These millions differ not only as individuals (which is their pride), but also in their action, object, and relationship. Sometimes one cannot speak of lovers at all, and yet of love; sometimes of lovers but not of love, in which case things proceed in a rather more ordinary way. And the word comprises as many contradictions as Sunday in a small country town where the farm boys go to Mass at ten in the morning, visit the brothel in a side street at eleven, and enter the tavern on the main square at twelve to eat and drink. Does it make sense to explore such a word from all sides? But in using it one acts unconsciously as if underlying all the differences there were one common ground! One can love a walking stick and one can love honor; the difference between the two is as great as that between one and one thousand, and no one would think of naming them in the same breath if one wasn’t accustomed to doing just that every day. One can cite other examples of what is one and one thousand yet one and the same, such as loving the bottle, tobacco, and even worse poisons. Spinach and outdoor activities. Sports or the mind. Truth. One’s wife, one’s child, one’s dog. To this list, the siblings added further examples: God, Beauty, Fatherland, and money. Nature, a friend, one’s profession, and life. Freedom. Success, power, justice, or simply virtue. One loves all of that. In short, there are as many things associated with love as there are endeavors and figures of speech. But what are the differences between all these loves and what do they have in common?

It might be useful to consider the word “forks.” There are table forks, pitchforks, tree forks, gun forks, road forks, and other forks; and all these have a formative property of “forkness” in common. This is the decisive experience, the essence of all that is forked, the gestalt of the fork in the most dissimilar things that are called by that name. If we start from these things, it turns out that they all belong to the same category; but if we start from the initial impression of forkedness, it appears to be filled out and amplified by impressions received from the various particular forks. The common feature, then, is a shape or gestalt, and the differentiation lies first in the diverse forms it can assume, but then also in the objects that have such a form, their material, their purpose, and so forth. But while any fork may be immediately likened to any other, and is a sensory given, even if only in a chalk line or in the imagination, this is not the case with the various configurations of love; and the entire usefulness of the example is limited to the question whether here too, corresponding to the forkness of forks, there is a principal experience, a loveness, a lovehood, a lovelikeness, in every case. But love is not an object of sensory cognition that could be grasped with a glance, or even with a feeling, but a moral event in the way that premeditated murder, justice, or contempt is; and this means among other things that a variously ramifying, multiply supported chain of comparisons is possible between different examples of it, the most distant of which may be quite dissimilar, indeed distinct from each other to the point of being opposite, and yet be connected by a resonance that is passed from one link to another. In treating of love, therefore, one may arrive at hatred; and yet the cause is not the much-invoked “ambivalence,” the divided nature of feeling, but precisely the wholeness and plenitude of life.