Abstract

Has philosophy paid sufficient attention to love? It is evident that the thinkers of the past expended a large part of their intellectual energies on talking about feelings, passions, emotions or affections, to mention just some of the terms under which, one way or another, love has tended to be subsumed. By doing so they undoubtedly granted it a philosophical importance, but not necessarily the kind that should be its due. Because love is much more than a philosophical subject with the same rank as the most important ones: in the end it is, to put it rather abruptly, what makes philosophy itself possible. Why not consider love as we traditionally consider the experience of astonishment, that is, as foundational, as prephilosophical, in the same sense that we commonly talk of the prepolitical? To dispute just for a moment with the authority which has held the monopoly of the prephilosophical for so long: if we are astonished it is because we love to know. Only someone who already loves wisdom is in a position to be astonished.