The Reasons of Love

Finally, it is a necessary feature of love that it is not under our direct and immediate voluntary control.

Our response to it bears directly and pervasively upon how we conduct ourselves—or, at least, upon how we propose to do so. Perhaps even more significantly, it affects how we experience our lives. When we seek to understand the world of nature, we do so at least partly in the hope that this will enable us to live within it more comfortably. To the

Without such purpose, action cannot be satisfying; it is inevitably, as Aristotle says, “empty and vain.” By providing us with final ends, which we value for their own sakes and to which our commitment is not merely voluntary, love saves us both from being inconclusively arbitrary and from squandering our lives in vacuous activity that is fundament

This means that the most basic and essential question for a person to raise concerning the conduct of his life cannot be the normative question of how he should live. That question can sensibly be asked only on the basis of a prior answer to the factual question of what he actually does care about. If he cares about nothing, he cannot even begin to

Regardless of how suitable or unsuitable the various things we care about may be, caring about something is essential to our being creatures of the kind that human beings are.

Being wholehearted means having a will that is undivided. The wholehearted person is fully settled as to what he wants, and what he cares about. With regard to any conflict of dispositions or inclinations within himself, he has no doubts or reservations as to where he stands.

Love is the originating source of terminal value. If we loved nothing, then nothing would possess for us any definitive and inherent worth. There would be nothing that we found ourselves in any way constrained to accept as a final end.

When we love something, however, we go further. We care about it not as merely a means, but as an end. It is in the nature of loving that we consider its objects to be valuable in themselves and to be important to us for their own sakes.

It may seem, then, that the way in which the necessities of reason and of love liberate us is by freeing us from ourselves. That is, in a sense, what they do. The idea is nothing new. The possibility that a person may be liberated through submitting to constraints that are beyond his immediate voluntary control is among the most ancient and persist