On the face of it, any claim by a parent (for example) that s/he loves his/her children unconditionally may seem to express hubris. For now I set aside the specific terms of May's argument (though I return to them later), and approach the question from a slightly different angle. With that in mind, I want to now directly challenging the very idea that human love could be unconditional. If it turns out that the nature even of parental love is "falsified" by being called "unconditional," then the best candidate for unconditional love, on the view May is querying, drops out. For I think May is right to say that these days parental love is the love most commonly thought genuinely unconditional. I am inclined to read May as holding to the first of those options, but anyway that does not matter for my purposes. Does he mean that, while love is thought to be perfectly generally unconditional, people take parental love to be the place where love's essentially unconditional character is best lived up to by the way people actually "live" their loving? Or does he think that in other-than-parental contexts of love, people take it that the "value or qualities" of a person play an acceptable role both in "arousing" and in "diminishing" another's love of her - so that love itself has a partly different structure in those contexts? May does not spell out just what he means by saying parental love is regarded as a "paradigm case" of unconditional love. (paradigm case: parents' love for their children.)" May thinks that it remains a "key belief … the West" that love is unconditional and he describes the belief's content this way: " is neither aroused nor diminished by the other's value or qualities it is a spontaneous gift that seeks nothing for the giver.
In his book Love: A History, Simon May says just this:īy imputing to human love features properly reserved for divine love, such as the unconditional and the eternal, we falsify the nature of this most conditional and time-bound and earthly emotion, and force it to labour under intolerable expectations. But even if that were not so, maybe we should still avoid all temptation to think of our loving as capable of being unconditional. Even if the idea of unconditional love as a possibility for human beings can linger a while after the decline of religious sensibility, perhaps it will soon enough atrophy without religious backing. That suggests that, even if the idea of unconditional love did have its origins in certain religious thinking, the idea might still continue to pollinate the life and practice of non-believers ― even of a society of them.įor more than one reason, however, this possibility might be thought shaky. The suggestion is then that we human beings can, by God's grace, ourselves be enabled to love others unconditionally, even if this actually happens more rarely than we might hope.īut many who now speak of unconditional love make no reference to a religious context, and do not suppose themselves to be relying on one to give substance or sense to their claims about loving unconditionally. This love is often labelled with the Greek word agape. The Judaeo-Christian God is held to have unconditional love for us, his human creatures. It has been widely held that the idea of such love has its source in religious thinking. But is there any such thing as unconditional love? Sometimes it is parents implying that their love for their children ― and other parents' love for their own children ― actually is unconditional. Sometimes the context is what parental love should be like, or would ideally be like. The commonest context, and the one often thought to offer the best grip on the idea, is the love of parents for their children.
Unconditional love gets mentioned quite often these days.
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