Love as moral motive in Husserl´s later ethics

CABRERA CELIA

Graz

Workshop; Phenomenology and Current Philosophical Debates; 2015

Karl Franzens Universität Graz

Since 1920, that is, since the time Husserl started to show some doubts on his early ethical theory, which displayed a conception that based mainly in Franz Brentano´s ideas on ethics, love gained a central place in his reflections as a fundamental ethical motive. As we will see, love is a many-sided phenomenon that determines personal life from its deepest centre. Since it reveals the individuality of each person´s ethical duties, love proves the insufficiency of the merely formal rational ideal to account for subjective absolute values that give place to particular imperatives. Besides, as founder of a special form of community, love exhibits the unsurpassable telos of intersubjectivity, which represents the highest form of monadic life. Taking this into account, it´s not surprising that in a manuscript from 1935 Husserl states that: "Liebe im echten Sinn ist eines der Hauptprobleme der Phänomenologie, und das nicht in der abstrakten Einzelheit und Vereinzelung, sondern als Universalproblem" . In this context, the aim of the paper is to analyse Husserl´s conception of love as a moral motive. Husserl´s writings on the topic of love can only be found in manuscripts beginning from 1917/1918. Referring to some of these manuscripts, in what follows, I will try to outline the main features of his conception of love and it´s relationship to morality, and, finally, I will introduce some considerations that lead into metaphysical questions.