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The phenomenologist Max Scheler argued in his essay "Ordo Amoris' that "love is always what awakens both knowledge and volition; indeed, it is the mother of spirit and reason itself' (Scheler, 1973b, 110). His argument is that, in knowing something, one transcends the self and its conditions to come into contact with the world. But this presupposes the movement of love precisely as the primal act by which a being "abandons itself' to participate in being other than itself. Similarly, the act of willing something actual in the world "presupposes an anticipatory loving that gives it direction and content' (Scheler, 1973b, 110). It follows that "before he is an ens cogitans or an ens volens, the human being is an ens amans' (110–11). Before thought or will, there is love.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137030979_6

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