Dietrich Von Hildebrand on Love as a Value Response

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue II, February 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Dietrich Von Hildebrand on Love as a Value Response

Dr. Peter Takov
Catholic University of Cameroon, Bamenda, Cameroon

Abstract: Against all forms of distorted love, Hildebrand asserts that love is a value response to a particular person, an unrepeatable individual who bears the framework of an imago Dei. In this paper I argue that this “Hildebrandian “value response” is not a new appellation of the ancient reason for love which is based on the fulfilment of a need but a gift inhering in life itself, which arises exclusively from a participation in the value of the beloved person. In Hildebrand’s “value response” it is not selfish to want to have one’s own subjectivity, to be loved in return, to be happy in loving – as long as these desires are embedded in the value-responding affirmation of the beloved person. Therefore, love can exist only if it seeks no reward, but once it exists, it is rewarded.

Keywords: Love, Value, altruism, Eudaimonia, egoism, personality, aesthetic love, imago Dei.

I. INTRODUCTION

In human history, the question of how love ought to be expressed has met with conflicting views. Prominent among these responses are, the physical, the aesthetic and the Hildebrandian conceptions of love.
The physical conception of love, whose proponents include Aristotle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, considers self-loveasa necessary feature of all true love and one ultimately finds one’s own good in the love of other humans and God. P. Rousselot contends that Aquinas “combines the view of Aristotle that self-love is the basis of our love for others, with the view of Augustine that in all actions one seeks one’s happiness to come up with the physical conception of love.” A thing is loved to the extent that one attains one’s own good and fulfils one’s natural appetite for loving. The more one gives oneself to others the more one finds and gains oneself.
The ecstatic conception of love severs all the connections linking the love of others to one’s egoistic inclinations; love is a relationship between two terms of love that have no natural relation to each other. Here, love is a free bestowal of one’s personal self to another in dissociation or opposition to one’s wants and desires.

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