Love's Telos: Kierkegaard's Critique of Preferential Love

Kierkegaard is often associated with a harshly dismissive stance toward ordinary human love, as measured against an ascetic ideal of pure, Christian, non-preferential love. This chapter reexamines Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in the light of the worry that this text so opposes ideal love to preferential love that it becomes doubtful how these can be called by the same name. It is argued that Kierkegaard relies in this connection on a certain general conception of love’s teleology. In this view, love aims at self-transcendence: that is, it aims to draw individuals out of themselves and into union with others. Kierkegaard’s critique of our ordinary loves—our friendships, romances, family life—is then best understood as an internal critique. This critique rests on the thought that, while it shares in love’s telos, merely preferential love interprets this telos in an inadequate way, as unity relative to lovers’ preferences. His claim is that lovers who merely seek this kind of preference-relative unity cannot attain genuine self-transcendence. However, the conclusion Kierkegaard draws is not that non-preferential love should replace our ordinary loves but rather that it should transform them. That is, he thinks our loves need to acquire a non-preferential dimension so that love’s telos can be interpreted in a new way: not as preference-relative but, rather, in terms of what we share just as human beings. So transformed, Kierkegaard holds that love’s telos can be realized in our ordinary, human, this-worldly, loves.