“ One knows nothing save what one loves, and the deeper and more complete that knowledge, the stronger and livelier must be one’s love— indeed passion,” wrote Goethe in his youth. He repeated this thought in countless variations all his life. Next to this judgment we may place the view of Leonardo da Vinci, that “ every great love is the daughter of a great knowledge.” The German poet (also the philoso pher Giordano Bruno) agreed with the genius of the Renaissance in bringing love and knowledge together into the most profound and in timate connection, although for Goethe the movement of love grounds the act of knowledge, whereas for Leonardo the movement of knowl
edge grounds the act of love. However, both contradict the common,
and as far as I can see, specifically modern bourgeois judgment, prev alent since the Enlightenment, that “love makes one blind,” that all true knowledge of the world can rest only on holding back the emo tions and simultaneously ignoring differences in value of the objects known. Framed as a conflict between amateur and expert, the opposi tion of these types is threaded through modern history. Even so, against this judgment that prevailed after the Enlightenment, no less than Blaise Pascal, in his “ Conversation on the Passions of Love,” dared to assert the clear, incredibly resonant proposition, “ Love and reason are one and the same.” Pascal’s deeper meaning was that love first discloses objects, which appear to the senses and which reason later judges. Even Spinoza, who fought against all “ anthropo morphic” worldviews, who wanted to conceive the passions as “ lines, planes, and circles,” spoke in his teaching of an intellectual love of God, an “ amor Dei intellectualis.” Spinoza considered the highest level of knowledge, where knowledge is most comprehensive and adequate to being, as the plane where “ God comprehends and enjoys Himself,” thus where knowledge is inseparably blended with loving attention to the object.
This essay was originally published as “ Liebe und Erkenntnis,” in Gesammelte Werke,
vol. 6, Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre, pp. 77—98.1 have translated it with the assistance of Peter Haley.
If one ignores the finer nuances, the solution to the question of the relation of love to knowledge is revealed in certain world-historical
types whose characterization I will be content to hint at here rather
than portray in great historical detail.
Despite deep oppositions between the Indian and Greek mentalities, one can speak in ainongenetic and world-historic sense of an Indian-
Greek type of solution to our question, a solution that is theoretical as
well as factual. For the Indians as well as the Greeks, value was viewed ontologically, as a function of being. However, noetically— as a strict mental correlate— love is a dependent function of knowledge. In the Indian case, the object that has raised itself beyond the ground of being is of the highest value. But in the Greek case, the object that has achieved the highest degree of being, Plato’s ovxog ov, is of the highest value.1 It is precisely because value is a function of being in both cases, but in such basically different ways, that the objective unity of their teachings can be seen.
The direction of the Indian mentality sets so much dependence on the ontological side that the positive and most central value adheres to
not-being. This means that the way to salvation consists in emptying
the reality coefficient of the world o f its “ whatness,” its contents. In the Indian experience it is this “ reality coefficient” that must be exor cised, for we drown in the depth and breadth of the contents o f the world the more passionately bound to these contents we are by our desires. The world is “ real” or “ unreal” for us only as acting beings, driven by desires, not as pure knowing spirits or intellects. It is real to the degree it is desired, but at the same time poor to the degree it is real. Only when the world stands before us as not real, not desired, is it rich and its amplitude fully revealed.
By analogy, “ knowledge” in the Indian view is gained, first of all, by increasingly overcoming the positive and negative reality accents of the world. As these accents are correlated with desires, their overcom ing is set into motion by taking an ascetic path in which the appetites are rendered progressively arbitrary and their fading and eventual loss occurs automatically and naturally. In this way, desires that envelop and obscure the pure subjects o f knowledge disappear and with them the associated reality accents. In the Mahabharata it is written that the spirit o f reality continually captivates desires and deeds anew. “ One must consider the paths taken before a man reaches self-containment and wisdom. His actions advance him from an involvement in bare nature to a true self. Only those blinded by the earth place the ground of their actions solely in themselves; the wayward are not constrained by modesty.” 2
Love and Knowledge
The content of “ love” in the Indian sense is located in the transition that occurs within the “ actual,” however, in the movement that is be gun when desires are opposed and objects of knowledge are chosen. The more desires are opposed, the fuller knowledge becomes. Viewed from the side o f action, love is merely the experience of transition from not-knowing to knowing. The love emotion is not independent; it is not an original, positive act of spirit that affects the mind, but merely the experience of the growth of knowledge itself. If we wish to under stand Indian writings on love we must see the essential connection be tween ontic (existential) processes of the actualization of the world, brought about by the steady flow of desires out of the center of the ego, and intellectual processes in men. This is a presupposition to everything said of love in Indian writings. Above all, we must under stand that love appears as a consequence, not as the origin, of knowl edge. Whatever religious or ethical value may attach to love is solely a fruit of this knowledge. In no way does love here play a role similar to the Christian love of God and neighbor. For the Christian, love is given a place equal in primacy to, even greater than, knowledge. The Indian axiom stands in sharpest opposition to this. Augustine, the greatest Christian thinker, expressly made love the original power of move ment of the divine as well as of the human spirit. In obvious opposition to Aristotle’s doctrine of nous, Augustine said that love “ makes holy
more than reason.”
The Indian idea of love is, therefore, as purely intellectual as the ideas of the Greeks. For Plato too eros is a transition from a lesser to a greater knowledge, a tendency of objects of sense, still belonging to the “ material” domain, to win participation in the “ idea,” the essential. Eros is the drive and longing of not-being for being, of the bad for the good.
The most basic elements of love and knowledge for both Indian and Greek, consequently, may be expressed as follows. For the Christian, the process of salvation is begun by an earlier act of love and grace of a superhuman power. This is a transcendent act of redemption whose
consequence is communication of knowledge, the revelation necessary
for salvation. But for Indian and Greek, salvation is only se//-salvation of the individual through knowledge. In Indian thought there is no savior who bears the attributes of God, only a teacher o f wisdom whose teachings point the way to “ holiness.” This consequence fol lows necessarily whenever love is thought of as a dependent function of knowledge. Compared to such self-found knowledge, however, for the Christian each communication of knowledge necessary for salva tion is based on love of the communicator for the communicant.
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Moreover, the idea that one may arrive at complete knowledge through pure contemplation is in striking contrast to the Christian conception of the infinite worth and true substantiality of each indi vidual soul. The contemplative act, for Indian and Greek, is bound up completely and solely with the individual and is the way to the end. But the end— “ there” for the Greek (ovxog ov, completed being), “ here” for the Indian (not-being)— may coincide with the extinction of individuality, its disappearance in the sphere of the supraindividual being. According to Mohler’s profound and little-understood essay “ On the Unity of the Church,” in original Christianity adherence to a religious conviction in the united community of love of the whole church was a criterion of truth of the doctrine corresponding to this conviction. The “heretic” must be wrong, no matter what the evidence for his view. He must be wrong, that is, because the essential Christian connection between love and knowledge binds any true knowledge to being proved in the community of love of the church. There is nothing of this in the Indian view: love is a consequence, not a condition, of the healing found only in knowledge.
The particular ethical character of the Indian idea of love is fixed with the above axiom. According to the pregnant, ever-repeated expression in the preaching of Buddha, love is the “ redemption of the heart.” 3 This means that love is positively valued for salvation, but not as something added to some other positive value, whether to God, to neighbor, or to beauty and life in nature. Love is a way “ away from oneself,” therefore a denial of being and reality. This is accomplished by a successive transcendence of one’s individuality conditioned by one’s desiring body. The contemplation of the self and things outside the self is thus an ontic process, an actualization of self and other from which, however, one gains increasing distance. Access to this “ way away from oneself” can be had through neighboring human beings and also through nature. Love of nature, especially plants and animals, like love of neighbor, is included in the offering of love. Always, how ever, the cause of this act of love is merely the experience of “ other ness,” of a “ not-1” as such, not because of any positive value this other being may have but only because it is not-I. Part of the Indian axiom, according to which the object’s worth increases the farther it is re moved from the sphere o f being, becomes effective in shaping the basic character of the Indian movement of love. This movement is entirely altruistic, going beyond its object; the object is a terminus a quo, a point of departure, which serves as an inducement for the “ redemption o f the heart.” The fulfillment of love in the object, love as a terminus ad quem, an arrival, is a matter of complete indifference. The only role
that such accidental inducements are allowed to play is to lead to a radical change of life, as in the meetings with the sick and the beggars that prompted the young Buddha to repent and change.
To this structure of the Indian experience of the world a third strand is connected that is maintained constantly throughout the develop ment of Indian religious speculation. Love, as merely dependent on knowledge, on the unveiling of the actual, is not an experience that a real individual person has as something that begins or ends. Love is, on the contrary, the emotional insight into the nothingness of individual-personal existence in general.4 For the Indian, the basis of individuation is not an autonomous, spiritual principle of the person as it is for the Christian. Individuation is only a matter of love and desire within whose plurality the one and identical subject of knowl edge in man is peculiarly imprisoned. In love one is not supposed to grasp the meaning and worth of a being other than and separate from oneself and overcome the separation in a deep affirmation of the oth er’s existence and worth. Rather, one is supposed to feel the other’s existence and worth as transcended, simultaneously with one’s own, as both disappear together by drowning in the fullness of “ nothingness.” To this corresponds (existentially) fully reached knowledge, the final transcendence of individuality, which must leave behind the love that was merely the growth of knowledge. Compared to this last great holy act and true “ death” the bodily death of the individual is only a false appearance of death; this is actually only a wandering of the individual into the house of a new body, therefore only the beginning of a new “ life” in which love and knowledge must constantly be overcome. Buddha is the great teacher of salvation who announced the possibility of a true, final “ death” — not through individual eternity, which was increasingly feared by the Indian world, but by individual extinction through entrance into Nirvana.5
In sharp contrast to the Indian-Buddhist type of relationship be tween love and knowledge, being and value, the Greek type positively
elevates being, indeed, looks upon the completion of being as the
greatest value. This affirmation of being, rooted specifically in Greek sources, remains the a priori of all European religion and speculation. The richer and higher the being of the object of knowledge, the more absolute and pure the knowledge. Absolute knowledge, therefore, is knowledge of 6vxog ov. The positive worth of existing things is merely a function of how much fullness o f being they contain, whereas the negative values of “ evil,” “ the bad,” “ the hateful,” and so on— in the most extreme contrast to Buddhism— are traced to their relative lack of being. Analogous to this, subjective love is also primarily a turning
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toward positive value, toward a form of being that has a certain full ness. Love is a taking possession of being in knowledge, and therefore is not salvation from being as is the case in India. Love and hate have been understood, ever since the doctrines of Empedocles, as objective cosmic agents, the two forces behind the four elements of the world. Love is a principle of procreation that brings forth newer and richer forms of being. As Plato says in his Symposium, love is “generation in beauty,” a concept that can span animal procreation as well as the intellectual conceptions of the philosopher and the works of the artist, the statesman, and the general, all in a huge, finely graded ladder of ways and goals of creating. There is an unbroken continuity in the conception of love as a positive drive and agent of creation that runs from the oldest Aphrodite and Eros cults to the intellectual articula tions in Plato and Aristotle. Corresponding to the ontic (existential) levels of creating are levels in the intellect, of love for the lowest to ward ever-higher figures and forms of the world until, finally, love for the highest plane, that of “ ideas.” And from among ideas there is the idea of ideas, the good, which makes possible even the ovtog ov: be ginning with the beautiful horse, through beautiful bodies of youths, up to the pure idea of beauty itself.
But from another no less essential direction, the Greek notion can be seen to have a deep commonality with the Indian. First, love is understood intellectually, as dependent on the progress o f knowledge. Love is a bridge, or better, a movement from poorer to richer knowl edge. Love is an ontic agent, the drive of {xf| ov, the least, to win partic ipation in 0VT05 ov, the most. In a striking figure that blends erotic and spiritual elements in friendship, Socrates taught that the inner reform o f the individual, not merely rearrangement of externals, is brought about by the question and answer of dialogue. Eros acts as the muse of philosophical investigation, as a kind of spiritual midwife by means o f which the souls of the young will be lured forth and self-knowledge gained. Plato’s view that Eros is closely bound to dialogue is of this origin. That love, for Plato, is entirely reduced to knowledge, indeed means only the striving of incomplete knowledge for the complete, is shown in his stipulation that neither the ignorant nor the fully know ing (i.e., the gods) can love, but only philosophers, lovers of knowl edge.
Love, Eros, is the son of riches and poverty, knowledge and igno rance. For this reason, divinity for the Greeks is only the object of love, but not in itself loving, as it is for Christians. Wherever this double stipulation concerning love occurs in history, that love in its dynamics comes after rather than before knowledge, and is merely a teleological
means to the end, there one always finds the heathen image of divinity as something dumb, looking only upon itself and incapable of loving back in return. That the divinity is solely the object of supplications of its creatures, not a subject of an “ intimate conversation of the soul with God,” as Saint Gregory of Nyssa defined Christian prayer, was also Spinoza’s view, which took up again the Greek principle. N o one, he said, can demand that God reciprocate one’s own “ amor Dei intel- lectualis” fom His side with love. In reacting to this thought, Goethe made his Philine respond, “ If I love you, what does this have to do with you!”
The Platonic conception of love as the striving of not-being for being contains the kernel of this entire theory. Factually, however, love and hate, as well as the taking of an interest, do not belong to the sphere of the striving and willing of our intellect, although, of course, all kinds of striving, longing, desiring, willing, and drives may be found there. All “ striving” consumes itself in the satisfaction of desire. At the same time, striving aims toward realizing another, actual new thing that is opposed to itself. Love, on the contrary, rests entirely in the being of its object and wants the object to be nothing other than what it is. Love grows as it presses more deeply into its object. When understood as “ striving” for knowledge, however, love must disappear with complete knowledge. Love can thus not be one with the divinity, which, as the complete being, lacks nothing but is precisely what it “ wants” and “ should be.” Celsius, in his critique of Christianity from a Neoplatonic standpoint, tried to prove in a rigorously logical fashion that the Christian idea of a “ loving G od” was nonsensical. It is per haps more to be marveled that the Platonic conception of love as “striving” entered Scholastic philosophy against the innermost inten