Self-love and the reversal of the central emotional rule of the West
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47456/sofia.v12i2.42542Keywords:
emotional rule of love, self-love, emotional power, government, passionsAbstract
The paper discusses the transformation of the main emotional rule of the West: love. Reformation and Counter-Reformation readings of St. Augustine's work placed the rule of love at the center of 17th-century treatises on the government of the passions. The period of religious wars and the unification of national states meant that the Augustinian rule was shifted to politics, with self-love operating as a pessimistic reading grid for the conduct of subjects and adversaries. If in the first half of the century the Christian condemnation of self-love and the neo-Stoic government of the passions was confused with the nascent Reason of State, in the second half there was a reversal of the emotional rule. The Jansenist conception of how divine providence disposed of self-love to place the satisfaction of one at the service of the needs of others operated as a model for Political Economy and nascent liberalism. Enlightened self-love was thus affirmed as a political norm, mediated by the emotional device of commerce.
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