Abstract
The claim of this article is that in Søren Kierkegaard's notion of love as a basic urge in every human being we find a special dialectic between lack and surplus, between need-love and gift-love. Through a comparison with Jean-Luc Marion's description of erotic love in The Erotic Phenomenon, I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's insistence that love is greater than everything and therefore prior to both existence and knowledge seems, on the one hand, to point in the direction of a metaphysical anchoring of love, which would be foreign to Marion. But at the same time, Kierkegaard, like Marion, stresses that we have a universal, human experience of love, which is anchored bodily and sensed phenomenally. This duality points to the fact that Kierkegaard had a much more nuanced notion of love than that simple distinction between eros and agape that Anders Nygren invented.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Dialog |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Pages (from-to) | 37-46 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISSN | 0012-2033 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2011 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Theology