PhilosophersSøren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard

Truth is subjectivity: one must take the leap of faith.

Existentialism1813 – 1855 DenmarkChristian believerThinker of existenceCritic of HegelWriter behind pseudonyms
Works of Love, 1847 (II A-C)

Preferential love is a form of self-love; true love is a duty that loves every human being

What it claims

True love is not preferential love: it is the commandment to love the neighbour, a duty that applies to every human being and protects love from change.

Why

Love based on inclination can end and remains self-love; only the duty to love one's neighbour is safe from change.

Valid with an implicit premise

We often think the highest love is the one felt for a single person, the lover or the friend, and that the poets described it well. Kierkegaard says the opposite, from a Christian point of view. The love we have for a chosen person is, he says, still a form of self-love: we love in the other "another self". True love is the one the Gospel commands: "You shall love your neighbour". It is a duty, which seems strange. But that is exactly what protects it: a feeling can change, a duty does not change. And the neighbour is not someone chosen: he is every human being, including the one we would not choose. The argument is given here in its own frame: a Christian ethics, in which all humans are equal before God.

P1Preferential love (the lover's for the beloved, the friend's for the friend) clings to a single being whom it calls "the other self". It is therefore as selfish as self-love, which clings to its own single self: it is another form of self-love.
P2 · implicit premiseA love that is a form of self-love is not true love.
P3A love that rests on inclination can change, in itself or over the years. Only when loving is a duty ("you shall love") is love secure, for ever, against every change.
P4 · implicit premiseTrue love must be safe from change: a love that could cease is not yet complete love.
P5What this duty commands is to love the neighbour. Now the neighbour is every human being: not through his differences, nor through his likeness to me, but through the equality of each before God.
So true love is not preferential love: it is the commandment to love the neighbour, a duty that applies to every human being and protects love from change.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world in which true love exists, in which it is not protected from change, and yet everything else is true: for example a sincere love that fades with time and is no less true while it lasts.
Valid with P2 and P4, two premises Kierkegaard does not state in this form but that the whole chapter assumes. Without P2, self-love could still be true love. Without P4, a changing love could be true love, and the duty would not be needed. To resist the argument one must deny P1 (love for a chosen being need not be selfish), P2 (a little self-love does not prevent loving truly), or P4 (a love can be true without being guaranteed for ever).
Analogy. It is like the difference between a plant that grows because the sun is out and a spring that flows in every season. The first is beautiful but depends on the weather. For Kierkegaard, the duty to love is the spring: it depends neither on the weather nor on who drinks.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

T
Theodor W. Adorno 1939 · attacks the conclusion

In "On Kierkegaard's Doctrine of Love" (1939), Adorno summarises the book and charges it with abstraction. By insisting on the commandment and on the generality of the neighbour, he says, the object of love becomes, speaking exaggeratedly, irrelevant: what counts are the qualities of the one who loves. He judges that this love comes close to callousness and sums it up: it asks us to love all men as if they were dead.

Kierkegaard replies
Kierkegaard Kierkegaard, further on in the book (IV), before Adorno
In section IV, Kierkegaard speaks of the duty to love "the people we see", those of reality. He says there that the task is not to find the lovable object, but to find lovable the object "given or chosen", and to keep finding him lovable however he changes.
The debate goes on (our summary) This passage shows that Kierkegaard is not speaking of a love with no one in it: he speaks of particular persons, seen, chosen or given. But Adorno can answer that the text confirms his charge: finding the other lovable "however he changes" makes his qualities indifferent. Adorno writes after Kierkegaard and does not answer him in this passage. Our reading.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The core disagreement is whether loving each person as neighbour respects the individual or erases him. Many readers of Kierkegaard defend him against Adorno; others find the objection sound. An open point.
Arthur Schopenhauer 1844 · attacks premise 1

In the "Metaphysics of Sexual Love" (The World as Will and Representation, II, ch. 44), Schopenhauer explains differently the choice of a particular person. When two lovers scrutinise each other, what is at stake is, he says, "the meditation of the genius of the species on the individual which is possible through these two". What their love affairs decide is "the composition of the next generation". For him preferential love is therefore not self-love: it is the work of the species, not of the self.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Kierkegaard in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Schopenhauer writes three years before Works of Love and does not target Kierkegaard. The two agree on one point: preferential love is not a pure gift to the other. They differ on the cause: for Kierkegaard, the self loves itself in the other; for Schopenhauer, the species uses the two lovers. Our summary.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Two diagnoses of the same fact: preferential love does not aim only at the other's good. The disagreement is about what explains it (the self, or the species) and what follows. An open point.
Immanuel Kant 1785 · attacks premise 3

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant also reads the commandment to love one's neighbour, even one's enemy. But he objects: love as inclination cannot be commanded. What can be commanded is to do good out of duty, even without inclination, even against a natural aversion: a "practical" love, lying in the will, not a "pathological" one, lying in the propensity of feeling. If love becomes a duty, what duty protects from change would then be goodwill, not tenderness.

Kierkegaard replies
Kierkegaard Kierkegaard (he notes the difficulty himself, without quoting Kant)
Kierkegaard admits that "you shall love" contains an apparent contradiction: that loving should be a duty. He makes it the distinctive mark of Christian love.
The debate goes on (our summary) This admits the problem without solving it, and Kierkegaard does not quote Kant in this passage. Kant proposes a solution: the duty concerns love that lies in the will. It remains to be seen whether what Kierkegaard calls love is more than that. Our reading.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The core disagreement is whether one can owe someone more than acts of goodwill, and whether a love that is only duty is still love. An open point.