Love

If you don't love yourself, can you love others?

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In this question, the words "can" and "love" are difficult. Take a simple understanding of what it means to love someone: to admire (at least some features of) this person and also to care greatly about his/her flourishing (eudaimonia, the quality of a human live comprehensively conceived). And take a narrow understanding of "can" in terms of conceivability. Then the answer is affirmative: It's quite conceivable that you might admire, and care greatly about the flourishing of, another, even while you have no admiration for yourself and do not care much about your own flourishing.

The affirmative answer holds up when we take a broader sense of "can" as psychological possibility. Most people love themselves (in the sense specified), but a fair number do not. So it's psychologically possible not to love oneself. And I don't think lack of self-love makes it psychologically impossible to love another. To be sure, persons who do not love themselves may be depressed and less likely to love another. But it also seems psychologically possible that love for another displaces self-love: The other seems immensely admirable and, putting oneself next to him/her, one cannot admire oneself; and one cares so much about the other's flourishing that one's care for one's own flourishing is marginalized.

To get to a negative answer, a more sophisticated understanding of love is required. Let's try this: to love someone is to devote yourself to creating and (to the best of your ability) participating in a relationship that is unbounded and in which this person can flourish. Now suppose you love another in this sense. Then you are devoting yourself to this relationship between the two of you in which s/he can flourish. If this is a relationship in which you can flourish as well, then you are loving yourself, that is, devoting yourself to creating and (to the best of your ability) participating in a relationship that is unbounded and in which you can flourish.

But what if not? What if this relationship between the two of you is one in which the other can flourish but you cannot? If it is, then you are loving the other but not loving yourself.

My response would be that the other cannot really flourish (really have a good live) in a relationship in which you cannot flourish. At most s/he can have false beliefs that s/he and you are flourishing.

I do not think that this more sophicated understanding of love is fully satisfactory. But it has an implication that seems attractive and may well be worth further reflection: Just as you cannot love another without loving yourself, you also cannot love yourself without loving another.

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