TITLE:
Why Do We Love?
AUTHORS:
Acylene Maria Cabral Ferreira
KEYWORDS:
Love, Attunement, Existential Mode, For-the-Sake-of, Being-In, Being-With
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.9 No.3,
August
23,
2019
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to answer the question:
why do we love? We think that we love because, as Dasein, we are constituted by ontological-existential modes, which structure us as disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) to being, to others,
and to the world. Our aim is to indicate the Heideggerian concepts of
existential analytic which, for us, are fundamental to grounding love as Dasein’s way of being, i.e., as an
ontological mode of Dasein as existence
and being-in-the-world. Our hypothesis is that love is a modification of the existential of disposedness (Befindlichkeit), or an attunement (Stimmung); i.e., a way of Dasein to be attuned to somebody or to something in the world. In the first part of
this paper, we will show why we can accept love as an existential mode; in the
second part, we will discuss how we can say that love comes from the
existential mode of being-in, of being-with and of the character of
for-the-sake-of (Umwillen).