On Scheler’s Metaphysics of Love: an Appraisal

Abstract

In the following pages we are going to briefly recollect some of Scheler’s main arguments concerning the status of “affective life” and to try a sympathetic appraisal of the bearing of these theses. After resuming Scheler’s assessment of love and showing its conceptual connections with intentionality, spiritual values and sensuous corporeality, we shall sketch an account of the ontological and axiological role of love. Love turns out to be interpretable as a pervasive drive that shapes both natural and cultural history, while history, in its most comprehensive sense, is not viewed either as sheer contingency or as teleology, but rather as an exploratory cosmological venture.