The Focus of Love

Sharon Krishek

doi:10.1017/can.2022.7

Abstract

AbstractIt is widely agreed that the focus of love is ‘the beloved herself’—but what does this actually mean? Implicit in J. David Velleman’s view of love is the intriguing suggestion that to have ‘the beloved herself’ as the focus of love is to respond to her essence. However, Velleman understands the beloved’s essence to amount to the universal quality of personhood, with the result that the beloved’s particularity becomes marginalized in his account. I therefore suggest an alternative. Based on Søren Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self, I demonstrate that the beloved being ‘herself’ is determined by a quality—selfhood—that is both essential and particular to her. To have as the focus of love ‘the beloved herself,’ I claim, is to respond to this quality, which is to respond to her individual essence.

Highlights

The focus of a person’s love is not those general and repeatable characteristics that make his beloved describable ... it is the specific particularity that makes his beloved nameable —something that is more mysterious than describability. (Frankfurt 1999, 170; emphasis in the original)
While I agree with Velleman that love responds to the beloved’s essence, I take issue with his understanding of this essence as amounting to universal personhood
I develop a conception of individual essence that views the beloved as possessing an essence that is particular to her: her selfhood

Summary

The beloved’s essence as the focus of love

The focus of a person’s love is not those general and repeatable characteristics that make his beloved describable ... it is the specific particularity that makes his beloved nameable —something that is more mysterious than describability. (Frankfurt 1999, 170; emphasis in the original). Every person possesses a ‘pool’ of such essential particular qualities that are the ‘ingredients’ of which one’s selfhood (in its potential state) is constituted Listing these qualities does not seem to be an accurate way of entirely capturing one’s essence: it risks a retreat back to describing the beloved rather than naming her (to use Frankfurt’s distinction). Understanding selfhood as a quality that, while determining our identity, exists primarily in a potential state and allows for a dynamic actualization accommodates the two senses of essence (presented at the beginning of the section) It results in a conception of essence as both invariable and changeable. To be nameable is not to be reduced to a list of qualities; rather, it is to be singled out by virtue of possessing the complex, yet unified, quality that makes one who one essentially is: a particular individual, a self

The beloved’s selfhood as the focus of love

Further implications