Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Love

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Liebe

Love is, at the core of the understanding advanced in this book, the affirmation of the person for their own sake. It is no mere emotion, no feeling alongside others, but the only adequate response to the personhood and the dignity of the other. Wojtyła’s personalistic norm formulates it thus: the human person is to be affirmed and loved for their own sake. Love is therefore nothing superadded; it springs from the insight into what the human being of itself is.

In the third dimension of personhood, love shows itself as self-transcendence: the human being passes beyond itself, it opens itself to the other as a someone, it gives itself away to a Thou. Spaemann stresses that without love there could be no true community of persons and, in the end, no persons at all. Genuine giving presupposes genuine receiving and vice versa — the interpersonal relation is essentially reciprocal (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 238—260).

Conjugal love between man and woman brings to light the full depth of human personhood: two persons give themselves to one another — with body and soul, wholly and without reserve. They do not merge into a single person, for each remains an autonomous being — yet they interpenetrate one another spiritually. The child is the bodily gift of conjugal love: a new, unique, unrepeatable autonomous being, a new person. Opposed to self-transcendence stands the curvatio in se ipsum — the egoistic curving in upon oneself, the constant circling about oneself as a failure of freedom.

Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What is human personhood? (esp. 4.7.5), Chapter 1

Ordo Amoris

The objective rank-order of values — from sensory values through vital values and spiritual values up to the values of the holy. Max Scheler formulated it: “Whoever has the ordo amoris of a human being has the human being.” In this sentence the insight is condensed that the person is determined not only by their thinking but, most profoundly, by their love — by that upon which they set their heart, what they affirm and to what they bind themselves.

The four levels of value are irreducibly distinct and hierarchically ordered: the sensory values (agreeable/disagreeable) stand at the lowest place; above them the vital values (noble/base, vital); then the spiritual values (beautiful/ugly, just/unjust, true/false); and at the highest place the values of the holy. This hierarchy is no arbitrary positing but an objective order discernible in the intuition of essence. A higher value is not merely “worth more” than a lower one — it is of another kind, irreducibly distinct.

As a archphenomenon, the ordo amoris is not derivable from simpler principles. The person experiences in affectivity — in feeling, in preferring and setting aside — the rank-order of values. This feeling of value is no mere emotion but a genuine organ of cognition: in it the objective rank of values is disclosed, much as truth appears in intellectual insight.

The personalist-ontological significance of the ordo amoris lies in the fact that the moral maturity of the person depends essentially on whether they enact the objective rank-order of values in their loving and acting. Whoever prefers lower values to higher ones — say, sensory enjoyment to justice — inverts the order of value and fails their personal vocation. Beauty, justice, truth, and the holy each demand a response befitting their rank.

Ontological classification

Ontological relations:

Personal Love

The most perfect expression of relational personhood; it comprises intentio benevolentiae (benevolence) and intentio unionis (the striving toward union). Personal love leads not to the ontological dissolution of the persons but to reciprocal self-gift and spiritual interpenetration (Hildebrand).

Personal love presupposes free will — for love that is not free is no love. It is at once archphenomenon and interpersonal relation: as archphenomenon it is reducible to nothing impersonal; as interpersonal relation it realizes itself between an I and a Thou. The personalistic norm — the person is to be affirmed and loved for their own sake — is the only adequate value-response to the being of the person (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 198–210).

Ontological classification:

Ontological relations:

Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Scheler, Max (~1916/1933): Ordo Amoris. Posthumous papers, published in: Schriften aus dem Nachlass vol. 1. Bouvier. (German)

See also

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