Freedom as Human Love

Abstract

This paper offers some autonomous clues on the relationship between love and freedom, based on a critical discussion of Kottman’s book Love as Human Freedom from the perspective of its Hegelian background. The latter is reconstructed in section one. In section two I proceed to highlight a problematic issue in Kottman’s book, namely the difficulty to adjudicate, on its basis, between the authority of love in the sense of a relationship between free individuals and other competing authorities, such as the one we may refer to as “patriarchy”. Finally, in section three I suggest that such a difficulty can be avoided, or at least reduced, through a fuller – though not uncritical – reappreciation of Hegel’s concept of freedom, and provide some further observations on the relationship between love, freedom, and philosophy.