Happy Valentine's Day!
Reflections on the Objectivist conception of love.
On this day dedicated to amorous love, I’d like to share some of my favorite quotes from Ayn Rand on the subject. While Rand is perhaps most renowned for her political and moral philosophy, Objectivism constitutes a philosophical system that includes a beautiful theory of love.
Many people conceive of love as unconditional and selfless. While this sounds sweet and wholesome prima facie, Rand’s fiction and philosophy reveal why this conception of love is far from the ideal. In Rand’s breakthrough 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, the protagonist (Howard Roark) issues one of the pithiest, most impactful and memorable lines in all of her fiction:
"To say ’I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’"
What does Roark mean by this? Love is not something that exists abstractly but the union between two individuals. For this love to mean something, both individuals involved in the happy commerce of romance, a special species of friendship, must have a robust sense of self. That is, each person must possess values independently and demonstrate the virtues requisite to achieve them. Love is not a substitute for self-esteem but the consequence thereof.
Hank Rearden, in Rand’s seminal 1957 tome Atlas Shrugged, expounds upon the role of romantic love in relation to one’s highest values:
[Lovers] can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
To lose oneself, i.e., one’s values, virtues, and self-esteem, in the ecstasy of romance is to consign one’s relationship to the same fate one’s consigned his individuality: oblivion. Such is the natural and inexorable consequence of treating love as a substitute instead of a complement to the self.
The following line from The Fountainhead strikes many as antithetical to the widely accepted conception of love as sacrificial:
I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need.
—Howard Roark
To demonstrate the truthfulness of love as selfish, one can do a simple proof by contrapositive. In other words, is it true that the opposite of selfishness implies the opposite of love? I believe so. Imagine, if you will, your loved one informing you that they love you selflessly, i.e., they love you not for their survival, not out of their ego and naked need, but because they know you need them for your survival and out of your ego and naked need? I predict that you would be aghast by such an admission and regard their feelings towards you as altruistic but certainly not as love. It follows, then, that true love is a reflection of mutual selfish satisfaction that both partners (the sex thereof is utterly immaterial) derive from each other’s company.
Rand expounds upon her theory of love as selfish in a 1964 interview with the most unlikely of publications, Playboy:
It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.
So, on this day dedicated to true love, I encourage you, dear reader, to express to your significant other that you love them “as selfishly as [you] lungs breathe air.”