Unselfish Love

Abstract

Having explored the nature of love, the present chapter endorses Kierkegaard’s conception of “work,” which refers to the way we should love. After all, possessing the capacity to love is not in itself sufficient for loving correctly. We often actuate this capacity poorly and fail to love as we should. The chapter focuses on selfishness, a failure to which romantic love is particularly susceptible. However, whereas Kierkegaard posits self-denial as a way of securing love against selfishness, the proposal here is that this alone is not enough to achieve loving correctly. Correct love can only be accomplished by what Kierkegaard presents as the double movement of faith. Explaining what it means to understand faith as a twofold attitude of denial and affirmation, the chapter suggests that for romantic love to be correct, it should not only be structured like faith but also be conditional on it.