Hegel's broken manuscript on Love is a great transition to one of his more popular works, The Spirit of Christianity, because he begins speculating the idea of love, and what it means to achieve that love. He attempts to answer many philosophical or otherwise unanswerable questions such as what it means to achieve "true union" and what it takes to maintain that bond. Since this manuscript was probably written "a year or eighteen months before The Spirit of Christianity" (pg. 302), many of these ideas were carried over into his new work in hopes of further speculating the conception of love and connecting them to Christianity. One of these ideas he introduces is the concept of dead objects and their relation to true union. Further, he ties it into an important term known as shame, and it is this shame that continually negates true union. In retrospect, the abundance of dead objects surrounding individuals force them into a constant struggle for true unity; thus, these individuals are striving to combat shame, but this very combat for shame contradicts Hegel's overall definition of true unity. Hegel's manuscript, however missing the pages seem to be, is left with no concrete conclusion on the conception of love.
Hegel incorporates a basic but fundamental term known as a "dead object" and a translator defines the dead object as such:
"[Here there is no living union between the individual and his world; the object, severed from the subject, is dead; and the only love possible is a sort of relationship between the living subject and the dead objects by which he is surrounded]" (pg. 303).
This statement clearly defines the term "dead object", but fails to show which objects can be considered dead. The rest of the paragraph ...