Two people I know share a word. It is not really a word. It is a sound one of them made years ago, mispronouncing something about a broken umbrella in the rain, and it has come to mean a particular kind of small disaster that is also funny — the kind you can only laugh at once everything is already soaked and already ruined. They say it to each other across a crowded room and both of them dissolve into laughter, and everyone else just stands there. I could write the sound down for you. I could explain the umbrella. You still would not have it. The meaning is not in the sound, and it is not in either of them. It is in the years between them, and the sound is only a small marker for those years.
That is worth pausing on, because it is a different kind of thing from anything we have examined so far. It is not a quality either of them has; you could not list "good at the umbrella word" on a dating profile. And it is not one person's wish about the other's wellbeing — the bare concern I built up last week. It is something the two of them made together, that neither of them owns and neither of them is. It exists between them. And here is the thought that has run through this whole series from the start, the one you may already have begun to form. Perhaps that — the thing between them, the years, the private word, the us — is what love is really a response to. Not your traits, which anyone could match. Not my bare wish that you are well, which I would feel for a stranger in trouble. The thing the two of you built, which has no copy anywhere.
Tonight I build that view — two versions of it, both serious, both defended by real philosophers. And I will be honest at the outset: for a good stretch it is going to look like the answer the last three weeks were missing. It gives the cleanest reply to one particular question you will hear all series. And then I am going to put that question on the table in earnest — a perfect copy of the person you love, standing at your door — and show that "the us" is not the only answer to it. It is one of three. The other two come from views you have already met, and they do not agree. The same caution as every week: do not settle here. Three times now, a serious account of love has failed to hold onto the one thing it was meant to hold.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the fifth of nine episodes on what love is a response to, and so on what loving someone actually commits you to.
Start with where we are, because tonight only makes sense against the failures of the last three weeks. We began by catching ourselves holding two beliefs about love that cannot both be true — that it is unconditional, and that it is because of who the person is — and quietly switching between them to suit the moment. Then I built each belief to its strongest form and stated its cost. Unconditional love — Irving Singer's version, on which love confers worth rather than finding it — turned out to be blind: it would remain no matter who the person became, so it was never tracking that particular person in the first place. Love for someone's qualities — Kate Abramson and Adam Leite's appraisal view — turned out to be tradeable: if the love is for the qualities, then a better bearer of those qualities has a claim on it. And then last week, the view we turned to once both of those had fallen: robust concern, Harry Frankfurt's idea that to love is to care about someone's good for their own sake, one's will bound up with how their life goes — together with J. David Velleman's sharper, Kantian version, on which love answers to a person's bare dignity, not their gradable traits. It escaped both earlier costs. And then it lost the person in a third way: a concern that answers to someone's good will answer to that good wherever it is found — you also want the stranger in the next hospital bed to be well — so bare concern could not say why this person and not the next.
So count them. Three serious theories of love, three failures, and the same gap in each. One was blind to who the person is. One loved what the person has. One cared about a good that everyone has. Every one of them, followed honestly, let go of the one thing you most wanted love to hold onto: the particular person. This one and no other.
And by the end of last week you could see where the mind turns next, because I pointed at it. Every one of those three views was looking inside the person — for a worth, a set of qualities, a bare someone-ness — and coming back empty. So perhaps, the thought runs, the mistake was looking inside the person at all. Perhaps the reason it is this person was never a fact about them that you could find by inspecting them, however closely. Perhaps it does not sit inside them. Perhaps it sits between you — in the thing the two of you have made. The us.
That is tonight. Two views that say this — love is the relationship; love is the we — and they are the most natural-feeling answers in the whole series, because they are the ones that finally explain why a copy of the person would not do. Of course a duplicate is not them, this view says; it was not there for any of it. I am going to build both as strongly as they can be built. And then I am going to state the cost — two costs, in fact — and then one further thing, which appears only when all five theories are finally in the same room, and which is what this whole series has been driving at. Do not settle. Three accounts so far, three failures.
Start with the cleaner of the two. It comes from the philosopher Niko Kolodny, in a 2003 paper in The Philosophical Review whose title states the whole move: "Love as Valuing a Relationship."
Here is the idea. Every view so far has asked the same question — what feature is your love a response to? — and gone looking for that feature in the beloved. Their qualities. Their worth. Their good. Kolodny says this is the wrong place to look. What your love responds to, and what justifies it, is not a feature of the person at all. It is the relationship — the actual, ongoing history the two of you have made. On this view you do not love her because she is funny, and you do not love her out of a bare wish that she is well. You love her because she is the one you have this with: the Tuesday arguments, the drive to the airport, the private word. The relationship itself.
And notice what that does, because it does cleanly the one thing every previous view could not. Last week's view could not say why this person and not the stranger two beds down, because the good it cared about was present in everyone. Kolodny has no such difficulty. The relationship is not present in everyone. By its nature it is the one you have with exactly one person. There is no wider, fuller version of your particular shared history that some stranger possesses more of. What you love is unique because it is made of the two of you, and there are only the two of you in it. The particularity that slipped through every other view — Kolodny simply has it, the moment he stops looking inside the person and looks instead at the relationship.
Now the part that makes this feel like the secure answer you have been looking for. Bring in the copy. This is the test the whole series has been leading toward, so let us finally state it plainly. Imagine a perfect duplicate of the person you love. Not a rough one — perfect. The face, the voice, the laugh, exactly. Every memory the person has, the copy has, loaded in whole. Every quality on your list, matched. By the standard of the qualities view, this thing simply is your beloved — it has every feature you ever named. By the standard of the bare-concern view, it is a someone with a good of its own, as fair a candidate as anyone. So a copy like that arrives at your door. Do you owe it what you feel for the original?
And everything in you says no. And here, for the first time in five weeks, a theory can say why the no is right. Kolodny's answer: of course you do not owe it that, because the copy did not stand in the relationship you stand in. It was not there. It has her memories, but a memory of a day is not the same as having been the other person in it. The history is something the two of you did, together, and the copy did none of it with you. It has your beloved's properties and not one hour of your beloved's history — and the history is what you loved. The copy is a stranger who happens to look exactly like her. That is a clean and complete answer. The duplicate that defeated every other account simply fails against this one. You can see why someone might stop here and decide the search was finally over.
So let me test it at its strongest point, because it does not hold, and the weakness lies in the very feature that made it seem clean. Ask Kolodny the plain follow-up question: so what do I love? And the honest answer is — the relationship. The history. But hold that against what you actually feel. You do not lie awake full of devotion toward a history. You feel it toward her. And on Kolodny's account, when you trace back why it is her, the reason turns out to be a fact about your arrangement: that she is the one you happen to share this particular past with. That is a real fact. But it is a fact about a relation, not about the person standing inside it. Philosophers call this the wrong-focus objection, and it is more serious than it first sounds. It says Kolodny has you loving someone for an accidental feature — being the one you have the history with — which is the kind of thing that angered you two weeks ago, when love for your qualities turned out to be love for the qualities and not for you. It is the same problem, moved one step outward. The relationship view rescues the particular person from the copy — and then, when you ask what you actually love, hands you the history instead of the person all over again.
Kolodny has a genuine reply, and you should have it, because it keeps the view standing. The relationship, he would say, is not some external thing set up beside her that I love instead of her. It is made of her — it is her and me, woven together. To value it just is to value her, as the person I have built it with; you cannot separate the two. And that is right, as far as it goes. But notice what is left over, because it is the same remainder as every week. The view still makes the justifying ground the history and not the person — which means the one love it cannot account for is the love that has no history yet. The week-old baby from last week. The person you knew, the moment you met them, was going to matter to you. On Kolodny's account those barely count as love at all, because there is no relationship there yet to value. The view answers the copy but cannot account for the newborn. Hold onto that — because in a moment it is going to matter that last week's view could account for the newborn and could not answer the copy. They do not fail in the same place. They fail in opposite places. And that is significant. Remember it: when all five views are finally made to face each other, that opposition is what the whole question comes down to.
The second version of "love is the relationship" goes further. It is stranger, and harder to shake once you have seen it. It comes from Robert Nozick, in an essay called "Love's Bond," published in his 1989 book The Examined Life, and from Robert Solomon, in his 1988 book About Love.
Kolodny still has you standing a little outside the relationship, valuing it, the way you might jointly value something you own together. Nozick says that is not what being in love is like from the inside. When you really love someone, you do not stand apart, assess them, and then assess the relationship. Something else happens. You begin to form what he calls a "we." Your good and their good stop being two separate goods. Their bad day is felt as your own. Their success is your success — not like a supportive onlooker, but literally: you feel it as yours. You begin making decisions as a unit, picturing the future as a unit, saying "we" and meaning something solid by it — a single thing with two people in it. Nozick's term for this is a bond. You pool your wellbeing, you pool some of your autonomy, and you let the boundaries between you merge into a shared self that each of you now partly defines yourself in terms of.
And that, this view says, is why love is not a verdict at all. All series we have been treating love as a judgment: you inspect the person, locate the feature, and return a finding — lovable. Nozick says this is backwards. Love is not a conclusion you reach about someone from the outside. It is a state you enter. You do not decide they pass; you become a we with them, and the becoming is the loving. It is why losing the person you love does not feel like losing something you had. It feels like losing part of yourself — because, on this view, part of yourself is gone. The we was real, and you were one of the two things it was made of.
You can see how much this explains that the colder accounts could not. Why love feels like belonging and not like grading. Why it makes you far more breakable than merely liking someone ever could. Solomon is good on this. He calls it the paradox of love: you want the union, the merging, the we, and you also want to remain a self — separate, autonomous, your own person — and you cannot fully have both, and every real relationship lives inside that tension. That pull you know — wanting to disappear into someone and wanting to stay yourself — is, on Solomon's account, not a flaw in your particular relationship. It is the shape of love itself. It is the thing itself.
So that is the appeal, and it is strong — perhaps the strongest emotional pull in the series. Now the cost. And it is hidden inside the very feature that made the view compelling. The view saves the particular person by merging with them. But look hard at what merging does to the person it set out to save. You wanted an account of loving them — this one, the irreplaceable other. And the union view answers by dissolving the two of you into one thing, the we, in which there is, more and more, no distinct them left for you to love and no distinct you left to do the loving. The separateness you would need — for this to be you, loving a distinct other — is what the view says love wears away. Solomon names this cost honestly: the deeper the union, the less you are two people at all. So the union view holds onto the particular person right up to the merging — and then the merging removes the separateness that made them a distinct person to love in the first place. It saves "them" by removing the very distance the word "them" depends on.
There is a reply, and it keeps the view alive: that the loss of separateness is not a defect but the point. Love just is the willingness to stop being a closed, defended, separate self; a love that kept its boundaries perfectly intact would not be love at all, but a careful arrangement between two strangers. That is fair, and true to something real. But the remainder stands: the view answers the question "what is it to love this particular other?" by slowly removing the very distance across which one particular person could love another. It is the same pattern as all the rest. It aims at the person and delivers something else — this time the merging, the we, the thing that has them in it but is not them.
Now the thing I have been promising — the one this whole series has been built to show you. So I am going to slow down.
All series, some part of you has wanted one of these views to win, to be the answer, so that you could stop. And tonight the relationship view looked as though it might, because it gave the cleanest reply to the copy. So let us go back to the copy and do the thing I have been holding off. Let us ask the surviving views the same question, at the same time, and listen to what they actually say.
Here is the copy again. A perfect duplicate of the person you love. Every quality, every memory, the laugh. It is standing in front of you, and it loves you. The question is plain: is anything missing? And if so, what?
The relationship view answers first, and you have already heard it: yes, something is missing — the history. The copy never stood in the years with you. What it lacks is the relationship.
But last week's view is still in play, and it answers too — and it does not say "the history." Robust concern says: what is missing is not a shared past, because love never needed a shared past — you can love a newborn you met on Tuesday. What is missing is that my will is already bound to the one who is gone. My concern took its shape around her, around her actual good, and it transfers to the copy no more than it would to a stranger wearing her face. The copy is a second person, with a good of its own — I simply do not love it, because love was never a position that the best-matching candidate gets to fill. On this view the copy lacks nothing in itself. The lack is in me — in where my concern has already come to rest.
And the Kantian view — Velleman — is also in play, and gives a third answer, the most unsettling of the three, and the one people are most inclined to wave away. Velleman says: honestly, the copy lacks nothing. It has the same rational nature, the same dignity — the very thing my love was answering to — and dignity does not come in better and worse editions. So on the strictest version of the view I cannot say the duplicate is short some ingredient that would make loving it inappropriate. I can only say that my love is already directed where it is directed. The copy would be exactly as worthy of love as she is. And that thought is meant to be uncomfortable, because it is.
Now stop and look at what has just happened. Three serious theories of love. One question — what does the copy lack? Three answers that contradict one another. The history. A will already bound. Nothing at all. These are not three wordings of one idea; they rule each other out. One says the missing thing is real and outside you, in the past you shared. One says nothing is missing in the copy, and the fact is about where your own concern has landed. One says nothing is missing, full stop. They cannot all be true. And the two views from the earlier weeks have not gone away either — appraisal looks at the copy's matched qualities and says trade up, it has everything she had and perhaps an easier temper; bestowal says you may simply love it, since nothing was ever required of the thing you love. Five accounts. Five answers. Already diverging in front of you.
And that is why I will not let you crown the relationship view tonight, even though it gave you the cleanest reply. The cleanness came from standing close to one view with the others set aside. Bring the others back, and "the copy lacks the shared history" stops being the answer and becomes an answer — one move, which several other competent accounts reject directly. You cannot keep all of them — they are rivals; they cannot all be right, and the copy forces the choice onto you. Which of them is the true account of love is not something I can hand you tonight. I am not going to present that as a resolution, because it is not one. We now have the whole field on the table — five serious theories of love — and the very first hard case has divided them.
So, before next time, here is the small honest version of tonight. Picture the copy of the one you love, standing there, loving you. Ask the one question — is anything missing, and what? — and simply notice which answer comes first, before you begin reasoning. "Obviously the whole history" is one entire theory of love. "No — but it is still not her, because what I feel is already hers" is a different one. "I honestly cannot say what it lacks" is a third. You do not have to settle which is right. You cannot, tonight; the people who have given their lives to this cannot. Just see that you have a leaning — that it has been guiding how you love all along — and that until a copy stood at the door and asked, you had never had to state it aloud. That is the work tonight. It is quieter than an answer, and it is worth more.
So count where we actually are, five episodes in.
The two beliefs you started with both failed: unconditional love is blind, love for the qualities is tradeable. You turned to a third idea, caring about their good, and it went too wide — it could not pick out the one bed among the forty. So you turned, last of all, to the bond: perhaps love was never in the person, perhaps it is in the us. And the bond gave you the cleanest reply yet to the copy — and then exacted its own cost. Kolodny saves the person from the duplicate and then hands you the history instead of the person. Nozick and Solomon save the person by merging with them, and the merging dissolves the very separateness that made them a distinct someone to love. Five serious theories now. Five failures. And this is the shape of the whole thing, so hold onto it: every one of them is a real, defensible, deeply felt account of love, and every one, followed all the way down, lets go of the one thing you started out wanting it to hold — this person, this one, no other.
That is not the philosophers being careless. They are not fools, and they did not overlook something obvious that you can see and they could not. You went in wanting one ground — one single feature that love is a response to, that a copy could not match and a stranger could not share — and what you have actually been handed is five serious candidates that point in different directions and will not line up. What to make of that — whether one of them is right and you simply have to find it, or something stranger — is precisely the thing I am not going to settle tonight. Notice only this for now: you have five, not one, and they disagree.
And here is where we go — because we are not going to keep doing this politely for ever. So far the five theories have failed one at a time, one a week, each on its own, never made to stand together. Tonight, with the copy, you got the first taste of what happens when they do: three of them gave three different answers about one case, and could not all be right. But the copy I handed you was hypothetical — a thought experiment. You can put it down and go to bed.
There is a real case in which the copy is not hypothetical. A case where the qualities are at their maximum and the history is exactly zero, and the thing is sitting in someone's actual phone, right now, telling them it loves them. And on that case the five theories will not take polite turns. They disagree out loud, at the same time, about whether what is happening is even love. It is the case my friend handed me at the very start — the one I stood there and could not answer. We have spent five weeks building these five accounts up. Next week we put them to the test.
So tonight, before you sleep — not the app, not yet. The person you actually love. The copy at the door, and the one question: is anything missing, and what? Do not answer it for the philosophers. Answer it for yourself, and watch which answer arrives first. That answer is older and more settled than you would have guessed, and it has been running your love all along without your ever once having said it aloud. You do not have to know yet whether it is right. You only have to stop pretending you did not have one.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.