Why Do We Love?

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question: why do we love? We think that we love because, as Dasein, we are constituted by ontological-existential modes, which structure us as disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) to being, to others, and to the world. Our aim is to indicate the Heideggerian concepts of existential analytic which, for us, are fundamental to grounding love as Dasein’s way of being, i.e., as an ontological mode of Dasein as existence and being-in-the-world. Our hypothesis is that love is a modification of the existential of disposedness (Befindlichkeit), or an attunement (Stimmung); i.e., a way of Dasein to be attuned to somebody or to something in the world. In the first part of this paper, we will show why we can accept love as an existential mode; in the second part, we will discuss how we can say that love comes from the existential mode of being-in, of being-with and of the character of for-the-sake-of (Umwillen).