discusses the ordo amoris—the order of
love—in both a general and precise sense. We order our loves in terms of that which is more and
less valuable. It is the substructure of morality that consists of the “hierarchy of morally relevant
250 Stephen J. Pope, The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
1994), 57.
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goods,”252 or put simply, and order of lovable values. In what he considers a “general sense,” the
ordo amoris:
encompasses the entire order of preferring one thing to another, and it encompasses the
obligation to do justice to the hierarchy of values in our response. In this general sense, it
then implies the very general obligation to choose the higher good over the lower good in
our actions, in our affective responses—in every kind of relating to things.253
It is a consideration of love “analogously,” by which he means in a sense that is not in terms of the
“precise,” “narrow” and “proper” way in which von Hildebrand considered it in the first thirteen
chapters. In a footnote to this passage, von Hildebrand makes a distinction between his conception
of the ordo amoris and that of Max Scheler. While Scheler thought that morality could be essentially
reduced to the ordo amoris, von Hildebrand disagreed with a reduction of the sphere of morality to
the ordo amoris. Von Hildebrand did not deny the merit of the ordo amoris and its role in the formation
of man’s morality; however, he made it clear that his stance in no way mirrors that of Scheler’s. The
primary focus of moral structure as centering upon the ordo amoris—the ordering of relevant
goods—does a disservice to the independent value-response due of a particular moral good. The
privilege of the merit of value is primary to but not necessarily independent of the ordo amoris:
Of course, the morally relevant value must be apprehended in the rank that it occupies in the
hierarchy of values and the value-response as an adequate response and does not necessarily
involve consciously placing the morally relevant good above or below any other good. The
call to give an adequate value-response issues primarily from the value of the good and not
from the relation of the good to other goods.254
The good is to be considered objectively and not solely or primarily in light of the other goods that
take order around it. Von Hildebrand disagrees explicitly with Scheler in that “it is wrong to reduce

253 Ibid., 349.
254 Ibid.
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moral badness to choosing the lower over the higher good.”255 The choice to commit a morally bad
act, or to align oneself with morally lesser good is not reducible to a simple “lesser than” mentality.
Even a morally poor choice is to be considered in full light, and not in terms of that which could have
been chosen as a lesser good, or as greater. To commit to this line of thinking would lessen the
status of an intrinsically or irreducibly bad act, and miss the fullness of badness or goodness of a
moral choice.
In his discussion of ordo amoris in the “more precise sense,” von Hildebrand specifies that in
this sense, this order is the hierarchy of persons in our sphere of love. Here, he is not concerned
with the ordo amoris as pointing to an abstract “good” that we are responding to, but rather, “with the
question of which persons we should love more than others.”256 He applies this consideration to
many loves, including the parental love of child, love of another friend, and the love of spouse. As
regards each particular love, von Hildebrand provides an explanation for the theme of proper value-
response to each situation. What he does tell us is that love is a gift, a promise, a value-response. He
imputes his concept of value-response to the “theme” of the ordering of love. When we consider
the value of another, say, our beloved, “to the higher values ‘more’ of a value-response should be
given. The higher good deserves more of a response than the lower good.”257
The Movement of Love
Much like Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas before him, Scheler alludes to the striving of man
toward love, toward perfection through our loving of that which is good and noble for the spirit. A
properly ordered love leads one beyond the self toward a higher expression of love, and a more

256 Ibid., 350.
257 Ibid., 62.
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profound ethical understanding of others through loving. From the ordo amoris "emerge[s] the basic
moral tenor of a person, the ethos of his community, and the norms to which he submits."258 This
character of a “movement” is clear in Scheler’s work; “love is certainly a movement towards positive
value, but so far as the nature of love is concerned it makes no difference whether this value exists or
not.”259 Is Scheler, then, indifferent to the realm of values? As regards the nature of love, it seems
that the advent of loving will continue whether or not the element of value is presupposed. If value
is present, love seeks to enhance it; if value is absent, love seeks to discover it.
Just as in the model of the human affective sphere as having an order of emotions, from
lower to higher order, so does love contain a similar element of movement. For Scheler, “love is a
movement, passing from a lower value to a higher one, in which the higher value of the object or
person suddenly flashes upon us.”260 It seems, then, that one cannot “be in love” if one is not
caught in a value-driven movement. This emphasis on value, prevalent in both Scheler and von
Hildebrand, aids in distinguishing love in its pure sense from other forms of “pseudo-love,” including
mere lust, desire, or attraction. According to Peter Spader, “it is because the movement of love is
occurring that we can now see more clearly the higher values and their objective hierarchy.”261 So,
for Scheler, the theme of love is a value-conscious movement that can occur in response to the
value of another, or out of a spontaneous gesture from the self. This movement is akin to the
philosophical task set by Scheler in his essay “The Nature of Philosophy,” in that he establishes two
distinct facets of philosophy hearkening back to the Platonic tradition of philosophy:
258 Kelly, Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, 44.
259 Scheler, Nature of Sympathy, 141.
260 Ibid., 152.
261 Peter H. Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise (New York: Fordham University Press,
2002), 236.
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1. An integral movement of the inmost personal Self, such as is not within the capacity of the
common-sense outlook or of any cognitive desire which is founded therein.
This is necessary even to bring the object of philosophy before the mind’s eye.262
Further, this movement is founded in—
2. An Act, which in essence is a love with a special character.263
In the first point, Scheler points out that philosophy is separate from any “common-sense outlook,”
incapable of a reductionist outlook on human nature. The pursuit of the philosopher is ontologically
separate from the psychologist, biologist, or anthropologist. While other traditions deal with
empirical ways of seeing, philosophy presupposes love in the character of the thinker. The primacy of
love in human life arose “at the beginning of the Christian era,” and thus, since the coming of the
Son of Man, “the primal Reality was, rightly or wrongly, thought and felt to consist in an endless
activity of creative and merciful love.”264 To explore the nature of philosophy fully is beyond the
scope of this work; however, a brief look into what Scheler and von Hildebrand consider the
fundamental moral attitudes of philosophy can offer an insight into the moral attitudes of love.
There is an integral connection between love and knowledge. Scheler adds that “love, which may be
thought of as the heart and soul of the entire complex of acts, leads us in the direction of the
absolute. It thus takes us beyond objects existing only relatively to our being.”265 Love leads us toward
a sort of “ethical ascent,” in that we are drawn out of our subjectivity—our “Eigenleben” in von
Hildebrand’s view—toward the other and ultimately to God. While in Plato’s ascent the absolute
was a form (Love), in the ethico-religious Christian ascent of love—to use a term from
262 Our physical body responds to others erotically with the faculty of human desire, while our immaterial soul
responds to others metaphysically in the form of spiritual recognition. It is in this sense that our physical body perceives
the world with a “physical eye,” provided our sense of sight is operable, while our spiritual self perceives the world with
a “metaphysical eye,” or the “mind’s eye” as philosophers attempt to apprehend reality, and as lovers (with what is
considered the “heart’s eye,’ another facet of this metaphysical faculty of sight) apprehend the beloved, be it one’s
spouse, one’s family, one’s neighbor.
263 Max Scheler, On the Eternal on Man (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1972), 74.
264 Ibid., 77.
265 Ibid.
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Kierkegaard—leads us beyond the self to communion with others and with God, the absolute love
(agape). This so-called “Christian” ethico-religious ascent of love will be explored in the next section.
As evidenced the prior discussion of his essay on the nature of philosophy, Scheler provides
an outline of moral philosophy that grounds an intricate connection of the activity of love in man to
the task of philosophy. It is from love that desire for knowledge arises; a desire that Scheler and von
Hildebrand call the “philosophical eros.” This interconnection between love and philosophy, and the
idea of love as an act central to man will contribute to Scheler’s foundational thesis that, above all
other faculties—to reason, to choose, to doubt—man is a loving being. Through love, we are led to
a full awareness of the objectivity of others and the world around us. In the next section, I will
discuss the philosophical ascent of love since Plato to discover the intersection between the
concepts of the Platonic and Christian ideas of love’s ascent.
The Ascent of Love
In Plato’s Symposium, the goddess Diotima instructs Socrates on the art of love. She speaks of
an ascent of love that moves from the physical or temporal desire for the beauty of another person
to the metaphysical or eternal desire for Beauty in its transcendent form. Of this Platonic ascent
there are “serious objections which are often raised against this concept: it is a love of ideals and
not of persons and in the end it is a form of ‘spiritualized egocentrism.’”266 Furthermore, this critique
points out that, “on Plato’s view we cannot love persons for their own sakes but only to the extent
that they instantiate or realize ideals or contribute to the realization of ideals.”267 This platonic
approach to love is radically antithetical to the personalist view of the lover seeking the other in love
as ends in themselves. Rather than recognizing the irreducibility of the other, the platonic lover is
266 Vincent Brummer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
113.
267 Ibid.
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moved by a characteristic of the other—say, beauty in the physical (or metaphysical) sense—to
further recognize and love the form of Beauty.
This movement differs from the Platonic ascent, as Scheler’s account of love’s movement
can be more accurately considered an “ethical ascent,” as his concern for the other is not superseded
by greater values, like the form of Beauty or love itself. Perhaps the underpinnings of this view can
be found in each thinker’s ultimate telos of the community. For Plato, the highest of human strivings
is a life of philosophical activity, the life of the intellect. The ideal community is ruled by
philosophers—our leaders shall be rational thinkers, not affective lovers, he tells us. In fact, Plato
privileges objects of love to subjects of love: “As objects of Platonic love (beautiful bodies or political
programmes) all these are not only as good as persons, but distinctly better. Plato signifies their
superiority by placing them in the higher reaches of that escalated figure that marks the lover’s
progress, relegating love of persons to its lower levels.”268 The idea of a community comprised of
“persons in love” is the ideal republic of Scheler. This idea will be imbedded throughout this work,
and it will culminate in my thesis that, if Scheler considers the nature of love a movement, it differs
radically from Plato’s ascent in which love aims beyond the other, upward from the particular to the
universal realm of the abstract—toward beauty, goodness, and truth. The ascent of love in Scheler
and von Hildebrand, however, is a personalist movement in full light of the other, moving upward
not to the universal abstract, but ascending within our value-imbued world, and our shared world
with the beloved, to the other in God.269 Ultimately, the ordo amoris is the order of love that, for
both Scheler and von Hildebrand, points to objective value-laden reality outside our subjectivity.
Through loving in light of the ordo amoris, which is ordered from the simple vital realm to the
268 Gregory Vlastos, “Love in Plato,” in Brummer, The Model of Love, 114.
269 On this point, we detect hints of Augustine’s neo-platonism, and how his ordo amoris and idea of love rests in God.
We are to not love others as intrinsically valuable themselves, but as a utility to extend our love to God.
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complex spiritual realm of emotion, one comes to a full recognition of the beloved in light of their
unique, radical otherness.
Love as the Task of Philosophy
When confronted with the question of the philosopher’s purpose, many respond with an
etymological answer: the philosopher is a lover of wisdom. This statement derives from a blend of
the Greek terms philo (love) and sophia (wisdom)—Philosophia. Traditionally, this is as far as
philosophers have been willing to take the discussion of love’s connection to philosophy. Such an
explanation, however, falls short of an adequate explanation to the philosopher. If philosophy
historically began with “love” (philo), how does it relate to the nature of philosophy, if philosophy
has since neglected its meaning? How is love and the pursuit of truth related? German poet Heinrich
Heine waxed poetically: “The deepest truth blooms only from the deepest love.”270 Let us look at
the intricate relation between love and philosophy to see how the personal motivation and
preconditions for love may reflect the philosophical eros of lovers of wisdom.
The role of love for the philosopher has often been cast as eros, the ancient Greek word for
desire, what is now considered to resonate more as an erotic love than a desiring faculty of the
human person. Like love, the idea of the soul can be traced back to ancient times, the Platonic
daimon, responsible for the “animating” feature of man—the soul—which is also considered the seat
of eros, human desire. Max Scheler outlines the relation of love to the Platonic conception of the soul
in his essay “The Nature of Philosophy.” Plato regards philosophy as an activity of the soul. The
soul, according to Plato, is
the dynamis at the centre of the Person, the mainspring, the Something which produces the
soaring to the Real world, as the highest and purest form of what he calls eros—that is, as
270 Heinrich Heine, Pictures of Travel, (New York: Leypoldt & Bolt, 1866), 465.
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what he was later to call…the indwelling tendency of all imperfect being towards perfect
being.271
Both Scheler and von Hildebrand, like Plato, presuppose a realist conception of reality, hence the
emphasis on the desire to strive toward an absolute “perfect being.” Thus, the journey of the
philosopher begins with a stirring at the innermost center of the self, the desire toward something
higher, toward perfection. Tillich explains the relevance of Platonic eros in the discussion establishing
love as an ontological category:
Love, power, and justice are ever repeated subjects of ontology. There is hardly a leading
philosopher who does not put them into the very foundations of his thought. In Plato we
find the doctrine of eros as the power which drives to the union with the true and the good
itself… In Aristotle we find the doctrine of the universal eros which drives everything
towards the highest form, the pure actuality which world not as a cause (kinoumenon) but as
the object of love (eromenon). And the movement he describes is a movement from the
potential to the actual, from dynamis to energeia.272
This philosophical eros, as von Hildebrand states, “is at its very heart a basic form of man’s natural
longing for God, the absolute truth and the source of all truth.”273 Catholicism is the underlying
influence beneath both Scheler’s and von Hildebrand’s philosophies; the neo-platonic influence of
Augustine clearly informing their thoughts on philosophy. Therefore, rather than point to an
abstract perfection, what they had in mind was the God of Christianity. The philosophical eros strives
to unravel the truth of God, as all reality lays in Him. To understand this strikingly mystical
description of the person in relation to wisdom, we must consider that phenomenology is, for
Scheler, “an attitude of spiritual seeing...something which otherwise remains hidden.”274 This
animating feature of man (the soul) is what forms the basic connection among men, and leads one
271 Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 73.

272 Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 21-22.
274 Scheler, “Ordo Amoris” Selected Philosophical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 137.
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to seek ascending goals for the self, to move from a state of lesser perfection to higher. Scheler also
draws upon the etymology of the tradition, as “the very name ‘Philosophy’, love of essential Reality,
still bears the clear and ineffaceable stamp of Plato’s basic meaning.”275
Philosophy, then, is a love that leads one to discover, or at least, to seek that which is
essential to Reality. Such love is a distinct mark of what it means to be human; the human soul is
equipped to discuss natures, to comprehend essences, to “love” reality in a way that animals (as far
as we know) cannot. Von Hildebrand also differentiates philosophy from this so-called “common-
sense outlook,” which he considers as perceiving the object “from without.” He proposes that,
rather than this viewpoint, philosophy deals with a seeing of objects “from within,” which Scheler
references in his discussion of perceiving objects “before the mind’s eye.” The sciences cannot attain
the insight that philosophy can through its intuitive insights. The pursuit of the philosopher is
ontologically separate from the psychologist, biologist, or anthropologist.
While other traditions deal with empirical ways of seeing, philosophy presupposes love in
the character of the thinker. Therefore, akin to the Aristotelian conception of eudaimonea as an
activity of the soul, love is also a central act of man that founds philosophical activity. Scheler
defines the nature of the philosophical attitude central to all thought in the tradition: “A love-
determined movement of the innermost personal Self of a finite being toward participation in the
essential reality of all possibles.”276 This is a short but profoundly rich statement. By love-
determined movement, Scheler is referencing the philosophical eros, the desire for knowledge that
moves our self toward a “higher” realm of truth. This “higher” realm is what Scheler means by

276 Ibid.
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“essential reality.” He is admitting to philosophical realism in that there is a set truth, an “essential
reality” that is beyond our merely subjective interpretation of it.
If philosophy is a movement, when is the task as a philosopher finished? As soon as one has
completed the task of loving, one may argue—philosophy, like love, is an act that never reaches
completion. Perhaps, then, like the philosopher’s pursuit of wisdom, “Love can never be fulfilled…
for love is always to come; love is always a task, something each individual must unremittingly strive
to realize.”277 Finally, the activity of the philosopher is to be approached with triune orientation, or
what I referred to earlier as the “moral attitude” of philosophy:
1. The whole spiritual person must love absolute value and being;
2. The natural self and ego must be humbled;
3. Self-mastery must be achieved.278
Scheler considers these three “moral acts” to lead, “in systematic interaction,” toward a full
participation in the nature of reality. These acts of love, humility, and self-mastery are Scheler’s
criterion of appropriate attempts to form an accurate mode of phenomenological seeing. This trifold
criterion mirrors the thinking of von Hildebrand in much of his work when he writes of the moral
attitudes. For von Hildebrand held the “conviction that certain realities, notably philosophical truths
but also the beauty in great music and art [and persons], will only reveal themselves on the basis of
what he called ‘fundamental moral attitudes’—reverence, humility, and love.”279 Although von
Hildebrand does not write explicitly on this topic of “proper” phenomenological attitudes, he does
warn us that, without a proper orientation toward knowledge, we will succumb to the “unfortunate
277 Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press,
2001), 238.
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role that erroneous philosophical attitudes play in false common sense and inorganic reasoning
about the world.”280
It is on this point that I find an overlap between the seeking of metaphysical knowledge and
the ethical formation of the philosopher. For (in phenomenology, at least) it takes fundamental
moral attitudes to properly orient oneself toward the seeking of philosophical truth. It is only
through humility, reverence, and love (the philosophical eros) that we are led toward higher
knowledge, to the attainment of truth. Ultimately, both Scheler and von Hildebrand have formulated
a phenomenology that places love at the center of man and at the “heart” of the philosophical task.
What I aimed to outline is the intricate connection of the activity of love in man to the task of
philosophy. This interconnection between love and philosophy illustrates the relevance of “love” as
the philosophical eros to the task of philosophy.
Loving and Being
Thus far in this work, I have illustrated the concept of the human person and the
phenomenological act of loving. As love is a spiritual act of the person, the interrelation between
persons in love leads to a profound knowledge of the other qua person. We are constituted by a
radically unique, irreducible personal center; “we live out of our personal center, we never lose
ourselves in the beings with which we have to do; we remain intact as persons, standing in ourselves
in relation to all other things.”281 We enter in communion with others and yet retain ourselves in
the process; there can be no loss of self in the communion of love when our self is radically other
from the beginning:

281 Crosby, Personalist Papers, 153.
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I and the other remain irreducibly two persons throughout the most heartfelt act of
sympathizing with the other…it implies the irreducible two-ness of myself and the other.
The same holds for love; it too is a properly personal act and so there can be no question of
any amalgamation of two persons loving each other. Their irreducibility to each other, their
inalienable two-ness is presupposed and in fact powerfully lived from within in all authentic
love.282
In love there is an interpenetration of selves that retains an “inalienable two-ness.” The individual
person is irreducible qua person and qua lover. There can never be a collapse of the self in authentic
love. “As the perceiver’s insight into the being of a person deepens,” our knowledge and our love
“becomes more individual, more ineffable and at the same time more certain.”283 There is an
interplay of knowledge and love in the spiritual act of love extended to another person. In the
interpenetration of selves in love, the “person is present as loving, and where value is revealed as
person…the structure of the correlation or dialogue is inexhaustible in its richness of meaning.”284
Love leads one to discover new meaning in the other person. Love will, as Luther points out,
reveal itself as a spontaneous, creative act in whose execution a person is most fully present
and in whose movement other persons are discovered as persons, that is, in the full richness
of their unique presence. The creative relational unity of persons in love will reveal a
dynamic structure of Being.285
Love is a creative drawing of the self, an awakening to the self and the other. To know, apprehend,
experience another in a way that nears an adequate or meaningful relation is only achieved through
love. The complexity of the human person demands a relation that is spiritual, hence the profoundly
personal element of love. Returning to our epistemology of the heart:
Scheler conceives of knowledge as an ontological relation of ‘participation’ in which a Being

transcends itself to participate in the selfevident ‘whatness’ or ‘quiddity’ of another Being.
282 Crosby, Personalist Papers, 153-154.

284 Ibid., 161.
285 Ibid., 42.
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This self-transcendence in which a Being opens itself towards another Being in order to
partake in its Being is what is called Love.286
This transcendence of the self, this interpenetration of being is what Scheler and von Hildebrand
consider precisely what love to be, on an ontological level. Retaining the concept of the person as a
“mystery” is necessary in order to understand the essentially deep interpenetration of selves that is
requisite of a phenomenological understanding of persons:
One can say then, that the deeper one penetrates into human being, and Scheler will admit
that such penetration is possible only in love, the more a human being appears, unique,
irreplaceable, which is to say individuated. Scheler means that a human being is more
individual, the more he is intimately personal.287
There is no possible “objective” way of understanding love or persons, for love and human subjects
are “mysteries” to be intuited, and not “problems” to be probed. To take a cold, distant, or
eminently rational approach to a notion such as love or personhood is to overlook the existential
import of such concerns. For Scheler, “[t]o reach another as a thinking being is not yet to reach him
as a person. A person is not only one who thinks, but also one who wills, believes, feels, loves and
so on.”288 Descartes was incorrect to reduce the human person to the ego cogito. To begin with the
aforementioned approach is to begin with only a single facet of what it means to be human. The task
of philosophy, much like the task of the lover, is to understand the object of our philosophical eros in
the fullness of its mystery. And while person and love are mysteries that perhaps will never and can
never be fully intuited, we will come closer by participating in such profound mysteries as
286 Vandenberghe, “Sociology of the Heart,” 29.

288 Ibid., 51.
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phenomenologically constituted persons, for “loving is incisively precise in its direct penetration to
the core of being, where being opens itself in its full inexhaustible dynamic richness.”289
What, then, does a community of “persons in love” look like? In a communion of love are
“all persons, human and divine, involved in a world, in the psycho-physical, in the personal.”290
And this loving communion recognizes not just what is, but that which “is fundamentally
unfinished,” for the task of person is a continual becoming. The invitation to a loving community
“becomes an invitation or a task for man to become who he is, as he is and can be¸in this world with
these persons.”291 That is the essence of love, an invitation to become what they are, to fully
actualize their potentiality in the direction of the good, in a community of “persons in love.”

290 Ibid., 168.
291 Ibid., 168.
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Let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.
Augustine
Conclusion: The Meaning of Love
Love’s presence seems to imbue all of human life with meaning. Love has the power to
awaken us, to pull us beyond our mundane existence, to usher us on the path toward profound
communion with others. For Marion, “if what I love is lacking, for me who loves, if therefore
reciprocal polarization is suspended, even for an instant, even if for an innocuous motive, nothing
less than the entire world is immediately and completely struck with vanity.”292 A love broken or
unreciprocated can starve life of all meaning to the point of desperation, even death.
With or without love, our world becomes transfigured. With the advent of love, we discover
new value in others and in ourselves, and our life is imbued with new meaning. With the demise of
love, we can be torn from this newfound reality, and even faced with the prospect of existential
vanity. Whether we find or lose our love, the fact remains: we, the beloved, and our world are
transfigured by our connection with value.
I wish to return to the words of von Hildebrand, which I feel capture, in essence, the nature
of the person’s love for another:
Falling in love is essentially to be granted a vision of the beauty of another person’s

individuality. This vision fills us with reverence, and simultaneously with a powerful
attraction for the object whose beauty has been perceived. Literally, to love another person
means to see his beauty, to discover the secret of his personality. This vision as we have
called it, is so convincing that we say, “Never shall I forget it.”293
The core of von Hildebrand’s philosophy of love, which encompasses his philosophy of the human
person, is how we perceive the other. Love leads us toward humility in our openness and sensitivity
292 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 136.

293 Von Hildebrand, The Art of Living, 63-64.
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toward others. This vision of love reveals the beloved person in a new light. With this vision, we see
this person’s “true face, his unique beauty: with the eyes of love, [we are] granted a ‘Tabor
vision.’”294 This apprehension of beauty is not of any sort of material or empirically measurable
observation. This vision is beyond the vital sphere of perception. The Tabor vision “from within”
surpasses the scientific observation of the impersonal human body, which is, ultimately a seeing
“from without.” The foundation of Scheler and von Hildebrand’s philosophy is a profound
philosophical perception of the other—a view of the neighbor, or the romantic other with a spiritual
sight grounded in love, an essential seeing “from within.” This love is for the other in full light of
their intrinsic value, a value-response to their unique and unrepeatable self.
Love is a reverent appreciation of the other’s being as such, a response to the transcendent
value of another person in terms of themselves as a thou, in full light of the other’s personhood.
Love is “directed to the totality of the person loved.”295 This response to the other in “love is a self-
transcending value-response; I de-center myself towards the other when I seek out the beauty of the
other and love her in virtue of her beauty.”296 This attitude of reverence is the cornerstone of one’s
love for the other. This love involves the full self—the cognitive, affective, and volitional aspects of
man—as knowledge, emotion, and will in coordination comprise the intentional act of loving.
294 In her book By Love Refined, Alice von Hildebrand refers to this “Tabor vision,” which she calls a “great gift” and a
seeing into the beloved’s true self:
Those who love have been granted the special privilege of seeing with incredible intensity the beauty of the one
they love - while others see primarily his exterior acts, and particularly his failings. At this moment, you see
Michael more clearly than does any other living human being … Do you recall the Gospel story of the
Transfiguration? The apostles went with Jesus to the top of Mount Tabor, and suddenly Jesus became radiant
and his garments a dazzling white. For the first time, the apostles were allowed to see Jesus directly, clothed in
His glory as God. He was transfigured before them (Alice von Hildebrand, By Love Refined, 12).
296 John F. Crosby, “Personal Individuality,” 2.
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Emotion belongs—passion, fear, hatred, and love—to the study of philosophy just as much
as reason. A person feels as much as he thinks; it is argued that the basis of language itself came
from the passions, from the drive toward human expression that became manifest long before the
logical infrastructure of the spoken word.297 We may know causally the effect of this power
constituent of love by its effects on our body and our psyche. Studies in neuroscience have shown
us the human physiological response to others, the chemical response to “love” in the brain.
However, the corporeal affect is not the sufficient cause of love. Even a full and complete
identification of the physical reaction of attraction is not the final answer in our quest to know what
the nature of love is. Love cannot be reduced to sensible or vital human feeling. Love’s effect is
experienced cognitively, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. We must also consider love’s power
teleologically, as love can imbue our lives with new meaning as a result of the theme of love: value.
The relevance of love’s telos is correlative of the central theme of this work in placing the heart at the
level of the mind and will.
Love is a dialectic between loving and knowing. We approach the other with a certain
amount of knowledge, and an attitude oriented toward love, we seek to know and to love
simultaneously. One cannot prioritize love over knowledge, nor can one prioritize knowledge over
love. Our love of the other is an irreducible experience that, from the beginning, as Drummond tells us,
involves concurrent cognitive and affective human faculties.
The element of willing, of commitment is the final point of difference between love and all
other pseudo-forms of love, including attraction, lust, affection, and other feelings often mistaken
for love in its true form. Through an understanding of the account of love posed in this work, the
297 This idea is found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of
New England, 1998).
105
various forms of pseudo-loves—what love is not—can be recognized. Furthermore, this analysis of
love grounded a discussion of the difficulty in affirming the ontological reality of self-love. What is
often confused as a “love” of self is perhaps best considered self-esteem, affirmation, or faith in
oneself to become what we are.
One of the main themes of this work is the role of fundamental moral attitudes in both our
life as moral agents and in our life as lovers. Repeatedly throughout this work and throughout each
of their works respectively, Scheler and von Hildebrand discuss the importance of moral attitude as
the foundation of everything from our approach to others to our approach to philosophy. Through
cultivating such attitudes as reverence, humility, and love, we properly orient ourselves toward
others, toward the task of philosophy, and toward the task of loving. It is my hope that philosophy
moves away from biases inherited by our forefathers—from the Greeks to the Positivists—in order
to reach a new level of understanding of the human person in light of our true self, comprised of
emotion, will, and reason. Though a thorough understanding of love we come to realize how
important it is to begin to understand ourselves and others, for it is “only though love [that] we can
attain to the mystery of individuality in a person, that is, get a glimpse of the unrepeatable personal
essence of a person.”298
Without love we can only grasp a person at the level of the essential; through love the other
becomes fully revealed. Love heightens our receptivity to others and the world around us. We are, as
with the philosophical eros, drawn out of our subjective existence (Eigenleben) and into an
intersubjective dialectic of love with others and the world around us. Hence, the profound affect
that the fundamental moral attitudes—especially love—has on us as both neighbors and
philosophers. Through our love of the other, we are profoundly brought to recognize the individual
298 Crosby, Personalist Papers, 161.
106
as worthy of being loved as a human person. This gift is the key that unlocks our innermost self and
our fundamental task as human persons: to love others.
Let us recall the task of love for both Scheler and von Hildebrand, of which “the essence of
love as an edifying and uplifting [erbauende und aufbauende] action in and over the world.”299 Here we
find a fundamental parallel between Scheler and Kierkegaard: love as an essentially edifying. Love is
both an emotional response to another on the basis of value and an ethico-religious act of the will.
We give ourselves to other, resulting in an edifying and uplifting mutual spiritual growth. In love, we
are called to this uplifting task: “If I had loved as I should have loved, then I would have been co-
responsible for the growth in the power of another to love, and thus co-responsible for the greater
love that he would have shown throughout his life in all of his relations with innumerable
others.”300 The phenomenon of love, as I have shown, cannot be reserved for oneself. For love to
be edifying, it must be a mutual, for-the-other, intentional act.
It can be spoken of both metaphysically—an ontologically real phenomenon—and in the
sense of an edifying task. Love is an enduring task, “always a dynamic becoming, a growing, a
welling up of things in the direction of their archetype, which resides in God.”301 Through climbing
the “ladder of love,” we ascend to new heights, recognizing the value of others as fundamentally
lovable human persons. We become members of a loving community, of “persons in love,” as we
participate in the world of values. We make ourselves a “gift” to others with full awareness of the
fundamental moral attitudes—love, humility, reverence—and through our participation in this
value-laden reality, we begin to truly understand ourselves and others as loving beings: amo, ergo sum.
299 Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” 109.

300 John F. Crosby, Personalist Papers, 177-178.
301 Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” 109.
107
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110

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Honors Thesis

The Nature of Love:

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................ vii

In loving memory of Jake Gibbs.

My family for allowing me to become who I am,

Tyler for nourishing my philosophical eros and awakening my understanding of personalism,

question neglected, ironically, by philosophers—those considered by definition to be lovers of

inquiry through exploring the possibility of a unified philosophy of love.

consider reductionistic or naturalistic explanations as to what constitutes love—from biological

intentionality of human love. These works will be examined in detail below.

examine my philosophical question in all its complexity and richness.

Furthermore, I wish to acknowledge my personal communication with scholars in

Crosby has enriched my philosophical understanding of love. In continuing my correspondence with

has given me guidance and suggestions on improving my research. He provided me with an

his own philosophical lectures—which aren’t readily available to students at my university.

today—a task I seek to enhance in this thesis.

Chapter One: The Role of the Affective Sphere

the philosophy of love in the works of Scheler and Hildebrand.

the phenomenology of emotions may help us understand the phenomenon of love.

the nature of the human person.

beginning encompasses cognitive and affective—and, I might add, practical—dimensions.”9 It is

5 Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart, 3.

tantamount to an inauthentic form of objectivity.”13

Men without Chests

11 Drummond, “Feelings, Emotions, and Wertnehmungen,” 3.

positivists included the pursuit of metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics.

unrestrained passion, but of emotion as a sanctioned center of affectivity. I speak of “emotion” as

not a fleeting physiological response to an object, but of emotion as representative of an entire

intentionality: there is no object of such feeling-states, no specific response to a specific external

distinguishing it from the lower irrational part.”20

17 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 1.

The Tenor of the Heart

23 Von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 54.

heart’s response when it is strictly a willed ethic?

aestheticism, “a merry-go-round of the heart which spins only to spin again.”27

25 Von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 54.

enter communion with others.

the effect of opening up our affectivity to others.

Rehabilitation of the Heart

28 Von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 54.

Hildebrand, “what is authentically personal cannot be reduced to artificial rationality.”35

affective sphere, into the phenomenon of love.

Chapter Two: The Ontology of Love

love as an ontologically real phenomenon. Whether love is intangible, illusory, meaningless, or

they became rational qualities of being.”41

42 Von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?, 153-154.

phenomenologists seek in the pursuit of philosophical knowledge of reality, especially in our

response to the personal value of the other.

43 Von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?, 154.

essence of philosophical perception. Regarding such differences in perception is to realize the

difference in position between the philosopher and the scientist:

considers this an attitude “antithetical to love.”

46 Von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?, 133-134

with a willing that is beyond our primitive human faculty of love.

communion bound by love. It is an experience that is reflected in a play of shared moments, in a

this shared “we.”

50 Von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 334.

characteristics of personality; however, to love a person for a set of characteristics is inaccurate.

itself. In an example cited by Fulton Sheen,