Amy & I are getting married in two weeks, and I’m still trying to come up with a good reading for the pre-game show. The following passage is a hoot, mainly because I always envision it on one of those “Love Is” fridge magnets, except it’d have to be about two miles long and has disastrously fascist overtones:
Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. But love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in its natural form. In the state, it is no longer present. There, one is conscious of unity as law; there, the content must be rational, and I must know it. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person in my own right and that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I gain recognition in this person, who in turn gains recognition in me. Love is therefore the most immense contradiction; the understanding cannnot resolve it, because there is nothing more intractable than this punctiliousness of the self-consciousness which is negated and which I ought nevertheless to possess as affirmative. Love is both the production and the resolution of this contradiction. As its resolution, it is ethical unity.
–G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
