Abstract

According to Max Ferdinand Scheler, love is a priori a force unto human life. A force whose sake is not dominion but acts as integral ‘movement’. Scheler’s notion of ‘movement’ grounds itself on his interpretation of love as agape. This text endeavours to explore and highlight Scheler’s notion of love, and use the movie ‘My Dinner with Andre’ as fulfilling example and for demonstrative purposes. When the cliché ‘all we need is love’ rings in the ear, it is often mentioned how naïve one must be to still associate oneself with such ‘delusion’. On the contrary, when one delves into the totality of love as movement, as valuable for its own sake, the naivete of such comments of ‘delusion’ becomes clearly unparalleled. If someone were to say that the body does not require its blood, seldom would we consider their heads to be adequately filled with it. Even if we were not so zealous, the role of love and its imprint on sympathy is worth considering—most especially the sympathy needed in dialogue. Whether it is possible to love someone so totally different from oneself—in short, the complete ‘Other’—is discussed. Furthermore, with ideas such as toleration making their way into contemporary discourse, we beg the question of whether that is enough. That said, it is not that in inquiring if it is adequate we wish to devalue toleration, but instead advocate for a more fulfilling notion. In the hopes of ‘being authentic’, in an unarbitrary sense, something much more passionate is required.