Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann (Bloomsbury, 2014), pt. 2, ch. 4, Four Forms of Love, pp. 92-94:
Brotherly love is related to the humanity in general of those who are near us; we love them for who they are, not for what they can become. In love of the remote, our sight is raised toward the ideal of humanity in general, toward the most noble and the best that humanity can become. In radiant virtue, we return to the individual, to the person who radiates goodness and spirituality around himself. In personal love, affirmative devotion is directed from one individual toward another. More precisely, it is directed toward the ideal of that unique individual. In every existing, empirically given and limited person there is an individual ideal of that person: the ideal of personality. Personal love “brings to light the otherwise hidden and neglected essence of one’s individuality.”
We habitually say that personal love is blind, but Hartmann corrects this opinion. Personal love is blind to the surface of personality and its general empirical and humanitarian aspects. Despite that, or just because of it, personal love is capable of taking us much deeper toward the essence of personality, toward its individual ideal, than any other form of cognition, than any other form of love. When it comes to such depth, “he who loves is the only one who sees; while he who is without love is blind.” We do not see that this is the case because we have too narrow a conception of knowledge. Just as the highest values are the individual values, so the highest form of knowledge is the knowledge of the individual. It is entirely wrong to limit knowledge to a thinking, reflective, or rational consciousness of an object. “Valuational knowledge,” as Hartmann calls it, is knowledge of the individual and unique, and it is based on feeling, on sharpened and sensitive intuition for the richness of values.
Hartmann also wants to distinguish this conception of personal love from the oft-repeated clichés regarding romantic love. He reminds us that the bliss that a person experiences in love consists not in being in love, but in loving. In loving, in striving toward uniting our own innermost depth with the innermost depth of another person, personal love does not simply aim at happiness. Speaking about happiness even obscures the understanding of personal love more than it clarifies it. To shed more light on the issue, he maintains that personal love is “beyond happiness and unhappiness.” Happiness is secondary in love; love always involves both suffering and joy. Ever a lover of aporias and paradoxes, Hartmann even claims that, “The suffering of one who loves can even be happy, his happiness [can] be painful.”
Hartmann is not playing with words. In fact, he emphasizes that the experience of love is one of those that shows the limitations and inflexibility of our ordinary language. Personal love overcomes such limitation. The lovers develop their own language, their own signs and signals, by which they can in one glance gain the knowledge they need of the soul of their lovers. Here every gesture is important. Every movement, every smile conveys a message: the two souls are united and yet they remain two. Personal love makes possible the participation in each other’s souls. It makes possible the intuitive vision of the best and the highest. The penetrating knowledge of personal love may be one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, perhaps the greatest mystery of all.
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