Abstract
James Hart has recently developed a sophisticated view of the exceptional character of love among the emotions as targeting “the most inward center” of the Other apart from any of her distinguishing attributes. This paper argues, against Hart, for three claims: (1) the target of love is not the propertyless ipseity of the Other but the concrete person over time; (2) love of a particular person, while not founded on her distinguishing attributes in the sense that those attributes justify my love, nevertheless presupposes certain attributes that motivate the loving attitude and that the relevant attributes vary according to the type of love in question; and (3) agapic love, which appears to be Hart’s model and ideal for love, might be the only kind of love that is not merely motivated by certain attributes but justified by them as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Although more complicated cases wherein the feeling or emotion is rooted in another axiological property are also possible, these in turn will point back to simpler apprehensions of an object’s or situation’s non-axiological properties.
- 2.
For Husserl, a presentation is a perception or a judgment that presents the object in a determinate manner, that is, with a particular set of descriptive properties. Husserl calls such experiences “objectifying acts” (Hua XIX/1, 500–501; 1970, 639). But the term “presentation” can also refer more narrowly to the content or “matter” of an experience that accounts for the object being presented in a determinate manner by that experience (Hua XIX/1, 474–76, 514; 1970, 620–21, 648). The significance of this narrower sense of “presentation” is that experiences that are not themselves objectifying acts must be founded not on another act, but on a matter—a presentational or descriptive content—of the sort that belongs to an objectifying act. Put another way, then, the foundational claim states that any act founded on a presentation comprises a matter identical to that of the objectifying intention that presents the merely descriptive features of the object in just that determinate manner present in the founded act as well. Since in Husserl’s later, explicitly transcendental philosophy, the “matter” of a presentation becomes the “sense” belonging to the intentional correlate of the experience (Husserl III/1, 298; 1983, 310), we can state the claim as it appears in the main text.
- 3.
Hart (2009a, 106) claims that this self-awareness is prior to object-awareness, but he does not spell out the senses of priority.
- 4.
I shall not enter Hart’s discussion of meontology. I believe he is correct that ontology, for Husserl, has to do with the objects of our intentions and that the subject is beyond that ontology (Hart 2009a, 89, 104–105). For that reason, importing traditional ontological language is questionable. I am also less inclined to think of the subject in terms of the “negative ontology” that is meontology with its gnostic overtones. I prefer to say that there is a philosophical discipline, along the lines of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, that investigates the proper categories in terms of which to speak of the subject, including and especially its transcendental dimension; cf. Drummond 2009a. This philosophical discipline, for Husserl, just is transcendental phenomenology.
- 5.
Drummond 2009a, 31–46.
- 6.
- 7.
For a more detailed account of the justification of affective experiences, see Drummond 2009b, 372–76.
- 8.
Cf. Drummond 2006b, 14–15.
- 9.
- 10.
Rønnow-Rasmussen (2011, 68–78) distinguishes “identity-involving” from “non-identity-involving” evaluative attitudes.
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Drummond, J.J. (2015). Exceptional Love?. In: Ubiali, M., Wehrle, M. (eds) Feeling and Value, Willing and Action. Phaenomenologica, vol 216. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10326-6_4
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