The outcome of the previous phase of Weisse’s aesthetic was the web of cultural customs generated from all interpersonal relationships: beautiful life of beautiful people. What is still missing from this web, Weisse notes, is a point of unity, which would make it into a true organic whole. This point of unity or the lifeblood of customs, Weisse suggests, is love. Weisse thus joins thinkers like McTaggart, who would place love as the highest, or the almost highest, pinnacle of a Hegelian-style system of philosophy. Indeed, this is an idea even Hegel himself toyed with.
What Weisse means by love producing an organic unity is simple to understand: in love, we have both a subjective Gemüt - the lover of something beautiful - and related to this lover a beloved objective beauty. Following Plato, Weisse even says that love is the ultimate pinnacle of aesthetic experiences, all others being mere shadows of this absolute experience.
The simplest form of love, Weisse continues, is the one Plato described in his dialogues. Weisse is not referring to what we are nowadays accustomed to call platonic love, which Weisse attaches more to the term friendship. Instead, Weisse means simply the just described relationship, where a lover - an individual human being - loves the beauty of another individual human being. Since the beauty in case is supposed to be individual, it is not the beauty of customs that is meant, but either the natural or physiognomical beauty of the beloved. An important aspect of this relation is also that it can be unidirectional - the beloved need not love the lover, although the love of the lover must be something that the beloved can perceive.
Even in Plato’s dialogues, the appreciation of the physical beauty of the beloved is in ideal case replaced by the more traditional platonic love or love of a mental disposition of the other person. Weisse also points out that this relationship, which he calls friendship, was historically emphasised by Plato’s successor in the history of philosophy, Aristotle. In addition to turning the focus from physical to mental beauty, friendship also makes love a reciprocal relationship, since I cannot be a friend of a person, if they are not my friends.
Friendship is still not the highest form of love, Weisse says, since it still lost something that was already present in Plato’s notion of love. What Weisse is referring to is that Plato’s love was more of an organic unity, with each member having a precise role in the relationship. Friendship, on the other hand, is more of an indefinite relation and in fact admits an indefinite amount of individuals in the same relation - we can have whole groups of friends with as intensive relation as with a pair of friends.
The relation Weisse is clearly heading towards in his account is, obviously, sexual or marital love. Here the indefinite plurality of friendship is replaced by a duality of persons involved. This duality is instigated, Weisse says, by a natural drive that urges human beings to reproduce. It is no wonder that Weisse’s account of sexual love is very consverative - he admits just monogamous relations as aesthetic, although he does accept the possibility of a serial monogamy, and he explicitly characterises all homosexuality as ugly and perverted.
The pinnacle of Weisse’s aesthetics is thus provided by a monogamous, heterosexual marriage, where the lifeblood of human culture is joined with a more crude, sexual relation, which still sustains this culture through production of new generations. Of course, Weisse says, this does not mean that e.g. friendships would be replaced completely by marriages. It’s just that human life, he says, wouldn’t be aesthetically complete and maximally beautiful, if there were no marital love in it.
Still, Weisse says, even marital life is not enough, since beauty is not the highest point of human experience. The transition to the next phase of philosophy is left purposefully vague, because Weisse thinks describing it would be the task of the next philosophical science. Yet, we may find some outlines of this transition in Weisse’s words. Marital love leads to an even better kind of love - that of parents toward their children. This is love of a higher kind in that it is not self-seeking, but cares for the well being of the other - it is not anymore just beauty, but goodness we are speaking of. This then leads to the idea of something beyond humankind, caring for it like a parent does its children - Weisse is moving away from aesthetics to theology.
