Philosophy of Love and Family
Love is the most intimate experience in human life, and one of the hardest to put into words. Everyone loves, yet few ask what love really is. Why does one person find himself or herself in another? And why is love so often felt as something beyond time?
This series explores the nature of love philosophically. For Hegel, love is “being with oneself in another”: I am no longer an isolated individual, because I recognize myself in the one I love, and become more whole through it. Love is both giving up and gaining; it limits freedom and is at the same time freedom’s fullest realization. It is this unity of opposites that makes love one of the deepest forms of Spirit.
From there we turn to passion and commitment, the individual and the union, love and marriage, the family as an ethical community, and how love endures and deepens in the ordinary course of daily life. These essays offer no dating techniques. They help you see the inner structure of love, for only when we understand what love is can we truly know how to love, and how to protect what we love.