What Remains of Love

From the personal to the impersonal

Abstract

The article aims to investigate the gradual evolution of the notion of love between the Middle Ages and the modern age. Starting from Dante’s conception and going all the way to Simmel’s thought, the article shows how gradually the notion of love becomes more and more impersonal. Passing through Cusanus, Bruno and Spinoza, we can arrive at the Hegelian concept of Wechselwirkung, later inherited by Simmel in the Philosophy of Money, where this general constraint is understood precisely as absolutely impersonal. Regarding this progressive immanentization, it is perhaps possible to detect in Kierkegaard’s thought a kind of countermovement, which highlights the problem of personality in the relationship between creator and creature.