Here is an odd reason for love. Someone is doing really well, and when we come to love them, their wellbeing becomes in part our wellbeing. So it’s especially good for us to love all the people who are doing well. The most extreme version of this is loving God. For God has infinite wellbeing. And so by loving God, that infinite wellbeing becomes ours in a way.
My first reaction to the above thoughts was that this is ridiculous. It’s too cheap a way of increasing one’s wellbeing and seems to be a reductio of the thesis that whenever you love anyone, their wellbeing is incorporated into yours.
But it’s not actually all that cheap. For consider one of the paradigm attitudes opposed to love: envy. In envy, the other’s wellbeing makes us suffer. It seems exactly right to say that in addition to the other-centered reasons to avoid envy, envy is just stupid, because it increases your suffering with no benefit to anyone. But if so, and if love is opposed to envy, then it is not surprising that there is a benefit to love. And because envy is hard to avoid, the opposed love is not cheap, since it requires one to renounce envy.
But what about the oddity? Well, that oddity, I think, comes from the fact that while the benefit to ourselves from loving is indeed a reason to love, it cannot be our only reason, since love is essentially an attitude focused on the other’s good. At most, the realization that loving someone is good for us will help overcome reasons against love (the costs of love, say), and motivate us to try to become the kind of person who is less envious and more loving. But we can’t just say: “It’s good for me to love, ergo I love.” It’s harder than that. And in particular it requires a certain degree of commitment to the other person for good and ill, so if an attitude is solely focused on the desire to share the other’s good, that attitude is not love.
4 comments:
I think this ties in to a hierarchy of reasons or ends, whereby the existence of multiple reasons or ends in loving are actually a good thing as long as they are properly ordered in a hierarchy - one can love primarily for the other's sake, secondarily for one's own sake insofar as one benefits also from loving. Or, if one wants to include love of God in this as well since God wants us to love others & is pleased with that and/or is glorified by it, love others primarily for God's sake, secondarily for their sakes, and tertiarily for our sakes.
Now through our own experience of cognition we know we can love others for multiple reasons or ends, but the way a hierarchy is established could be interesting to think about. What does it mean to love something primarily for one reason / end, secondarily for another and tertiarily for yet another?
How are the ends distinguished as primary, secondary & tertiary as opposed to there being multiple reasons, each of which is EQUAL in importance? And what makes some reason / object primary in one's own loving as opposed to secondary? Is it the intensity or strength of the object willed? Or conscious focus put into any of the reasons? Does it proceed from the object's own nature, such that one loves others primarily for reason A because A as an object or end is richer or greater than B, while B in turn is richer or greater than C?
*By intensity or strength of the object willed, I mean the intensity that one desires or wills it with, not the object's own intrinsic intensity or power. Though I suspect the two are related as the greater an object, the more a healthy mind will recognise it & a healthy will want it.
I missed something obvious in my post. There is a much more straightforward self-centered reason to love: it's good for one to be a loving person!
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