To Sense What Is Living in the Other: Hegel’s Early Love

<p>There are not many manifest reasons to think about Hegel and love together. First of all, Hegel is hardly lovable to most people; many readers do not want to take the time to sort out those sentences. Second, the language of love is usually understood to be a direct proclamation or a lyrical expression of some kind. Third, love has a relation to images and motions, to what we imagine time and again or, rather, to a form of imagining and moving that seems to take us up into its repetitions and elaborations. So the topic of love seems an odd way to approach to Hegel, whose language is dense, who explicitly devalues non-linguistic forms of art, and for whom direct address and lyrical style seem equally remote. And yet it was a topic to which he turned in his early work, where “love” is the name for what animates and what deadens, and his views have clear implications for thinking about the senses and aesthetics more generally. In the years prior to writing <em>The Phenomenology of Spirit</em> (1807), for example, Hegel wrote a short essay called “Love” (1797–98), a fragment of which remains. And we find further remarks in a small piece now called “Fragment of a System” (1800). Later, it seems, love falls away, or is pushed away, or becomes silently absorbed into his writing on spirit…</p>