Love,That Indispensable Supplement: Irigaray and Kant on Love and Respect

Is love essential to ethical life, or merely a supplement? In Kant's view, respect and love, as duties, are in tension with each other because love involves drawing closer and respect involves drawing away. By contrast, Irigaray says that love and respect do not conflict because love as passion must also involve distancing and we have a responsibility to love. I argue that love, understood as passion and based on respect, is essential to ethics.     

MINDING OTHERS' BUSINESS

What do we do when a loved one is seriously messing up her life? While Kantianism describes the predicament nicely as a tension between love and respect, it is not well‐suited to resolving it. Kantian respect prevents minding another's business in cases where love demands it. Virtue ethics can readily explain the predicament as a tension between the virtues of sympathy and humility. Moreover, by changing the focus away from the other as a setter of ends and toward the would‐be‐benefactor's own degree of practical wisdom, virtue ethics permits a more nuanced set of loving responses to self‐destructive people.     

Living Sola Fide: Features of Religious Recognition

This article discusses the life of faith and forensic justification as related to some new issues in social theory, especially Axel Honneth's notions of love, respect, and esteem. The article is critical of virtue ethics and recommends an ethics of vocation as a path toward equal respect and individual social esteem. The article also discusses why Lutherans consider faith (or even faith alone) rather than love as a proper starting‐point of this path.     

On the difficult case of loving life: Plato's Symposium and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence

A simple but significant historical fact has been overlooked in interpretations of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. In making eternal recurrence the standard for the affirmation and love of life, Nietzsche accepts an understanding of love developed in Plato's Symposium: love means ‘wanting to possess the good forever’. I argue that Plato develops two distinct types of love, which remain in tension with one another. I then show that a corresponding tension arises in Nietzsche's work when we consider eternal recurrence as the love of life. By making love central in the phrase ‘love of life’, and by allowing Plato's thoughts on love to inform the love of life that Nietzsche expresses in the thought of eternal recurrence, I show that Nietzsche's dramatic presentations of the eternal recurrence do not present us with a test, but in revealing an incompatibility between loving something in life and loving life in its entirety, they present the tragic conflict in the task of life affirmation.     

TWO FORMS OF LOVE: The Problem of Preferential Love in Kierkegaard's Works of Love

The duty to love one's neighbor as oneself is at the core of Kierkegaard's Works of Love. In this book, Kierkegaard unfolds the meaning of neighborly love and claims that it is the only valid form of true love. He contrasts between neighborly love and preferential love (which includes romantic love and friendship) and criticizes the latter for being nothing but a form of selfishness. However, in some contexts, Kierkegaard seems to acknowledge the significance of preferential love relationships, and does not disallow them. Therefore, his understanding of preferential love appears to be confused and inconsistent. My essay discusses the tension in Kierkegaard's position regarding preferential love, and by presenting recent readings of Works of Love, it asks whether this tension is resolvable and offers a suggestion for a possible solution.     

Sich verlieben und die große Liebe

Although romantic love plays an important role for many people, empirical studies on romantic love have only been carried out recently. This article describes the results of a questionnaire on romantic love completed by 606 volunteers. The results show that nearly everyone has had the personal experience of falling in love at least once. According to the reports in the questionnaire, men and women do not differ with respect to the frequency and to the velocity with which they fall in love. Women, however, more often believe that their respective partner has fallen in love at a relatively early stage, whilst men believe that their respective partner has fallen in love only later. Both men and women exhibit distinct physical and emotional phenomena when they have fallen in love – women more pronouncedly than men. The quality of the relationship between men and women appears to be better if the partners have initially fallen in love with each other. From the point of view of couple therapy, the quality and quantity of being in love appear to be less important than the methods of coping with it, i.e. accepting that the initial romantic love period may not stay forever but must be replaced by another type of love, or accepting that a couple can also have a highly satisfactory relationship, although there was no initial period of romantic love.     

Planetary Love: Ecofeminist Perspectives on Globalization

This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans).     

Love as a Starting Point for Pastoral Theological Reflection

This article draws on recent work in the theology of love to propose steps toward the development of a pastoral theology of love in order to inform the practice of pastoral care. A pastoral theology of love is a necessary foundation for an ecclesial practice of pastoral care that promotes growth in love. The article defines love and addresses key issues in the theology of love, namely, human agency and the analogies that exist or do not exist between human and divine love and the concept of growth in love, or sanctification. The article concludes by proposing and sketching some key features of a pastoral theology of love for pastoral practice.     

Love,Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts (Velleman and Bagnoli) to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un‐Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals.     

Filiality,Compassion, and Confucian Democracy

Ren, the Confucian virtue par excellence, is often explained on two different accounts: on the one hand, filiality, a uniquely Confucian social-relational virtue; on the other hand, commiseration innate in human nature. Accordingly there are two competing positions in interpreting ren: one that is utterly positive about the realization of universal love by the graduated extension of filial love, and the other that sees the inevitable tension between the particularism of filial love and the universalism of compassionate love and champions the latter in that filial love appears to create a serious obstacle to modernizing Confucianism. Nevertheless, both interpretations agree that compassion, given its universal and humanist implications, can be unquestionably conducive to the modern project of ‘Confucian democracy’. This paper counters this shared view by arguing that in order to make Confucian democracy culturally meaningful and politically viable, it must accommodate uniquely Confucian relational virtues, particularly filiality.     

Construct validation of a triangular love scale

This article presents a construct validation of a love scale based upon a triangular theory of love. The article opens with a review of some of the major theories of love, and with a discussion of some of the major issues in love research. Next it briefly reviews selected elements of the triangular theory of love, according to which love can be understood as comprising three components—intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Then the article presents two studies constituting the construct validation of the love scale. The construct validation comprises aspects of internal validation—determination of whether the internal structure of the data is consistent with the theory—and external validation—determination of whether the scale based on the theory shows sensible patterns of correlations with external measures. The data are generally, but not completely supportive of the utility of the triangular love scale. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

'The Christian as Christ to the Neighbour': On Luther's Theology of Love

Abstract: This article explores the theology of love advanced by Martin Luther, relating it to his account of the presence of Christ by faith in other people, and to his biblical expositions. In outlining Luther's contrast between the love of God and the human loves, it is argued that Luther nonetheless is still able to value human love. Finally, the relationship between love and faith in Luther is described: love is chief among the many gifts of God that we receive by faith.     

Islam and Christianity between tolerance and acceptance

Basic to the understanding of Christianity and Islam as faith‐identities are their principles of ultimate power or authority. For both, ultimate power belongs to God alone, and human authority must reflect this divine power. In both a tension exists between these two powers which determined the course of their respective histories and interaction with one another. While in both religions tolerance is a fundamental principle based on the imperative of love and respect for human life and dignity, the Qur'an clearly advocates mutual acceptance and cooperation among the people of the Book: Jews, Christians and Muslims. This is evidenced in the term ahl al‐kitab, the family of the Book, which includes all the children of Abraham.     

Communication for Life in Cyberspace

Cyberspace communication is a key driving force of the neoliberal globalization that has led to worldwide crisis. Despite some positive perspectives, cyberspace communication has played a crucial role in the dominance of global markets by transnational corporations. The ethical foundations of the problematics of cyberspace communication lie in a social Darwinism that leads to ruthless competition based on egoistic morality. This article posits the notion of love as an alternative ethics, drawing on perspectives of Christian love (especially those of US ethicist Paul Ramsey) as unselfish love for others, as well as on East Asian traditions of love (such as Buddhist compassion, Confucian jen, and Korean jung). The article argues that unselfish love offers a perspective to overcome an anthropocentric perspective of communication. In this way, human beings can build a community with all living beings and develop harmonious relationships with them to live together on the earth.     

Fred Rogers and children’s spirituality: valuing the uniqueness of others and caring for others

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was a safe haven advocating kindness, empathy, and caring for all children. Making everyone feel loved, Fred Rogers captured the attention and curiosity of young children across America with his compassionate manner, intentional listening skills, and respect for all individuals by encouraging children to feel good about themselves. This article explores the ministry of Fred Rogers and how his approach to children's spirituality focused on valuing the uniqueness of each individual, human connections through play, and caring for others by recognizing spiritual moments and teaching the whole child while appreciating the uniqueness of others. His genuine and patient presence had a healing quality, creating a world for children in which real learning and unconditional love could flourish. The messages of tolerance and acceptance by recognizing and respecting other's beliefs, and unconditional love and care, were beacons of hope for all.     

Considering love: Implications for critical political psychology

Within psychology, love is typically understood in fundamentally psychological terms. Even those critical psychologists who have interrogated the sociopolitical dimensions of love seem unable to break from conceptions of love as romantic, familial, and/or private. In this article, I argue that in understanding love as a disposition, rather than a feeling, political psychologists are able to bring nuance to mainstream psychology's engagement with the emancipatory potentialities of love while, simultaneously, instating a critical reorientation of political psychology. To this end, I offer two pathways through which political psychologists can work with love: rooting counter-hegemonies in the love ethic, and enunciating love knowledges across contexts. I conclude by reflecting on future directions for critical political psychologists who are concerned with a multifaceted, materialist, psychopolitical and contextually-bound notion of love.     

Love and expansion of the self: The state of the model

The self-expansion model of love developed out of a confluence of research on attraction and arousal, Eastern psychology, motivation theory, and the social psychology of personal relationships. The model treats love (the desire for a relationship with a particular other) as arising from a desire to expand the self by including that other in the self, as well as by associating expansion with that particular other. First, the model is described, including its function as a source of heuristically important metaphors for common human experiences of love and its unique focus in relation to other approaches to love. The remainder of the article examines its application, including supporting research, to predictors of falling in love, motivations for unrequited love, consequences of falling in love, love as including each other in each other's self, and how love changes (and how it can be maintained) in long-term relationships. The conclusion examines current trends in which the model serves as both a very general integration of useful perspectives and as a set of precise mini-theories.     

Volo ut sis: Arendt and Augustine

This article focuses on Hanna Arendt's use of love in her writings. More specifically, I contend that Arendt's use of volo ut sis (I want you to be) and labeling of this type of love as Augustinian, takes what Augustine meant by "love" too far.