Love As Recognition

Love is a recognition, but desire as recognition in general precedes love and is necessary for it. We can, in the end, only love those we truly recognize. Without recognition of the other, they cannot even love us in any way that we can experience as love — the connection is impossible, and the love of the other is meaningless as well as without value to us.

Is love impossible if we are not loved in return? Yes, it is indeed impossible when it comes to the full reality of love, for without its return love is only the existence of a frustrated desire to be desired. The desire and need for love exist, but love does not. Here a peculiarity of the Hegelian conception of love arises against notions of love as simply an outpouring towards others such that one can believe love exists, that one can love, without being loved in return.

In the fullness of love to love is to be loved, the many become one under spirit, the love for the other becomes love of the self, and love of the self is love of the other. Love in its fullest meaning, however, concerns a “we” and not individuals separate from each other, i.e. I love you just as I love myself, you love me as you love yourself, and this love is truly a love for us. Lovers are one that exist as two. The one-sided expression of love where only one shows this and not the other is love, but it is incomplete and frustrated love which finds no direct nor full satisfaction. — It must be repeated, this is not about romantic love alone, for this is part of all love relations including familial and friendly.

Abstract vs Concrete Love

There exists an ambiguity with love in our everyday uses of the term. Love is both a mere base feeling of desire as well as a high state of conscious recognition. It is considered both as mere abstract desire of desire — a vague but powerful feeling — and as total concrete recognition of the self. When we speak of a higher sense of love — total recognition — we cannot confuse it for its lower sense as an abstract desire. Love as feeling is not immediately this higher form of love though it is a necessity for its achievement. This higher sense of love requires that love be supplemented with more complex desires.

What is often considered a higher notion of love, ‘true love’, is not mere desire of desire. Human love is inextricable from the network of conceptions and recognitions we engage the world with. For us love is always already modified and placed within a context of recognitions beside it and which subsume it; thus, it is almost impossible to speak of mere love as detached from true love, for the object of love’s desire and the idea of its maintenance is already a socially mediated conception. While love already logically implies the freedom of its object of desire when it involves recognition, this level of freedom need not be anything more than the free action of the other to love us according to its natural whim. True love, however, for us involves the desire for freedom of the other on a level far higher than the mere whim of feelings of attraction and attachment. We know we desire the other and that we desire them to love us freely. What social conception adds to love’s desire is a modification of what we understand by the self and its freedom. What we conceive a person as such to be leads to who we recognize as a person and what we are to do to elevate them to such capacity if they are lacking, or to share with them in such capacity if they are already there.

Now, where does love begin? Neither romance nor friendship are our first love; it is the love of our parents. Further, this love is no mere contingency for us to take or ignore without consequence to the self, in fact it is the very beginning of our concrete comprehended sense of self as opposed to a mere intuition of our own experienced unity.

Love As Foundation of Self

The impossibility of love without recognition is determined not just logically, but from our deepest experience since infancy. From the day we are born we are, as Jay Bernstein says in his Phenomenology of Spirit lectures, “born lovers”³ in the vital need for our parents’ love. We desire to be desired by our parents and the success or failure of this first recognition has immense effect on our own capacity to love and our very conception of what love is thereafter.

Assuming that one is not a sociopath or psychopath for whom the social needs of normal human beings are not a felt issue (this is and leads to other issues), if we are not loved in these crucial moments of our lives, we find it increasingly more difficult to love ourselves in the reflection of our rejection. Depending on the rest of our development, in the absence of love we may develop in various ways such that we may grow coldly self-centered and not believe any such thing exists or is even desirable, or we may find it hard to accept ourselves and forgive ourselves — to believe in and to value ourselves — in light of the failure, and as such we develop a sense of self which is broken and does not see itself as worthy of love. In either case the self has been damaged and both of these damaged selves may project an outward appearance that is quite similar. The self which refuses to love either out of its own ignorance or because it is too afraid fails to concretize its foundations and cannot achieve the highest recognition as a self. The self thus fails to realize its deepest social desires — its inner life is lonely, its mind caught in despair of lack even while consciously rejecting such desires.

We all will almost certainly fall in love, and we all have opportunities for friendships, but when the self is significantly damaged there are defensive barriers which become our own obstruction to the realization of love even when the other genuinely loves us — though we may recognize the other we refuse to believe the other can recognize us. We become trapped by a thought: “If I don’t love myself, if my family does not, how could anyone else?” How can we come to love others and let others love us when we feel this is the case? Here popular self-help psychology and spirituality charges to the front and proclaims the answer: To love others, we must first love ourselves.

Self-love

The concept of self-love is strange given that love is something social as well as that the emotional relationship experienced is not the same as with love for another. Self-love seems like a misnomer for something else: self-esteem or self-valuing. Nonetheless, the term does have some affinity with love as such when it comes to the notion of desiring ourselves, albeit this does not inwardly mirror love’s form of desire for what we find in our self-desire is not our desire for us to desire our desire.

The notion of self-love as love and not simply as self-esteem is actually only possible in a relationship of love, however it is in this sense not self-love in any way we normally comprehend. When I love you and you love me, your love reflects my love back to me; thus, I find self-love through my love for you, but… I find that the love of self is not separate from the love of us — in fact, the self itself cannot be conceived and is not experienced as anything in the relationship of love other than as us. The self which this self-love concerns is not the individual, but the united plurality, and it is towards the sustaining of this plurality of desire that love’s desire is aimed. Nonetheless, the common notion of self-love is to be included in this consideration because it is indeed important for a healthy form of love and it is also generated by a healthy love.

Self-Esteem

Given that generally the original failure to realize self-love (self-esteem from here on) lies in the failure of being loved in return by our parents, consider that the reality is that one cannot love oneself before loving another and being loved in return. Consider that no matter how our confidence soars in many areas of our lives, it will not mean we love ourselves, for however we succeed, it is itself not the success of love as that full recognition of the self as a ‘we’. We find and build a sense of self through recognition from others of much of what we do, of our capacities and skills, but these recognitions do not of themselves add up to the recognition of love — the recognition that a self as self is desired and valued.

Because the self as inner is emotionally, conceptually, and socially reflected from other selves as outer, we are constituted first by our social relation and love for and from others. What others think of and see in us is a significant source of what we come to think and see in ourselves; their praise, their disappointment, their love, and their hate constitute us in our earliest years. Self-esteem is not an individual phenomenon, it is entirely social. It is social not just in the presence of other individuals we relate to but in the very concept of esteem itself, a concept which is a social cultural product. Here it should be clear that self-love is part of the order of the higher notion of love, it is a conceptually mediated desire where what we desire and how we desire it is ordered under higher considerations. Because self-love is recognitive it is not logically nor emotionally possible under lone circumstance.

As a recognition it logically follows the mirror structure: if I recognize you and you recognize me, then I must recognize (love/esteem) myself. But if this is logically necessary, how come we see it fail to realize in the world with people who are loved but lack self-love? How and on what level this recognition occurs is of prime importance: there is a rational as well as emotional level of this self-recognition and love, and in the case of self-love it is the emotional side which is most important though the rational side is not far behind. Our rational self-conception is important in correcting a lack of self-love, but it is itself not enough. Recognition is always a desire to be desired and as such it is an emotional connection which opens up the self to construction or destruction. The logic of emotions and desires, however, is something quite different from our conscious rational logic, it is comparatively irrational due to its natural and individual contingency such that no logic of the unconscious is universally applicable in a concrete sense — sometimes all that reason can manage is to contain such a problem.

With the first love of child and parent the sense of value and worth in the child is generated such that it recognizes itself as valuable through its parent’s desire for it. When this fails how could one love oneself afterward without someone to love and love us in return? How do we value ourselves without the other which reflects this value to us as something objectively real and not fictitious?