The Reasons of Love

Caring about something differs not only from wanting it, and from wanting it more than other things. It differs also from taking it to be intrinsically valuable.

Suppose now that someone is performing an action that he wants to perform; and suppose further that his motive in performing this action is a motive by which he truly wants to be motivated.

The topics to which this book is devoted have to do with the ordinary conduct of life. They pertain, in one way or another, to a question that is both ultimate and preliminary: how should a person live?

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

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

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.

Loving someone or something essentially means or consists in, among other things, taking its interests as reasons for acting to serve those interests. Love is itself, for the lover, a source of reasons. It creates the reasons by which his acts of loving concern and devotion are inspired.

Under these conditions, I believe, the person is enjoying as much freedom as it is reasonable for us to desire. Indeed, it seems to me that he is enjoying as much freedom as it is possible for us to conceive. This is as close to freedom of the will as finite beings, who do not create themselves, can intelligibly hope to come.

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