Erotic Love and the Value of the Beloved

Abstract

The phenomenon of love is an oft-discussed theme in early phenomenology. Scheler, Hildebrand, Husserl, and others approached this theme in their own ways. Among them, the psychological analysis of love by Else Voigtländer is characterized by focusing on what she calls “erotic love” - the equivalent of what most contemporary philosophers of love call “romantic love.” This chapter introduces and discusses her psychological observations and arguments about love, centered on her 1933 paper “Bemerkungen zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” (Notes on the Psychology of the Sentiments), where Voigtländer conceives of love as a kind of sentiment (Gesinnung) in Pfänder’s sense. Therefore, I will briefly introduce Pfänder’s theory of sentiment as a backdrop. Then, I will show how Voigtländer conceived of erotic love, with a focus on her claims about the relationship between the experience of erotic love and the value of the beloved. According to her, the value of the beloved is a complex consisting of qualitative values rooted in the objective properties of the object and subjective values projected onto the object through our experience of love. After the explication of Voigtländer's account, its historical and philosophical significances will be evaluated.