Consider a kind of love that nobody argues about. It is worth starting there, because it is real, and for some of us it is the best thing we will ever do.
Someone I know sat up for three nights in a hospital chair beside a cot. The baby in it had done nothing — I mean that precisely. It had no kindness yet, no wit, no loyalty, none of the qualities anyone would put on a list of reasons to love a person. It could not hold up its own head. It had, as far as anyone could tell, no character at all beyond a firm objection to being awake. And the person beside it would, without a second thought, have given up anything to protect it.
No one had argued them into this. No one had set out the child's qualities and asked them to weigh the case and decide. The love was already complete, and it was complete before there was anything there to earn it. Ask that person, on the second night, what the baby had actually done for them, and the question would have seemed to make no sense.
So here is a love that plainly does not work by reasons. It does not consult a list of qualities. It does not wait to be impressed. It comes first, and the person it settles on grows into it afterwards. And we do not think less of it for that. We think it is the highest love there is — the love that asks for nothing and was earned by nothing. We put it at the very top.
Hold on to that. Last time, this looked like the weaker of our two ideas about love. This episode, it will turn out to be far more serious than it appeared — serious enough that a philosopher built his whole account of love on it. And then it will turn out to cost something we did not expect.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the second of nine episodes on what love is a response to, and so on what loving someone actually commits you to.
A word first on where we were. Last time we identified something almost everyone does and almost no one notices. We hold two beliefs about love at once. The first: that it is unconditional — that we would love the person no matter what. The second: that we love them because of who they are — the kindness, the mind, the way they are in the world. And the two do not fit together. If the love is unconditional, it is not because of anything; if it is a response to their qualities, it is not unconditional. We had been holding the two apart and drawing on whichever one we needed — the unconditional one when we wanted to feel safe, the because-of-who-they-are one when we wanted to feel chosen. And the moment we set them side by side, each began to rule out the very people we actually love.
I left both of them looking broken. That is not fair to either, and I do not intend to leave it there. The only honest way to find out what a belief is worth is to build it into the strongest version anyone has made of it, feel its full force, and then ask what it requires us to pay. A belief we have only ever met in its weak form we do not really know; we have only a caricature, easy to dismiss when it suits us.
So I am going to take these two views one at a time and build each to full strength. This episode, the first — the unconditional one. The one from the wedding vow and the hospital chair. I will love you no matter what.
I should be honest that this is the one I would reach for myself. Last week I described freezing at a wedding, during the toasts, when a friend leaned over and asked me to say what divides her companion app from real love. The first answer I reached for was: real love is unconditional. So in taking this view apart, I am taking apart the answer I would have used to save myself. I am not examining someone else's view from a safe distance.
Start with the wedding-card version of unconditional love — the weak one, which we can set aside. I will love you no matter what happens. Put like that, it sounds like mere stubbornness: a promise to go on feeling a feeling whatever comes. And stubbornness is easy to argue against. People fall out of love all the time; vows are broken; so much for no matter what.
Now the strong version. It comes from the philosopher Irving Singer, who devoted three volumes, The Nature of Love, to the subject, and it rests on a single distinction that, once grasped, is difficult to set aside.
Singer says there are two quite different things love might be doing, and that we tend to run them together.
The first he calls appraisal. To appraise something is to weigh its actual value. A jeweller appraises a diamond: examines it, grades it, states what it is worth — and the worth was in the diamond already, before the jeweller arrived. The jeweller only reads it off. Much of what we call valuing is appraisal of this kind. We assess things, establish what they are worth, and respond accordingly.
Love, Singer argues, is not that — or at least, the love we care most about is not. The second thing one can do he calls bestowal. To bestow value is not to read it off a thing. It is to give the thing a value it did not have until it was given.
Consider a worn-out toy a small child cannot sleep without. To anyone else it is a few dollars of stuffing with one eye missing. To the child it is more precious than anything else in the house — not because the child surveyed the available toys and judged this one the best, but because the child has invested something in it that the toy did not have on its own. The child has made it precious. Take it to a jeweller and the valuation is: worthless. Ask the child, and the question itself is the wrong one, put with the wrong instrument.
Singer's claim — and this is the strong form of everything we believe about unconditional love — is that loving a person works like the second case, not the first. We do not love someone because we have assessed them and found them valuable. We confer value on them by loving them. The whole view can be put in a single line — not one Singer wrote, but the shape of what he means: I do not love you because you are worth it; I make you worth it by loving you.
Be precise about what this says, because the rest of the episode turns on it. On Singer's account, the value the beloved has for the lover is created by the loving itself. It is not a quality the lover detects in the person and then answers to. It is brought into being by the love. The love does not find something valuable and respond to it; it makes the person valuable, and that value would not exist apart from the love.
See how much this gets right — and it gets a surprising amount right.
It explains the hospital chair. The baby had no qualities to appraise, and yet the love was already complete, because the love was never appraisal in the first place. It conferred a value the child would then spend a lifetime growing into.
It also explains the other end of a life, and this is the case that, to my mind, settles whether there is anything to the view at all. Consider someone whose husband has gone far into dementia. The man who could repair anything, who had the dry remark ready before you had finished speaking, whom she married for the particular cast of his mind — that man is, by any list one could write down, no longer present. The wit is gone. The competence is gone. Half the time the recognition is gone; on some days he asks her who she is. By appraisal — by any honest grading of the qualities — almost nothing remains of what she first loved. And she comes anyway, every day, and does the unglamorous work, and means it, and would tell you without hesitation that she loves him. You may call that habit, or duty, or grief. But Singer can call it what she calls it — love — and explain how it is possible without being a lie she tells herself. It is possible because her love was never an appraisal she would now have to revise downward. The value she had been responding to was value she had conferred, and one can go on conferring what one once conferred. The value does not lapse simply because the qualities have worn away.
So the view explains why love can survive ruin. When someone we love is diminished — ill, failing, stripped of the very things we would have named as our reasons — appraisal would have to mark them down; the grade falls. But those who love well do not mark each other down. They stay. And Singer can say why they stay, without it being a delusion: because the value was never something they were reading off the person to begin with. It was something they conferred, and what one confers, one can continue to confer.
This is the love that does not leave. It is, genuinely, among the finest things we manage for one another, and Singer has shown how it is even possible — how it is not merely sentimental noise to say I would love you no matter what. It is possible because the love was never a verdict on your qualities that your qualities could overturn. It is a gift; and a gift, once given, does not depend on the receiver remaining worthy of it. That is what makes it a gift rather than a wage.
There is an older version of this: the shape of the Christian idea that a person can be loved before they have earned it, loved precisely as the one who has not earned it. I will not pursue that tonight — it has an episode of its own later in the series. I mention it only so that this does not sound like one eccentric professor's notion. The idea that the highest love confers value rather than detecting it runs very deep in how we think about love at all.
So that is the strong version. Not I will keep feeling this whatever happens — stubbornness — but my love is what makes you precious, so no fact about you could arrive and cancel it. Set beside it, the wedding-card version is plainly the cruder and weaker one. This is the view at full strength.
And now I have to show what it costs, because it does cost something, and the cost is hidden in the very thing that made it beautiful.
You have to work through this next part yourself. Otherwise it is only me asserting things at you.
Say the most devoted thing you believe about love, aloud or to yourself, in its strongest form. Not I would probably stay. The real one: I would love you no matter who you became. Mean it as you would mean it at three in the morning, to the person whose hand you would hold in that hospital. No matter who you became.
Now follow it — not where you would like it to lead, but where it actually leads, on its own.
And let me be fair and begin from the case that made the view beautiful, not from a cheap one. The wife at the end of her husband's dementia: her love remained while his qualities drained away. That is the strong evidence, and I meant it. But notice what kind of change that was. He did not become someone worse. He became someone less — emptied out, diminished, but not an enemy. That her love stayed through it is the most moving thing in this episode. So watch what happens when we keep the view honest and run it on the other kind of change.
No matter who you became means the love does not depend on who they are. That was the entire point; that is what made it a gift and not a wage. So picture it actually happening. The person you love changes — not a little, but completely. Over years, in the way people sometimes do, they lose the kindness; it hardens into something cruel. They lose the sharpness; the mind you loved goes dull, and then unkind. By slow degrees they become a person you would not choose, would not befriend, would avoid if you met them new. Every quality you would have put on the list of reasons is gone, or has turned into its opposite.
And your love, being the genuine unconditional kind, the kind that confers value rather than finding it, stays. It has to. That was the promise. It confers the same worth on this hard stranger that it conferred on the person they used to be, because it never was responding to the kindness or the sharpness. It confers value; it does not find it; and it can confer value on anyone.
Now the hard question. Is that still love of them?
Look at what it is doing. It would be exactly the same toward whoever stood in that position. It did not track the person through the change; it did not even register the change, because registering it would mean responding to qualities, and we have said it does not do that. A love that would remain the same no matter who you turned into is not, in the end, picking you out at all. It is not devotion to a particular person. It is a stance the lover once adopted and now maintains — and would maintain toward anyone they had decided to hold it toward.
Now look at what this means, because the beautiful case and the disturbing one turn out to be, at bottom, the same case. Bestowal cannot tell those two changes apart. The wife's love that stayed as her husband emptied out, and a love that would stay just as warm had he instead grown cruel, are on this view the same love doing the same thing. It remained regardless of who he became: that one description covers both. The feature that made her love beautiful — that it did not track his qualities — is exactly the feature that means it would not have faltered had those qualities gone bad rather than gone blank. You cannot keep the first and refuse the second. They are one stance, and the stance does not read the difference, because reading the difference is precisely the thing it does not do.
This is the cost of the view. It confers value regardless of what the person is like — that is why your love could survive your own decline. But a love that confers value regardless of what the person is like is not assessing the person. It does not respond to who they are. It cannot, because responding to who they are is appraisal, and we have spent a whole segment establishing that this love is not appraisal. So the very feature that lets unconditional love persist through anything is the feature that makes it not about the person it persists for. It stays regardless of them. And regardless of them and because of them are not two varieties of devotion. One of them is, quietly, not devotion to the person at all.
Here is how I would put it to myself, plainly, because it is not comfortable. The love I reach for to feel safe — the no-matter-what love, the one I would have grabbed at that wedding — turns out, followed all the way down, not to be aimed at the actual person in front of me. It is aimed at a position, and they happen to occupy it. If they stepped out of the position and a stranger stepped in, this love, by its own logic, would confer the same value on the stranger.
And you can feel, can you not, that something has gone wrong — that this is not what you meant. You did not mean I would feel this toward whoever happened to be here. You meant I would feel this toward you, the specific you, and go on feeling it even as you change. But that second thing quietly brings back exactly what bestowal told us to drop: a love that tracks the particular person, that is about them, that would be misplaced — wrong — if it landed on someone else. The moment you want your unconditional love to be for them and not merely from you, you have reached back into the other view — the one we said contradicts this one.
That is the cost, and it is not a small one. The strongest and most beautiful version of I will love you no matter what — the one a serious philosopher defended across three volumes, the one that explains the hospital chair and the love that endures through ruin — buys all of that by making the love something that does not, in the end, respond to who they are. It would be the same if they were someone else. It would be the same if they were no one in particular at all.
I said we would not return to the app for several episodes, and for the most part we will not. But I have to show one thing tonight, because it is where this view's cost stops being abstract.
A love that confers value regardless of what it is directed at will confer it on anything at all. That is not a side effect; it is the definition. So if your love really is bestowal — if it confers worth rather than finding it, and can go on conferring it no matter who or what it lands on — then put the question my friend put to me, and watch the unconditional answer try to handle it.
Can you love the app?
The honest answer, on the view we have just built to full strength, is: of course you can. There is nothing to prevent it. Bestowal does not check whether the thing in front of it has earned the love — we made that its whole virtue. It does not consult a list of real qualities — we said that is appraisal, and this is not appraisal. It simply confers. So a love that is pure bestowal can settle on the app just as readily as on a person — more readily, perhaps, since the app never gives any reason to mark it down. Such a thing will never fail to be worthy of a love that was never tracking worthiness in the first place.
So the view I reach for — the safe one, the unconditional one — cannot tell me why my friend's app is not a perfectly good place to put my love. It gives me no way to say: that only reflects you back; it is not a person. On its own terms, something that only reflects you back is a fine recipient. You confer; it receives. What more did you want?
This is not an argument that she is right to love the app. I am not saying that, and I will spend whole episodes not saying it. It is something smaller and worse: the belief I would have used to win that argument — real love is unconditional — turns out to be the one belief that cannot even begin the argument. It says yes to the app. The answer I would reach for to feel safe is the answer that rules nothing out.
So let me try to do tonight, with you, what I should have done at that table. Take the person you actually love — not the app, the real person. And ask yourself, honestly: when you say you would love them no matter what, do you mean a love that would be exactly the same toward anyone who stood in their place? Because that is what no matter what buys you, held cleanly. Or do you mean a love that is about them, that responds to them, that would be misplaced on someone else — in which case you do not, after all, want pure bestowal. You want a love that attends to the person, and you have just admitted that your unconditional love has conditions.
You do not have to answer tonight. But notice that you cannot have both halves of what you wanted. You wanted a love that stays no matter what and is about this particular person. And the part that stays no matter what is bought by the part that stops being about them. The love persists precisely because it never depended on assessing them.
So what do you leave with tonight that you did not have an hour ago?
The soft, obvious answer you might have started with turns out to be neither soft nor obvious: it is a serious, defended account of what love is — the bestowal view — and it is more beautiful than you had realised, not less. A love that makes the worth rather than finding it. A love that can endure through ruin because it was never assessing what it would now have to mark down. That is real, and it is worth wanting, and I do not want you to discard it on your way out. Keep it in view. It still stands; no one has refuted it tonight. We have only found its cost.
And the cost is this. Held all the way through, on its own, unconditional love does not track the person. It would be the same toward anyone you directed it at, which means it is not, in the end, picking them out — and it cannot refuse the app, or anything else you point it at. The very thing you wanted it for — to be your proof that you love this person, specifically and unbreakably — is the one thing it cannot give you, because the unbreakable part is exactly the part that stopped attending to who they are.
And now you can feel yourself reaching for the other answer. If the trouble with unconditional love is that it does not attend to the person, then what you want is a love that does. A love that is a response to who they actually are: the kindness, the mind, the way they are in the world. The reasons. That is the other view, the one we set against this one at the very start, and I would guess a good many of you have quietly been standing on it for the last ten minutes, thinking: well, obviously, it is that one.
I would hold off on obviously. Because that view is where we go next, and I am going to do to it precisely what I did to bestowal tonight — build it to the strongest, most serious form any philosopher has given it, until you feel its pull as you felt this one's. And then I am going to find its cost, because it has one — just as real as tonight's and, I suspect, harder to face, hidden in the very thing that is about to make it feel like the safe answer. I will not tell you tonight what that cost is; you should feel that view's pull first, cleanly, before you learn what it charges — the same arrangement I gave bestowal. So do not leave thinking that we found the broken theory tonight and next week we will find the correct one. We did not. Tonight's view still stands, undefeated, with its one cost named. Do not trade it away for a view whose price you have not yet seen.
So tonight, before you sleep: the person you love most. You have already tried finishing I love them because — and felt what it cost. Now try the other one, the one we built tonight. Say it plainly: I would love you no matter who you became. And then ask the question I could not avoid — is that a love that is about you, or a love that would be the same toward anyone in your place? One of those is what you meant, and you know which. And whichever it was, you cannot, tonight, have both.
Two steps in, and already the safe answer has shown its price.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.