Illustration by Dulce-Pop Bonini

You have a fun task: you should ask your partner (or a close friend, or yourself) this question tonight: Why do you love me? List the 3 most important reasons. And if they fall into your trap, and they tell you 3 reasons for loving you: X, Y, Z – we can then have some philosophical fun! You immediately ask them: So, would you not love me anymore if I were not X, Y, Z? Slightly taken aback with your subtle hostility, and surprised by the change from the usual “Would you love me if I were a caterpillar?”, they will (hopefully) respond with: “Even though it is great that you have X, Y, Z, I love you primarily for who you are. And even if you did not have X, Y, Z, I would still love you”. In most cases, they should tell you something that neatly translates to the sense that they love you for your own sake. Jacques Derrida in “On Love and Being” asks a very similar question: Is love the love of someone or love of something in someone? Do you love someone for “who” they are or “what” they have?

It is not just personal relationships that we talk of loving or caring for X’s own sake. In environmental ethics, for example, philosophers like McShane argue that we should have a conception of the environment where we think of the environment as meriting care “for its own sake”. The basic premise is the following: We should care about melting glaciers not just because they affect human lives, but more fundamentally because we care about them for their own sake. We tend to ascribe intrinsic value to things we care about and love. What exactly is this “for its own sake” talk in philosophy?

Now, we do a lot of other important things in our lives just for their own sake. We dance not for a particular end goal, but for the sake of dancing. When you make art, you do not necessarily think of the functions of the art; it is valuable for its own sake. Our sense of love and care is fundamentally tied to the understanding that these are feelings that are associated not with an attribute of a being or a thing, but with their intrinsic worth.

In truth, we could take an understanding of what it means to love somebody selflessly for their own sake and apply that to our broader understanding of our attitudes towards the world. But what does that mean?

Simon Weil argues that loving is an act of selflessness and acceptance, something you do to a being because it exists, and no more. She goes as far as to state that the love you devote towards the dead is perfectly pure. “We desire that the dead man should have existed, and he has existed”, she says. Is, then, the “for its own sake” all talk, one of mere existence? When you say, “I love the mountain for its own sake,” could you just mean, “I love the mountain because it exists”?. If existence alone is enough to merit love, then love becomes inseparable from being itself. But then a pushback might again be: “But you love the mountain for its beauty, and because beauty makes you feel better – you do not love the mountains for its own sake”. How do we deal with such ideas that suggest that humans always do something because we have our self-interest at the heart of every action? Such an argument is often based on an English Philosopher Jeremy Bentham who argued that each person is guided by the notion of maximization of utility (pleasure, for our purpose). He posits that anything we do, even if it involves suffering, is ultimately done for pleasure or its expectation. Waking up early for the gym? It’s for the satisfaction of fitness. An ascetic’s suffering through self-denial? It’s the pursuit and satisfaction of salvation. But this view, while unfalsifiable and possibly true, explains everything yet proves nothing. This becomes more apparent when we consider acts like love, care, and freedom, where we intuitively feel that we would be willing to suffer even if we didn’t receive pleasure in reciprocity.

Back to Weil, we can zone in again on her idea of radical acceptance of true love through the premise that true love is about fully embracing the existence of something. A host of questions come out of this framing: Does that mean what we do not truly love doesn’t exist? How is that metaphysically consistent? “To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind”, Weil argues. Love in this sense— true love— is fully recognizing the existence of something. Let us think of it this way: The world might exist – other galaxies exist, and amongst them millions of stars – but love is the acceptance of something in full, without focusing on any specific attribute in such, or what we might get in return. If we love something or someone for their own sake, we want to say that we are ready to perceive and attend to them openly, selflessly, and without any expectation in return. This is where Weil’s earlier stance on “love for the dead being the perfect love” makes sense; from the dead, there is nothing to gain, nothing to get in return, they just had to exist, and they did. What is enough for them to deserve our love and care is simply existing, and nothing more?

In the broader picture, I believe that doing X for its own sake can be understood through Simon Weil’s idea of love: We do X for its own sake if we do it just because X exists and no more. The existence of X is sufficient for us to have that disposition towards X. This doesn’t hold just for the idea of personal love but for our care of the world itself. We need not justify why we care about the environment in terms of its impacts on humans – perhaps we care simply because they are. And next time your partner asks you why you love them, you can answer “Because you exist!” – a corny yet, if you agree with Weil, philosophically profound response.

Manoj Dhakal is a Columnist. Email them at feedback@thegazelle.org.