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Question of the day: do you love someone for their qualities, or simply for being them?

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Love & friendshipGreek & RomanAnalyticPlatoAristotleBlaise PascalHarry Frankfurt#friendship#love#question-of-the-day#reasons-for-love
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Its coordinates: 6.19 Philosophy of Love and Friendship

Today's question comes from the card on love and friendship: do you love someone for their qualities, or for being them?

Ask people why they love their partner or their oldest friend and you usually get a list: kind, funny, brave, honest. But lists cause trouble. If you love her for her kindness, should you love someone kinder just as much, or more? And if illness or age took the kindness away, would the love have lost its reason?

The main answers:

  • For the qualities. Love responds to what is good or lovely in a person. Plato's Diotima describes a ladder that climbs from one beautiful body to beauty itself, and Aristotle thought the best friendship is love of a friend's good character. Pascal drew the uncomfortable conclusion: we never love a person, only qualities.
  • For being them. Love attaches to this particular person and is not traded for a better model. Harry Frankfurt argued that love is not a response to value at all. We do not love our children because they are valuable; they become valuable to us because we love them.
  • For the history. What you love is neither a list of traits nor a bare individual but a shared life. The relationship itself gives the reasons.

The card sets out the positions and the people behind them: 6.19 Philosophy of Love and Friendship.

Answer in your own terms. A story about a friend, a parent or a marriage is as welcome as a theory.

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5 answers

  1. Eliana Halpern

    Fellow

    The rabbis gave a version of this in Pirkei Avot, chapter 5: any love that depends on a thing ceases when the thing ceases, and a love that does not depend on a thing never ceases. The example of the first is Amnon and Tamar; of the second, David and Jonathan.

    What I notice on Tuesday nights is that Jonathan's love surely had reasons. He saw David's courage. So the saying doesn't separate love with reasons from love without them. It separates love whose reasons are also its conditions from love whose reasons were only the way in.

  2. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    Al-Ghazālī's Book of Love in the Iḥyāʾ has a list of the causes of love, and it is more patient than either side here. If I have it right: we love our own existence and perfection; we love those who do us good; we love the good in someone even when it does nothing for us; we love beauty for its own sake; and there is a hidden affinity between some souls that explains love no list of qualities can account for.

    That fifth cause is his honest admission that the qualities view runs out. He does not call it irrational. He calls it hidden.

  3. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Proust's answer is the most deflating I know. At the end of Un amour de Swann, after years of jealousy, Swann reflects that he wasted years of his life, wanted to die, felt his greatest love, for a woman who did not please him, who was not even his type.

    So for Proust neither answer is right. Swann did not love Odette's qualities, since he did not like them, and he did not love her either, since he barely knew her. He loved his own anxiety about her. A gloomy view, but anyone who has been jealous recognises it.

  4. Harpreet Kaur Grewal

    Fellow

    A line from the Guru Granth Sahib is often recited at Sikh weddings, from Guru Amar Das: they are not called husband and wife who merely sit together; they alone are called husband and wife who have one light in two bodies.

    Read against today's question, it is neither qualities nor the bare person. It says what is loved is something shared that neither had alone. That is closer to the third option, the history, except that the tradition would say the light was there before the history began.

  5. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Spinoza defines love as joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause. On that definition we love whoever we take to be the cause of our joy, which sounds like the qualities view, except that he spends much of Part III showing how often we are wrong about the cause.

    Claire's Swann is a Spinozist case. His joy and pain had a cause, and he pinned them on Odette. I find that more useful than either side of the question: love is real, and its explanation is usually a mistake.