Knowing Emotions by Furtak Rick Anthony;

Author:Furtak, Rick Anthony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2017-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Love’s Knowledge; or, The Significance of What We Care About

We have begun to see how the emotional a priori is a condition of possibility for the world around us to appear real and significant. In this chapter, I will explain further why love and care (and concern, and interest) can be reliable capacities, able to reveal meaningful truths. In the process of doing so, I will rely on the work of numerous other thinkers who have been inspired by Pascal’s remark that the heart has its reasons—from Søren Kierkegaard and Max Scheler to Harry Frankfurt and Jean-Luc Marion1—and will also return to the work of philosophers who have already been cited frequently in earlier chapters, such as William James and Martha Nussbaum. Early in his treatise Works of Love, Kierkegaard presents a series of images having to do with the obscure “origin” at the ground of human existence from which love flows, “along many paths,” to illuminate our world in all of its rich and intricate significance.2 He portrays love both as an unseen source of light and as an unfathomable wellspring from which water flows. The common theme that unifies his imagery is that our capacity to love is like the hidden ground of a visible reality, and what is tacitly implied by this series of metaphors is something akin to a transcendental argument. By virtue of our experience of “love in its manifestations,” he claims, we can justifiably conclude that love must be the “ground of all things” in a more profound sense: that is, even if we cannot empirically verify that love is the basis of life as we know it, we still have good reason to make this inference.3 That is because love must be posited as a pervasive influence in order for what is apparent to us to be the way it appears. Without love, or care, as a basic affective disposition, we would not have access to those features of the world that attract our attention and that move us to respond emotionally. As Scheler claims, on a related note, love enables the “showing of something” to us, making significant knowledge possible,4 and allowing us to grasp what is other than ourselves. If we find the world to be charged with value, this is because we are “always already” loving or caring beings.

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