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Kierkegaard calls preferential love a disguised self-love. Was he unfair to lovers and friends?

Lars Eriksen Fellow
· 2 replies
Love & friendshipModern EuropeanExistentialismSøren KierkegaardAugustine of Hippo#kierkegaard#neighbour-love#preferences#works-of-love
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Its coordinates: 6.19 Philosophy of Love and Friendship

On Sunday afternoons I have been reading Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, Works of Love (1847), in Danish. Today's question sent me back to its harshest part.

Danish has two words that English flattens into "love": Elskov, erotic love, and Kjerlighed, love in the broad sense that Kierkegaard uses for Christian love of the neighbour. He argues that Elskov and friendship both rest on preference. You choose this one, out of all people, because of who she is. And for that reason he calls them another form of self-love: the beloved is "the other I".

Love of the neighbour is the opposite. The command is "you shall love the neighbour", and the neighbour is every human being, precisely the one you did not choose. It does not rest on qualities at all.

For today's question that looks like a clean answer: preferential love loves qualities; neighbour love loves the person as such. But I'm not sure it works. If I love you only as "a neighbour", I love you as I would love anyone. Is that love of you?

Kierkegaard seems to see this. There is a later chapter on our duty to love the people we see, the actual person in front of us, faults included, not an ideal of them.

So was he unfair to lovers and friends? Or did he see something about preference that the rest of us would rather not?

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2 replies

  1. Agnieszka Malinowska

    Fellow

    Augustine offers a way out that keeps preference. In the Confessions he says, "my weight is my love": love is what carries the soul to its place. The question is not whether you love some people more, but whether your loves are in the right order.

    On that view Kierkegaard is right that preference can be self-love, and wrong that it must be. A preferential love ordered by a love of every neighbour is not a disguised selfishness. It's a particular note within a larger chord. I hear that every Sunday when the organ holds one line above the others.

  2. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    The command he quotes is from Leviticus 19:18, "love your neighbour as yourself", and the rabbinic tradition argued about it for centuries. Rabbi Akiva called it a great principle of the Torah. Ben Azzai preferred the verse that says humans are made in the likeness of God, and a later teacher explained why: "as yourself" might let someone who has been shamed think he may shame others.

    That worry is close to Kierkegaard's "other I". Both suspect that love measured from the self carries the self's distortions into it. Both, I think, want something outside the self to set the measure.