4/ The hidden face of love

If the conception we have just outlined is correct, love appears to be more than a subjective feeling of pleasure at the thought or presence of the beloved, as initially suggested. Love is also an affirmation, a judgement, and even a thesis that can be summarised as: 'This, which I love, has value'. By attributing value to its object, love asserts something about it, fulfilling the classical definition of a judgement. It postulates a reality—namely, the existence of value in the loved being or object—making it a kind of theory or thesis.

Love, then, is not a blind, meaningless feeling driven solely by impulses or vital forces; beyond its emotional nature, it possesses a cognitive dimension.

We might assume a chaos of forces within us, inaccessible to rationality, meaning, or analysis; indeed, it would be a classical error of rationalism to deny this. I shall refer to this irrational chaos, the existence of which I acknowledge, as 'desire'. However, I contend that we must not, as irrationalism might, deny the existence of another feeling in humanity that possesses a cognitive nature: love.

If a judgement lies at the very heart of love, we must examine how it is expressed. Firstly, it is a judgement that need not be explicitly formulated. It would be absurd to assume that one must explicitly declare, 'You have great value', in order to love something. Even if a slightly different form of explicit affirmation might be required in the context of marital love, we cannot assume this is necessary for all forms of love.

In fact, a judgement can be made instinctively or unconsciously; for instance, a newborn feeding instinctively embraces the notion that he must live (otherwise, he would not feed). This kind of judgement, which genuinely possesses a cognitive character while simultaneously being an expression of a vital, instinctive process, is difficult for us to conceptualise. We tend to operate within a reductive dualism, separating irrationality—deprived of all meaning and judgement—from logical, explicit, rational judgements, made in full awareness and studied in relatively austere treatises on logic.

This type of judgement, which I believe lies at the heart of love—an aspect of rationality intertwined with the irrational—merits careful consideration.

My position can be summarised as follows: axiological judgement does exist, but it cannot be reduced to logical judgement. Rather, axiological judgement is precisely what disrupts the classical dualisms—rational/irrational, reason/feeling, logical/illogical, cognitive/pathological—dualities that contemporary thought seeks to unravel.

I therefore define love as the presence of a value judgement within a feeling of pleasure. One might object that love has been defined quite differently, particularly in its original, historical sense. For instance, Plato defines love as a lack of the thing loved (Eros), while Aristotle defines it as enjoyment of the loved object (Philia). How can I disregard everything that has been written about love without taking it into account?
I readily admit that love can also involve lack or enjoyment, which aligns perfectly with the idea of love as an affirmation of value. However, I would argue that love as lack or enjoyment represents only secondary aspects, as they pertain not to love itself, strictly speaking, but rather to its concrete realisation: unrealised love becomes lack, whereas realised love transforms into enjoyment.

Thus, love now appears as both a feeling and a thesis—or rather, as a thesis embedded within a feeling. Yet it seems that the cognitive aspect of love has been largely overlooked or given less attention than its irrational or sentimental dimensions, as explored or celebrated by psychoanalysis, religion, poetry, philosophy, and so on. This raises the question: might we uncover something truly significant by exploring this cognitive side, or what I call 'the hidden face of love'?

To explore this, we must again proceed negatively, by examining what would happen if we denied that love itself implies an axiological judgement attributing value to the beloved. In such a case, I believe, our love would transform into contempt. If we recall that the meaning of a concept lies in its difference from other concepts, the meaning of love will undoubtedly become clearer when contrasted with its opposite: contempt.