What is love?

If one wants to go beyond this ambiguity of self-love, it is necessary to consider attentively what love is what “self” is. How can the “self” be a real good, capable of determining an authentic love? We thus soon find ourselves in the midst of immense problems of fundamental importance. Husserl himself recognized this and did not hesitate to affirm that “love in the authentic sense is one of the main problems of phenomenology, and not in its abstract singularity and as an isolated phenomenon, but, on the contrary, as a universal problem”.

We cannot, of course, treat such topics here in an exhaustive manner, but shall content ourselves with an examination of certain central points of research. If we first take a look at what is love, we are obliged to recognize its extreme richness and multiple significations. Is not love, as born in the heart of man, like a desire, an impetus toward what we consider good-whether that good is a present sensitive good which incites in us an affective passionate state, or a spiritual good, a lovable person who attracts us? Love seizes us in all that we are, our sensitive and imaginative being, our spiritual being. It can be at the same time instinctive and passionate, imaginative, and spiritual. It is as though it were beyond all these distinctions we make when we analyze our diverse knowledge(sensitive, imaginative, rational, intellectual), because it is man, in all that he is (sensitive, imaginative, rational), who loves. Love tends to go beyond these distinctions, and, moreover, it hardly bears them. Nevertheless, in developing itself, love itself is going to follow these diverse orientations; it will be more or less passionate, more or less imaginative, more or less spiritual. In claiming total unity, it develops in diversity. Love then is a tendency which orientates “toward”, while uniting to the good that attracts us.

br. Marie-Dominique Philippe o.p.