Nomothetics of Love in the Moral Philosophy of L. Tolstoy

Abstract

The article offers a new reading of the moral-religious teaching of L. Tolstoy about love. The
essence of the campaign is to consider the category of love in the light of the universal law and its
practical implementation. For this purpose, the authors, relying on the Kantian idea of "nomotetics of
freedom", choose the term "nomotics of love", understood as a law-making act of reason, establishing
general principles of behavior in their free implementation. For this, the article defines the main semantic
meanings of the concept of "law of love" as a natural anthropological and socio-ethical phenomenon of
spiritual and social life. Determining the conditions for the practical implementation of the law of love,
the authors consider it from two sides: from the point of view of the metaphysics of "universal" love and
from the point of view of the ethics of love for one's neighbor. This allows us to reveal the main
contradiction of Tolstoy's "nomothetics of love": between Plato's metaphysics of "universal love" and the
evangelical ethics of love for one's neighbor. In conclusion, the authors show that the resolution of this
contradiction is carried out by Tolstoy through the concept of "life in the present", which is intended to
concretize the abstract universalism of universal love.