Notes on the Order of Love (II)

The inquiry about love, in this case, is of a political nature -in that it is not a neutral question of aesthetic theory about the value in general of love as a sentiment as for example in poetry and art, it is not the concept of love alone as the result of methodological reduction to the simplest possible factors or to the most basic atomic units in the style of the "separation of the omelette into the eggs again" typical of Biblical criticism, call it phenomenology or ontology; there is no quest after the things themselves or the things by themselves. The main issue at stake is the relatedness of this "emotion" as a bridge between actual everyday people in their experiecing of the world, how are they affected by it in the most general possible sense and not in the specific tense of their own individual relations to themselves; for in discussing the problem of love it has been an age-old Christian sin to become oblivious of the world as the field par excellent where the works of men are bequested to posterity and where their deeds are remembered. Here one should remark that while it is true that value and meaning remain philosophical categories and terminologies, they do not constitute the main bulk of the aim, which is ever since Plato left as truth, and again ever since Plato, not left a neutral field.

Thus, the question of love retains an orientation as a question of the nature of the world in a non-hierarchical manner and also a question of the value and situatedness of experience. Firstly I attempted to tackle withal, following Arendt in that social concerns cannot be too tainted by politics in the rationalist sense, meaning, these are not concerns of public administration nor of public life and they must remained confined to the realm of individual acts of love. There is already some clarity in that love is the socializing factor par excellence, through which men leave their fundamental existential solitude and are able to enter the world, either instrumentally or in itself, to derive pleasure or joy from it, the difficulties arise when we are comfronted with the again lonely life of men in particular and how without the relatedness to God, love can be experienced in private either as usage of something/somebody or enjoyment for its own sake, or both. If sentiments are only public -this is already an oxymoron, then we fall again back into the solipsism of "mood" in lieu of emotion, therefore all emotions turn into something necessarily socialized and become unauthentic for the private self, whoever he is. If emotions at all unauthentic they do not constitute a driving force for human beings to enter the world of experience, because all sentiments then are necessarily obligated to be expressed in the same terms that objective political opinions are and become thus irrelevant as a passage-way to enter the world since they are construed only in the objectivity of the whole of human relationships in this network that since Augustin we call the world, and therefore all works and deeds of men are absolutely external to their condition as conscious selves and would construe themselves only in public life and this would immediately render the general character of thinking into an absolutely pointless a priori that at any event could be grasped only upon entering the world and invalidate all the pre-conditions of experience, such as the basic facts with which one enters the world as an individual and leaves it once again as a denizen thereof.