What does it mean to love someone for who they are?

In this commentary, Tucker Sigourney, a postdoctoral fellow at the Human Flourishing Program, reflects on ideas developed in his recent paper in the European Journal of Philosophy. What does it mean to love a person as a unique individual rather than simply for their qualities, roles, or relationships?

Love is an extremely personal thing. I don’t mean that it’s no one else’s business—I mean that it is something which makes you acutely aware of another person. My love for my daughter, for example, is meticulous in its search for the good in her. I see how she considers what to do about other toddlers on the playground, the little movements of her eyes as she looks into mine, and so on. And as she grows, it feels to me like something in her is unfolding, coming through in all these delightful little flickers of light. It feels, in other words, like my daughter is some exquisitely crafted and utterly unique sort of thing, down to her very core, which I am gradually seeing better—and that that is what my love for her is primarily about.

Philosophers are alive to this experience, even increasingly so. Many recent investigations into the nature of love, and how to make sense of it, try to give due credit to the particular individual person whom you love. The purpose of my paper, though, is to suggest that only a certain kind of view can do it well. I call that kind of view ‘particularist’. A particularist view maintains that the foremost reason to love someone is who she is—not her traits or categories or relationship to you, but simply who she is, full stop.

But what does that mean? What is this thing, “who a person is”, to which love responds? Edith Stein suggests that it’s an “individual nature”: a particular variation on human nature, just as collie is a particular variation on dog, but specific to each person. I find that picture beautiful, and true to life. Anyone who has loved someone knows that love helps us better understand the ones we love, ourselves, even human nature in general. I don’t think that truth is only for poets. It can help guide our philosophy too.