Question

Explain Frankfurt’s general analysis of love and how he applies it to the self.

Explain the two complications for his view that to love one’s self is to love what you love.

How does he address these?

How does the resulting view of self love contrast with more popular ways of thinking about self esteem?

Answer 1

Frankfurt's logic is simple that if one wants to experience the love he has love himself unconditionally, he called is self-love.

1. One can experience self-love if he loves what he loves wholeheartedly without prejudice. The self form is the purest form of love that combines one with love and makes them "we". Frankfurt's idea of love is based on four fundamental ideas 1. Love our loved ones for their own sake, 2. Treat the loved ones as irreplaceable, 3. Unified with them as “we”.4 love is not by choice.

As one cannot observably define self, thus showing complete devotion with someone you love is equivalent to your loving yourself, there is no selfish motto.

What does love give? It gives us satisfaction, a reason to live, it increases secretion dopamine and serotonin in our brain thus we feel pleasure and feeling of love.

2. Self-esteem is having the confidence to achieve some goal, the self-love is loving our self through loving others because if we love someone, whom we love the devotions would form “we”, that is love and self. But there are obstacles in achieving self-love, if one has high self-esteem he can remove the hurdles, otherwise, he can strive to achieve self-love. He says that a person who does not live to strive for love cannot develop self-love.

The two difficulties in developing self-love can be the low self-esteem and the hurdles that come in between the love the one whom you love, and this hurdle is ambivalence, which means one develops a mixed feeling. The mixed feelings always confuse people, and if one is confused then he would develop contradictory answers to his quest for self-love