Love and/as the Second-Personal Relation
摘要
Preparing the ground for this book’s final chapters, this chapter rearticulates the complex relation between the I-You relation and the I-It relation in terms of love. Seeking recourse to Martin Buber and Simone Weil, it presents love not as a feeling, desire, or personal bond, but as an existential force that sustains the very relation between I and You. It is argued that while love thus understood is in a certain sense ‘there anyway’, it is of utmost moral importance whether it is affirmed and embraced or rejected and denied. In the former case, one responds lovingly, while in the latter, the response is unloving.