What is love? Philosophers give 5 main answers: an ascent to beauty, finding one's other half, willing the other's good, a useful illusion and a meeting of freedoms. AskPhilosophy presents 14 arguments, from Aristophane to René Girard, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 5 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Love starts with a body and lifts us up to beauty itself, or to God.
Platon, Marsile Ficin, C. S. Lewis
To love is to find the unique being with whom one becomes one.
Aristophane, Michel de Montaigne
To love is to will the other's good for their own sake, an act more than a feeling.
Aristote, Thomas d'Aquin, Kierkegaard, Martin Luther King Jr.
Love is an illusion produced by nature or imagination: it does not see the other as they are.
Schopenhauer, Stendhal (Henri Beyle), René Girard
Love is a relation between two freedoms, which may turn into conflict or become a free commitment.
Sartre, Beauvoir
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
An ascent to beauty
Love starts with a body and lifts us up to beauty itself, or to God.
3 argumentsThe ladder of love
To desire is to lack what we desire: love lacks the beautiful and the good, and wants to possess them forever.
Love is the desire for beauty, and it rests only in God
To love is to desire beauty; a body's beauty comes from a higher beauty, infinite in God, which alone quiets desire.
The natural loves are good but not self-sufficient: they are meant to be raised
The natural loves are real goods, but they go bad when made absolute: they need to be raised by the love of God.
Finding one's other half
To love is to find the unique being with whom one becomes one.
2 argumentsWilling the other's good
To love is to will the other's good for their own sake, an act more than a feeling.
4 argumentsThere are three kinds of friendship, and only the friendship of virtue wills the friend's good for his own sake
We can love for use, pleasure or virtue; only virtue, being stable, makes us wish the friend's good for his own sake.
To love is to wish good to someone
To love is to wish good to someone; loving a thing for oneself depends on loving a person for her own sake.
Preferential love is a form of self-love; true love is a duty that loves every human being
Love based on inclination can end and remains self-love; only the duty to love one's neighbour is safe from change.
Agape: loving even one's enemy
To love is not to feel affection: it is to will everyone's good, even of the one who wrongs us, because hate also destroys the hater.
A useful illusion
Love is an illusion produced by nature or imagination: it does not see the other as they are.
3 argumentsThe genius of the species
Love is only a refined sexual instinct, which deceives us with an illusion serving the species.
Crystallisation
The lover keeps adorning the loved one with perfections he invents, like crystals covering a twig.
We desire through another: "spontaneous" desire is a romantic lie
The hero thinks he desires for himself, but his impulse goes toward a model whose desire he imitates.
A meeting of freedoms
Love is a relation between two freedoms, which may turn into conflict or become a free commitment.
2 argumentsLove is a contradictory project: you cannot possess a freedom
The lover wants a freedom that loves him freely yet stays captive; these two wishes contradict each other.
Authentic love is the recognition of two freedoms, not a surrender
A woman who loses herself in a man to save herself fails: two freedoms must recognize each other, neither giving itself up.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.