Adopting a critical attitude towards appearances, ideas, and pieces of knowledge has been a common goal of philosophy ever since it entered stage in the history of mankind. Love has been said to let the beloved go unquestioned. It rather strives for intimacy and closeness. It offers unmerited acknowledgment and commitment. There is no love without a lover’s personal engagement and caring attention towards particular objects, fellow human beings or non-human creatures. In the 20th century modern phenomenology set up new standards for combining a critical attitude with concern for particular phenomena and their descriptive analysis. This combination, however, seems to entail a tension between opposing tendencies or movements. On the one hand, following Husserl’s methodology, the critical attitude rests upon stepping back from an everyday communicating, thinking and acting practice and throwing a fresh glance on hitherto taken for granted experiential materials and trajectories, assumptions, patterns of behavior, and so on. Whether or not this distancing movement of pausing and stepping back is shaped by the phenomenological reduction as Husserl suggests, there is a peculiar tendency to focus on the inner nature of what is given and to explore it step-by-step. On the other hand, phenomenologists agree upon the importance of striving for intimacy with the “things themselves”. Getting close, becoming immediately acquainted with whatever phenomena and attaining intuitive givenness undisputedly is the most important goal of a variety of different brands of phenomenology. To immerse oneself in the given while still operating its critical exploration, going to and fro between a loving and a critical attitude, seems to mark the powerful, and yet somewhat paradoxical, idea of doing phenomenology.
This lecture meets a two-fold aim. First, it strives for better understanding and
figuring out the importance of love for a phenomenological approach. For this
purpose, the above-sketched paradoxical movement will be scrutinized in the light of Husserl’s late investigation of love-based commitments and their role within a process of ethical self-improvement. Second, and going beyond the peculiar context of Husserl’s phenomenology, it will be argued that specifying love’s role and importance for a phenomenological investigation, by the same token, helps to unveil some crucial aspects of a phenomenology of love.