Love is a key to comprehending what freedom is. As with all philosophical concepts, love also has its own scale of forms - to follow R. G. Collingwood's method. At its lowest, love is a mere momentary emotion, almost indistinguishable from like. However, whereas like is conditioned by a relative presupposition - i.e. a particular, contingent, and selfish interest - love rests upon a universal and absolute presupposition. This latter states that in loving someone, the lover affirms everything about the beloved, unconditionally and without exception, down to the most trivial and minutest detail.
The expression "I love you" is absurd and ticklish, not because love is a sublime emotion which the average existing human being cannot realistically handle, but because in declaring love in this form, I turn love into something which I more or less intentionally do, like a decision. However, love is not merely a decision. Deciding to love someone does not mean that in so deciding I come to love that person for the first time. Rather, such a decision is only a reaffirmation, a confirmation I give after reflecting upon the fact that I already am in love with the other person. Love, therefore, is a category of representation and action rather than a particular object or act.
Of course, it is contingent that I love at all, and it is even more so that I love this particular person. This is the reason why I called love a "presupposition." Love can eventually go away. In recognizing this contingency, a human being can further make the decision to love love, that is, to absolutely presuppose the absolute presupposition, or, what comes to the same thing, affirm everything about affirming the entire existence of the beloved. This decision based on reflection is a free act. It is also a terrible decision. In making such a decision, love begins to burn and char the body and mind of the lover. The lover must learn to accept absolutely everything about the beloved. No moral, natural, political, aesthetic, or religious argument can excuse the lover from neglecting the implications of this standpoint. The lover must affirm the unnatural, the immoral, the politically impotent, the aesthetically unpleasant, or the profane.
It is also through this absolute passivity, this absolute renunciation and acceptance, that the lover liberates himself from the immediacy of representation. Prior to loving someone, the lover more or less thinks that some things in the world just is how it is, regardless of how he chooses to represent it. After the process of love, at the point which the lover assumes the full weight of his decision to love someone, the world essentially is how the lover chooses it to be. True, the lover did not, and could not, decide to let the world be in a particular way ex nihilo. But then it is also the case that, in a certain sense, the world is indeed the way it is ex nihilo. The lover knows that if he chooses to reject and criticize the faults of the beloved, and the faults of the world, then this decision will directly determine the way in which the thing appears to him. It is this consciousness of his own power of representation that is also the seed of a peculiar kind of freedom. I say seed because this freedom cannot blossom within the narrow confines of the flowerpot that is love. It must travel by wind to foreign lands, compete with other trees and bushes, take root, germinate, and grow. The resulting stand of trees is a state. But everything starts from the traumatic experience of becoming self-conscious while being in love.
