Love, Jesus, Plato, and Hegel

Reflections From a Budget Motel in Bonnyville

Though I am typically loath to add a preface to my work, I will here: the following essay was written over a year ago, when I was working in northern Alberta while my girlfriend lived back home. Now, on the occasion of our wedding, I have thought fit to edit and release the following: a meditation on love, Christianity, and my two favourite philosophers. Enjoy.

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Bonnyville, Alberta

I am in love with a girl, but she is not with me. I work in the oil sands while she is halfway across the country. I think about her every day. Words cannot describe how I miss her, and so I will spare the reader any attempt at description. The hours of pining, however, have born out reflections on love, the gospels, and metaphysics.

It seems that everyone has something vaguely true to say about love. Perhaps each of the myriad truisms espoused capture some aspect of love, but few people have tried to understand love itself and in its entirety. Even fewer have done so with any pittance of accuracy. Plato points out this eternal feature of discourse concerning love in the Symposium when Socrates rebukes those who speak of love for not praising love itself, but merely praising the effects of love. Perhaps we cannot know what love is, but only that love is—tracing the varied vestiges we observe around us. Or, perhaps reason can elucidate what love is in itself.

But let me begin by observing the phenomenon of love as I experience it. I know that there is a mighty and indomitable force which ties me to a woman, no matter that we are a world apart. I know that this force makes me despair that she is not here with me. I know that this force occupies my mind and turns my thoughts to her, and I know that it pains my heart. I know that she feels the same for me. I know that this experience is not unique to me, for it has been shared by many lovers throughout history and all over the world. Therefore, I know that this love shared by her and I is merely one instance which is, in all likelihood, a universal feature of the human experience, owed to a common phenomenon.

I observe, moreover, that my mind is spurred to reflection only because the object of my love is absent. There is an old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder—true enough. But there is also the Heideggerian principle that something only reveals itself truly when it becomes a problem. It is not that love has ceased, only that our love now faces the barrier of distance. Despite this, love yet persists, tightening its calloused grip upon my soul.

But, just as fire’s blithe warmth and scorching burns are both felt by its presence, the bliss and the sorrow of love must both be known by its presence, hardly its absence. Otherwise, if the cause is absent, how can its effects be present? How is it the case, then, that I feel the depths of love when the object my love is absent? It can only be so if love is something which transcends location and the presence of the object of love. It follows that love itself is supervenient upon these material conditions.

Love, furthermore, must be immaterial. For, there can be no material explanation for a force which binds two souls together across time and space. Of course, pheromones, physical attraction, and reproductive compatibility all play into human romance. But these are merely necessary conditions for love, containers within which the phenomenon occurs, not to be confused with the thing itself. Love cannot be a purely material phenomenon, for if it were, it would be merely a contract formed for mutual expedience, a hedonistic pleasure pact, or a pattern of behaviour born purely by natural selection.

In nature, we see no love. We see, rather, reproduction based on evolutionarily stable strategies, be they through displays of genetic prowess or implicit covenants formed to care for the young. In any case, these childbearing relationships are formed through the calculus of expedience. It is pure necessity that orders relations as such, either directly or indirectly through the behaviour encoded in organisms via natural selection.

Human love, on the other hand, resists being reduced to expedience. Contrary to what we observe in the natural world, for humans, romantic relationships are not merely means toward the end of childbearing, but rather, are ends in themselves. Love can, and often does, persist without the possibility of children, or even in the absence of sex. Love violates the practical and the rational, often opposing social order, defying border, breed, and birth. Love is a force that overcomes rational human law and custom, a force that defies distance and social stratum—one that can seldom fit any rational explanation.

In Greek myth, this force was the god Eros, and the Greeks understood with striking clarity that Eros, or love, is one of the most powerful and fundamental forces in the universe. Hesiod assigned to Eros an ancient and essential role as the bringer of order to a formless void, just as Empedocles termed this fundamental forces of unification and separation “love” and “strife,” respectively. Love, as we see in The Iliad, compelled Zeus himself to stop helping the Achaeans and make love to his wife instead. Love is the very thing which imbues an inchoate and chaotic world with lawful order, making gods and devils its playthings.

While love may seldom manifest for humans as a rational force, we may wonder at why it is humans alone of all mortal beings, having the unique gift of rationality, who experience love in this way. This points to the fact that love, while not strictly rational, is metaphysical, acting upon those beings alone who can conceptualize the immaterial. If love is transcendent, or even divine, then this means that, for it to act upon man, he must contain an element of the divine within him.

Love and Christianity

This understanding of love as a metaphysical force coheres neatly with the Christian worldview, which, in distinction to the other Abrahamic religions, understands God as a fundamentally loving being—even one whose primary attribute is love. 1 John 4:7-8 reads “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” John 3:16 reads, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

In the Christian understanding, God is fundamentally loving, and He is love itself; every instance of love in the world originates in God. The greatest manifestation of God’s love is Him sending His only son Jesus to die for man’s sins. The significance of this act of grace is that man, in his fallen state, would otherwise have been unable to fully obey God’s law, thereby preventing him from attaining full communion with God. Through Jesus’ sacrifice, however, God and man could be reconciled, and man’s sinful trespasses covered. As such, grace and love are intimately tied.

Obeisance to God’s law is still demanded, but love becomes the primary criterion of salvation. When Jesus says that He has not come to replace the law but to fulfil it (Matthew 5:17), He means to say that love complements law, and that, where we fail to follow the law, our failure is covered by God’s loving grace—only so may we attain salvation. After all, “love covers a multitude of sins.” (1 Peter 4:8). However, this reconciliation is not possible except through God’s love embodied in Jesus, which is why the gods of Judaism and Islam are not fundamentally loving, for in those religions, man and God have not yet been reconciled.

The pervasiveness of God’s love marks a crucial similarity with the Greek concept of Eros. For, just as Eros permeates human love, divine love, and the very creation of the universe, so too is God’s love central and omnipresent in Christian cosmology. In Genesis, when the world is formless, it is God who gives form to the world. When it reads that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters,” (Genesis 1:2), this is an image of form meeting chaos (as waters and seas are a recurring motif for chaos in the Bible). This story is analogous with the interplay between Eros and Chaos in Hesiod. The Song of Solomon shows the passionate intensity of human love, which is a love that comes from God, too. Finally, the Gospels show us that the link between God and man is love, in the form of Jesus.

Art, poetry, and song, throughout history and across the world, have long contended that there is something markedly divine and mystical in the phenomenon of human love. And yet, the modern secular West overlooks this fact in favour of shallow materialist explanations of love. But might there not be something true in the common wisdom? In love, do we genuinely experience something divine?

We may reason from effects to cause, for what is present in the effects must be present in the cause also, and the two must be of like kind. If love is a metaphysical force, then it follows that its source must be metaphysical. And if love is not merely a phenomenon that emerges from matter, then love’s origin must be transcendent. And because what is present in the effects must be present in the cause, the transcendent origin of love must also be loving. To explain the phenomenon of human love, then, we are led to posit a metaphysical loving force whose effects descend upon us. This suggests the truth in the Christian account of a loving God.

And what is more, there is a universal desire for love and a universally implicit sense that love exists. People desire love without knowing precisely what love is. And indeed, throughout our lives, we are ever mistaken as to what love is. We humans have a profound capacity and longing for love, yet we are also uniquely unsuccessful in finding it. But how can anyone seek love if they do not know what love is to begin with? How can we be disappointed with the imperfections of human love if we do not know what perfect love is? The fact that people do seek love and, in seeking love, discriminate between what is and is not love, informs us that there must be an innate knowledge of love in each of us. We may only discriminate because we have this innate reference point.

This is because all instances of love on earth are pale comparisons of a perfect and primordial divine love, of which we are implicitly aware, and against which we judge the shades of human romance here below. Without this reference point, the search for love would not be possible, nor would we have any cause for disappointment in the imperfections of human love.

But, on rare occasion, when we do find true love on earth, it reminds us of the first love we knew, which is the perfect love of our Creator. It is only because He first loved us that we are able to detect true love when we encounter it. And though human love is only ever an approximation of divine love, it is sometimes such an excellent approximation that we perceive flashes of the divine in it, and indeed, in love, we most closely approach the divine. Moreover, in true love, where each selflessly seeks the good of the other, we most closely replicate the benevolent love which God has for man. I can say truly that true love has imbued in me a newfound understanding of the perfect love of my Creator.

Because we love, and because we love with reference to a first and eternal love, we must accept the existence of a perfect and eternal love as a paradigm, visible in the mortal realm by its vestiges. This suggests the truth in the Christian worldview, as it is the only one which includes love as a primary feature of God. To be clear, love is a force that is synonymous with God, and instances of love are evidence of this divine force at play. God loves us with a perfect and immutable love, which leaves an indelible imprint upon every heart. Moreover, the Christian account explains why love is such a fundamental force in our world—it is how we are reconciled with our Creator, and it is how God extends Himself towards us. Love is the vehicle of divine participation.

The phenomenon of human love, then, indicates the fact of divine love and provides evidence of an infinitely loving God.

Michelangelo - section of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Love has an crucial place in the Christian cosmology. However, in the human experience, love often confounds any attempt at rationalization. So, too, is God’s love mystifying to human reason, which is why His love is categorized as a profound mystery. This is hardly a contradiction, for the experience of love may bewilder the understanding, while we still may acknowledge the fundamental role that love plays in the universe.

The view of love as a capricious cupid, wherein romance is a subjective and irrational phenomenon, is only coherent in a universe of flux without a rational unifying principle. This is the Eros of the Greeks, and this is where their worldview was almost complete, but lacked the overarching logos and unity featured in the Christian religion, where all the divine traits embodied by different gods were unified in the One God of the Trinity. The rational cosmological function of love within the Christian worldview implies a rational and law-like God, and vice versa. After all, in the Bible, the very same God that embodies love also embodies law, as well as reason, when Jesus is described as logos (John 1:1). God, then, is both love and logos.

If God places an innate understanding of love in each of our hearts, then, because Jesus is love, this means that there is a universal intuition of Jesus in every man. This indicates a universally available pathway to salvation. I suggest that because every human, no matter whether he is aware of the name of Jesus, may be led to God via love, and through love, he may attain salvation. When one loves truly and earnestly, perhaps one also worships Jesus, even if that name is foreign to him. If Jesus is love, a rejection of love is synonymous with condemnation. For, if one rejects love, one rejects God also.

Condemnation and salvation are, therefore, twin faces of divine love. In our own romantic love, we experience microcosms of each condition. And, being in love, I truly sense both. When I am with the woman I love, I experience the heights of salvation. Without her, I feel as if in the depths of condemnation. It is not when love itself is absent that one experiences condemnation, but when the object of one’s love is absent and the force of love is still present.

This state represents our fallen condition; when we reject God, we still experience His love, but also the attendant anguish with our distance from Him. The flashes of salvation we experience on earth are when, in rare instances, we may experience His presence directly through His love. So, conversely, is God pained when we reject Him, and overjoyed when we embrace Him in love.

It is our imperfections—chiefly our selfishness and vanity—which pose the greatest obstacle to enjoying God’s love for us and emulating His love in our own relationships. If love, as commonly stated, is to pursue the good of another above one’s own, then the selflessness that God embodied when sacrificing His son for our sake is emblematic of an ardent and pure love. The failure of earthly love is the failure to match this paragon of selflessness. It is not love that fails, but we who fail to love in our fallen state.

Now, of course, there is a deeply selfish aspect of love. Love is not always a benevolent desire to seek the good for an other, but is often a desire to possess also. When we encounter a beautiful person, we desire to possess that person physically and emotionally—such is the exclusive nature of human romance. Whether this is a good, evil, or necessary feature of love is besides the point. While love can often be free of possession, it is just as often devoid of selflessness.

Pompeo Batoni - “The Sacred Heart of Jesus” (1767)

Love and Otherness

An important metaphysical question thus arises: does self-sacrifice, as an essential component of love, entail that the self is abolished therein? In common opinion, love melds two hearts into one. We colloquially refer to a lover as our “better half.” This view is even vindicated by the Bible, when it reads “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24). Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium features an apocryphal history of humans as once being four-armed, four-legged, and two-faced until Zeus spitefully separated all of us into two—love, then, is the search for our long lost missing half. Or indeed, in Empedocles’ account of love as a unifying force, it is solely through love that elements are fused together to make composites. Albeit not always in a purely literal sense, the idea that, through love, two souls are fused together and become one has proven prevalent.

It can seem that, in a loving relationship, we are called to dissolve the borders of our very self and be subsumed into an other. I contend, however, that this is not so. Indeed, otherness as such, and the persistence of otherness, is an essential condition for love. In love, a subject-object distinction must be preserved.

If love is to seek the good of an other above one’s own, this does not entail the abolition of otherness and the subsumption of two into one—on the contrary, if love is to persist in this equation, then otherness must also. If the other is subsumed into the self, love vanishes. Aristotle, in the Politics, counters Aristophanes’ sympotic speech, arguing that love would be spoiled if the two were unified into one because there would no longer be an association. It is the sense of ownership and preciousness which cause people to love one another. But you cannot own what is identical with you.¹ Or, in George Grant’s articulation, “Love is consent to the fact that there is authentic otherness.”² In love, you make sacrifices for an other. If otherness is not an essential aspect of love, then love becomes pure egocentricity. But if love is egocentricity, then the tyrannical soul turns out to be the most beloved of all men—the height of absurdity.

I find the arguments of Aristotle and Grant far more convincing. Love is fundamentally relational, as the force which mediates subject and object, the lover and beloved. If not for an other, one cannot seek another’s good above their own, for that would be to seek their own good. And there can be no relationship, and therefore no reason to love, between two things who are made one. As a mediating force, love depends upon there being discrete beings to mediate.

Though it is true that Genesis declares man and woman to be one flesh in marriage, I take this as metaphorical. If this were literally so, as Aristotle points out, the labels man and wife themselves would be rendered null. For, what is a husband but a husband to a wife? Furthermore, explaining love as a force which subsumes two into one would entail that God’s love subsumes man into Him. But this would result in a false and facile understanding of God akin to Spinoza’s, wherein God is everything and everything is God. Reality would become an undifferentiated unity.

God’s love, though perfect, does not entail complete self-sacrifice either. For, though God’s sacrifice was great, as He sent His only son to cover our sins out of love, it was not His whole self which was sacrificed, but merely one aspect of the Trinity. And Jesus, recall, did not perish entirely, but was resurrected and preserved. Thus did love alter our relationship with the divine, but neither we nor the divine were abolished thereby.

Moreover, love subsuming the one into the other would entail that love is terminality. Once the other is subsumed into the self—once two hearts become one, or once one finds their lost other half—love’s task is complete and any relationship as such, ceases. However, this is not how we humans experience love. Widespread divorce, separation, and marital disputes mean that love is never complete in the human experience. And even in our relationships with God, we fall, recover, stray from Him, and then return. We are never complete, nor is our love, but both are constantly evolving. In all relationships, there is a difference in unity.

Love is a metaphysical force, and as such, may only interact with metaphysical objects, namely, the soul. And so, two souls cannot be made one through love, for even in perfect love each soul retains its autonomy. And since love is a metaphysical force, the bearing of offspring, which is a purely physical process, cannot be said to be subsumed two souls into one, for such would be a category error. Animals, for instance, reproduce well enough without love, and yet the bearing of offspring does not entail that the two are made one another unless in a loose sense.

It is now appropriate to offer a definition of love. Based on what has been argued, I say that love is the metaphysical force which compels us to seek the good in, through, and for an other. This manifests most potently as romance, but also in our relationship with the divine. Traces, too, can be found in friendship and goodwill towards one’s neighbour. This force is a fundamental aspect of God, and the subjects which experience love can be none other than God and man, for these two alone have understanding of, and therefore are subject to, forces beyond the merely material.

Love and Plato

This understanding of love as a salient cosmological force, and as one which does not erase difference, but rather establishes a unity in difference, must be accommodated by our worldview. It is here that I will make, perhaps, a surprising suggestion: that Plato’s understanding of the world may help us best of all to account for human and divine love and their interaction. Though Plato hardly advanced a metaphysical system per se, his many dialogues, taken together, provide a number of key metaphysical tenets which establish a worldview compatible with the conception of love I espouse. Moreover, his conception of love as Eros, described in the Symposium, is consonant with the present account, albeit with some modifications.

Anibale Caracci - “Venus, Adonis, and Cupid” (c. 1590s)

We hardly need speculate what Plato thought about love, for love is the subject of his Symposium, where Socrates and a host of other symposiasts take turns giving encomia of the god Eros. Many give eloquent and beautiful speeches before it finally comes Socrates’ turn, who, rather than providing his own account, begins retelling a wise lesson given to him by a sibylline sage named Diotima.

Diotima’s teachings about love begin innocuously enough. Love, she says, is fundamentally of the Good. A man loves something if the object of his love possesses something which he lacks—something which is good for him. This is because, in Diotima’s fanciful mythology, Eros is the child of Poverty and Resource. Eros takes after the former in its pervasive deficiency, but owes to the later its deft contrivances for what it lacks.³ Most often, this manifests as an ardent desire to possess a beautiful body, “scheming for all that is beautiful and good,”⁴ whereof the whole of human romance is born.

However, love is multifaceted. The force of Eros compels one to hunger after the Good in its many forms. Bound up with the pursuit of romance is the pursuit of immortality. It is, after all, through sexual generation that one may attain a kind of immortality in their progeny. This is because of Eros’ nature as an emissary between mortals and immortals, “Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one.”⁵ I argued that love is the vehicle of divine participation—we find that Plato’s account is happily consonant with my own.

But it is not through sexual generation alone that love allows one to participate in immortality. For, the love of bodies, according to Diotima, is but one—ultimately shallow—manifestation of the great power of Eros. She demonstrates in her “ladder of love” how Eros is the impetus behind a turn away from the sensual realm of bodies and towards higher forms of beauty and goodness:

Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; from personal beauty he proceeds to beautiful observances, from observance to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is concerned with the beautiful itself and that alone; so that in the end he comes to know the very essence of beauty. In that state of life above all others, my dear Socrates . . . a man finds it truly worth while to live, as he contemplates essential beauty.⁶

It is in this way that Eros leads one to contemplate not only what is beautiful in the world, but the eternal, perfect, divine, and unchanging form of beauty itself.

Within Plato’s metaphysical worldview, it is possible for man and gods to interact because they are fundamentally of the same kind—like can only interact with like. This tenet is essential if love is to be truly a transcendent matter of bridging the gap between divine and human. Undergirding this worldview is Plato’s understanding of the soul.

In the Republic, we read Plato’s understanding of the soul as tripartite, containing one’s reasoning, desiring, and spirited faculties.⁷ As such, the soul is the seat of all that is immaterial or non-bodily in a human life. In the Phaedo, Plato argues for the immortality and divinity of the soul, free from corporeal decay. Or, in the Philebus, Plato articulates a divine resonance between the human soul, which alone can moderate the carnal impulses of the body, and the divine mind of Zeus, who imposes order and proportion on an otherwise inchoate and disordered world.⁸ Reasoning from cause to effects, Plato indicates the divinity of the soul, imbued with the same traits possessed by the Olympian.

It is through the force of Eros that man and god share communion, working through the common medium of mind. The similarities with the Christian account are readily apparent.

The conclusion of Plato’s Philebus, after a long discussion between Socrates and Protarchus, a young hedonist, is that reason is more essential to the good life than pleasure, for reason alone, possessing traces of the divine, is able to moderate one’s desires so as to resist the pains which are so often attendant to excessive pleasures. However, there is a second reason, which is that reason alone can give one knowledge of the Good. As such, reaffirming the position of Diotima in the Symposium, reason is most highly prized if one is to life a good life.

For Aristotle, as for Plato, the highest good was to engage in contemplation, for it is The rational part of us that most closely resembles the divine. Aristotle writes in Metaphysics that a being has attained fulfilment when its activity is identical with its aim. Contemplation is both an activity, and an aim in itself, which means that man finds his highest fulfilment therein. Further, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that contemplation is the highest fulfilment of man, for it is through contemplation that we may learn of the highest and most fundamental things.⁹

Raphael - “The School of Athens” (c. 1509)

For Aristotle, man may reach divinity through contemplation because of the underlying logos of the universe. And because logos is fundamentally divine, we also resemble the divine most while in contemplation. The Christian account understands God as logos and love, as I have shown, and if God is equally love as He is logos, then may we not resemble the divine most closely in loving also, as in contemplation? And might we not be equally fulfilled in love, with the end of love—pursuing the good for, in, and through an other—being identical with its activity? I contend that love is an equally effective way as contemplation to ascend the cosmological hierarchy and mirror the divine.

I only disagree with Plato insofar as he describes love as a frantic desire to possess, and that alone. What the Christian account adds is that love, while inescapably a drive to possession, equally embodies selflessness. Love is not desire not only to possess the Good—namely, to seek the good for oneself—but also to seek the good for an other. Love, contrary to Plato, is not born of base Poverty, but rather, through the infinite bounty of our Father.

Whereas Plato understands Eros as merely a means towards the end of contemplating the Beautiful, the Good, and the Whole, I contend that loving itself is equally a means of divine participation. I reject the conception that romantic love is a lower form of Eros than the love of beauty itself, for the former is as much an image of the divine as the latter. Because logos and love are unified in Jesus, both love and contemplation are necessary and equal courses to reach the divine. Therefore, they cannot exist in a hierarchy, for they both lead to one another and necessitate the other.

Love entails seeking the good of an other. However, we often need discernment, and not only right intent, to determine what is good for someone else. As such, reason and contemplation contemplate and fulfil love, just as love complements them in turn. Love and logos are inextricably intertwined.

While the Platonic worldview, with a minor supplement, accommodates our understanding of love, there are rival philosophical traditions, more or less prevalent today, to which the present account is utterly anathema. I turn, then, to the philosophy of Hegel and find a rival metaphysical worldview with a starkly different explanation of the phenomenon of love.

Love and Hegel

Hegel’s metaphysics are often categorized as “Absolute Idealism,” or as a relational metaphysics, as opposed to a substance-object metaphysics (dealing with things and predicates). What this means is that, for Hegel, metaphysics is not a matter of relating subject to object in the correct way. Whereas for Kant metaphysics was a matter of a thinking subject attempting to attain knowledge of things-in-themselves, and for Plato, grasping the eternal forms, for Hegel, metaphysics is more precisely a matter of understanding the relations between mind and phenomena and viewing this phenomenological relationship as the ultimate source of knowledge, rather than the static objects which present themselves as phenomena.

Hegel’s reason for viewing relations as the crux of metaphysics is that, for him, everything is mutually determined—in nature, society, and ideas—through a dialectical process. The Hegelian dialectic is often presented as a three-stage process, with a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—though these are words Hegel did not use to describe it. It is, nonetheless, a useful way to understand the dialectic. Simply put, the dialectic is the process by which a proposition is met with a contrary proposition, which, through this opposition, are together raised up to form a higher level of truth. This happens because, when two contrary propositions are brought into opposition, it is realized that the two determine and are determined by each other. For instance, in his Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel draws Being into opposition with Nothing. Being is utterly meaningless without its complement, Nothing. Nothing, however, to contrast Being, must have existence—Nothing must be. And so, to explain this paradoxical state of affairs, the dialectic presents their synthesis, Becoming, which carries both inside it. The German word Hegel uses to describe this moment is Aufheben, which refers to a simultaneous destruction, preservation, and raising up. The English term most often employed in its place is Sublation.

The Hegelian dialectic is all-pervasive. This is to say that, while it applies to concepts, it is also a process by which history progresses, as Hegel demonstrates in his Philosophy of History, as well as pervading nature, civil society, and the development of self-consciousness. In short, for Hegel, the world is fundamentally process, not substance, and that process is the ever-evolving dialectic and the dynamic unfolding of what he calls the Concept, or a kind of master principle of the rational structure of the universe which the dialectic eventually unveils. The dialectic is as much ontological as conceptual.

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)

A necessary consequence of Hegel’s metaphysics is that there are no authentic binary oppositions, or at least there are none which are not eventually subsumed by the dialectical nature of reality. There can be no absolutely discrete entities. There is only the relation of the dialectic, which steamrolls dichotomies and subsumes them into the Absolute totality. Thus, contrary to Plato, there is no transcendent divinity, no irreducible soul, and no ontological hierarchy. For Hegel, as the Phenomenology of Spirit displays, the divine is eventually reconciled entirely with man.

Instead of speculating how love might fit into his system, we can turn to where Hegel discusses love explicitly in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Love is defined by Hegel as “mind’s feeling of its own unity” and “the consciousness of my unity with another.”¹⁰ What is important to note in this definition is that love is a subjective disposition rather than an external force. Moreover, as Hegel notes, love happens between material beings—specifically, human beings: “love . . . exists between only living things who are alike in power . . .”¹¹ Love turns out to be the contradiction of one’s sense of one’s own incompleteness, and then the sense of self found in an other. The inherent incompleteness of the self leads one to form a marriage with an other, to find one’s very self in an other. In this, two become one. As he writes, “marriage results from the free surrender by both sexes of their personality.”¹²

Two become one not in a figurative way, but a literal way for Hegel, for he writes that “lovers can be distinct only in so far as they are mortal and do not look upon this possibility of separation as if there were really a separation or as if reality were a sort of conjunction between possibility and existence. In the lovers there is no matter; they are a living whole.” He goes on: “love strives to annul even this distinction [between the lover as lover and the lover as physical organism], to annul this possibility [of separation] as a mere abstract possibility, to unite [with itself] even the mortal element [within the lover] and to make it immortal.”¹³

But this establishes a troubling principle—that in love, personality itself is annulled and otherness is overcome. This suggests that love entails finality—when the self has been overcome and subsumed into another, then love as such has ceased. But is this so? Is love not continuous, ever-evolving and changing? If we accept Hegel’s premises, we are forced to admit that love cancels itself, as the otherness which first establishes love is superseded as a mere stage in the dialectic.

We see the markings of the Hegelian dialectic at work in the relationship of love. There is a contradiction when one finds one’s self in an other. Then, how is this contradiction sublated and brought forth into a new phase? Hegel argues that the moment of sublation in love is the creation of a child, which is simultaneously self and other. In the child, both the lovers have been completely subsumed into one another, and have been brought forth into a new phase. In this way, the production of children in the family fits perfectly into Hegel’s dialectical model.

But I contend Hegel makes a category error when he asserts that love culminates in the bearing of offspring. For, as I argued earlier, the production of offspring is a natural result of sexual relations within all species, including humans. However, it is only humans who are aware of something called love, and who experience something we call love. Animals mate and bear offspring in various relations, according to their evolutionary strategy, which reduces to expedience. Moreover, mating is a significant and necessary condition for a relationship of any sort between two animals.

This is in distinction to humans, who experience love regardless of the potential of bearing offspring—in fact, this is most often a secondary consideration in human romance. The fact is that the bearing of offspring is inessential to love, which can endure despite the impossibility of bearing offspring. one may argue that it is sex, rather than the bearing of offspring, which humans seek, for sex is tied to childbearing. And so, humans evolved to seek sex primarily. However, animals seldom have sex for pleasure—only humans do. Moreover, there can exist romance outside of sex, and sex outside of romance also. It is markedly clear that romantic relationship differ from merely sexual or reproductive relationships.

However, there is the more fundamental point that love is metaphysical, not material. Hegel’s view hinges upon love being an interaction between two material bodies. However, the body is not the locus of love; the soul is. This is so because love can endure through the absence of the body—namely, through distance—the very same distance which I now experience. Love, of course, works within the parameters of biological attraction and sexual compatibility. But so does the soul exist within our corporeal form, yet we do not say that the latter is sufficient explanation for the former. It is the soul which feels love, which is why we can innately sense the traces of divine love.

If the creation of offspring is the means by which Hegel argues love can subsume two into one, and love is not necessarily connected to the creation of offspring, then it follows that, love cannot subsume two into one as Hegel writes. There is a rupture in the dialectic, which he wishes to impose upon every dimension of human life, even where is hardly applies.

Of course, the reason Hegel includes marriage as a stage in the dialectic in the Philosophy of Right, a book detailing how his dialectic plays out in civil society, is that marriage is an important societal institution. Yet he neglects to mention that it is an institution because of its importance for religious, as well as legal, reasons. To study merely the legal and childrearing dimensions of marriage and consider that a full treatment of the subject is hopelessly shallow.

This is not a refutation of Hegel’s grand metaphysical system. It is merely to say that he did not accurately depict the phenomenon of love. However, if a metaphysical system is unable to accommodate such deep intuitions about love, an eminent part of the human experience, then we have reason to be incredulous of such a system. Rather, I argue that, no matter how much Platonic ideas have been attacked through the centuries, including by Hegel himself, I argue that the Platonic worldview accommodates the phenomenon of human love and the fact of divine love to a greater degree than Hegel. As such, there is no small reason to believe that, perhaps, Plato’s understanding of the world was more accurate than Hegel’s.

But let me return to what I experience most deeply: I miss my lover. However, it is precisely because she is far away that I most acutely sense her otherness to me. She is not my own, but I want to possess her. She is not here, though it is for that very reason that I feel the pangs of love so strongly. As such, Hegel was perhaps right that there is a paradoxical character to love. But I know, also, that I will never be one with her. It is because of love, not despite it, that we remain two. Otherwise, our love would be completed and thereby annulled. Perhaps Hegel truly did view his love as completed in the birth of his children. Perhaps it was an absence of true love in his life that led him to such sterile conclusions. The presence of love alone convinces me beyond a doubt that love is divine. If Hegel neglected this fact, I cannot imagine that he ever felt true love, with all its soaring heights and ravaging depths.

Sitting here in a budget motel in Bonnyville, I both pity and envy Hegel.

1. Aristotle, H. Rackham trans., Politics, 1262b.

2. Grant, George, “Faith and the Multiversity” in The George Grant Reader (1998), pp. 463.

3. Plato, W.H.D. Rouse trans., Symposium, 203b-d.

4. ibid, 203d.

5. ibid, 202e.

6. ibid, 211c-d

7. Plato, Desmond Lee trans., The Republic, 440e-441a.

8. Plato, Robin Waterfield trans., Philebus, 30b-d.

9. Aristotle, J.K. Thomson trans., Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a-1178a.

10. Hegel, G.W.F., H.B. Nisbet trans., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §158.

11. Hegel, G.W.F., T.M. Knox trans., “Fragment on Love” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/love/index.htm#:~:text=True%20union%2C%20or%20love%20proper,genuine%20love%20excludes%20all%20oppositions.

12. Hegel, Elements, §168.

13. Hegel, “Fragment on Love.”