Freedom as Human Love

This paper provides a critical discussion and integration of a central thread of Kottman’s book Love as Human Freedom, together with some essential coordinates on how the relationship between love, freedom, and progress should be conceptually framed in my view, based on Kottman’s own Hegelian background. I reconstruct the latter in section one. In section two I proceed to highlight a problematic issue in Kottman’s argument, namely the difficulty to adjudicate, on its basis, between the authority of love in the sense of a relationship between free individuals and other competing authorities, such as the one we may refer to as “patriarchy”. Finally, in section three I suggest that such a difficulty can be circumvented, or at least reduced, through a fuller – though not uncritical – reappreciation of Hegel’s concept of freedom, and provide some further observations on the advantages of the latter for the topic at hand.