The central commandment of love in discussion

Abstract

Some of the key issues that surfaced in a recent discussion on Thinknet regarding the meaning of the central commandment of love and its relation to various aspects of reality, in particular the social and ethical modal functions, will be analyzed in this article. In its central and direction-giving meaning the central commandment of love comes to expression in a rich diversity of modal and typical norms and principles. Since the terms used to describe the central commandment of love are located within various modal aspects an account is required of the multiple ways in which they can be employed. By distinguishing between conceptual knowledge and concept-transcending knowledge it is possible to understand why a key term such as "love" may refer to the core meaning of the ethical or moral aspect and also be used to point at realities exceeding the boundaries of this aspect. Once this is understood it is no longer possible to deny the differentiated, peripheral and partial meaning of the social and the moral aspects of reality in relation to the central commandment of love. An analysis of the coherence between the social aspect and those aspects foundational to it constitutes a part of the task of reflecting on the elementary or analogical basic concepts of sociology as an academic discipline - embedded in a non-reductionist ontology and including a brief account of the inter-modal coherence between the social and moral aspects of reality