Getting love right
Against the p and the q
When I started studying philosophy it was in the analytic tradition. It wasn’t a deliberate choice that I made, but rather a result of what was offered to me at that stage. I was fascinated by it for two years, but started to realise that, far from helping me understand the world, it was forging a gap between me and the world. I remember the moment that I decided to draw a line under analytic philosophy (which was not so much of an issue because by this point I was a year into reading Heidegger anyway). That moment was during a seminar about love.
Love, in this seminar, took the form of something resembling “p loves q if and only if p takes a stance r towards q…”. I thought at the time that I objected to the “r” but now I realise that it was the “p” and the “q” that made me decide to draw the line.
“Love calls forth the being of the other”
I’ve just finished reading Irene McMullin’s Time and the Shared World. The book defends Heidegger’s characterisation of human selfhood and develops an account of the human’s social nature, including an account of human-to-human relationships, consistent with Heidegger’s thinking, as a mutual recognition of the individual as an individual. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to read all the footnotes because it is packed with brilliant interpretation and insights.
Towards the end of the book Heidegger’s conception of love makes an appearance.
“To embrace a ‘thing’ or a ‘person’ in its essence means to love it, to favour it. Though in a more original way such favouring means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favouring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be.”1
For Heidegger, to love something (or someone) is to let it be what it is. Doing so, requires one to understand the thing’s being (or person’s being): what it is, how it is, who it is. Representing the thing (or person) as “p” or “q”, where each is reduced to an object, obviously fails to capture the being of the thing, and so the attempt to capture love in these terms will also obviously fail too.
In terms of the human-to-human relationships, McMullin draws on Gallagher’s Intersubjective Knowledge to bring Heidegger’s conception of love to life:
“he argues that “my love calls forth the being of the other.” Love is essentially a call to the other’s inner potential to be herself – a self that I have put myself in the service of evoking. In the relationship between the lover and the beloved, “he knows her in a manner that only one who loves her can know her. For her ‘being’ or her ‘person’ is not an already realized objective reality viewed by him from a more advantageous perspective: it is a created category. The boy’s love is the creative invocation of her being; it is a participation in the mystery of her uniqueness.””2
As well as describing love more beautifully than Heidegger can, Gallagher captures my irritation with the p, q formula for love: it cannot be a stance that an isolated subject takes towards an isolated object, but instead requires a participation between two people who are open to understand who each other really is.
I always ask ChatGPT to provide the image for my post, since my thesis is about AI (and each of these posts is a contribution towards that, although it may not yet be obvious why!). This time we had quite a negotiation about which image was right - there were too many people and hearts for my liking. As you can see we settled on a forest because “this one feels right — nothing declared, nothing forced, just a world quietly letting things be what they are. Which, honestly, is about as Heideggerian (and as loving) as it gets”3.
Heidegger, M. (1993) Letter on Humanism in Basic Writings
McMullin, I (2013) Time and the Shared World
ChatGPT (2026)