The desideratum

In the poem ‘For Anne Gregory’, the titular woman says that she wants to be loved ‘for [herself] alone/And not [her] yellow hair’. Her interlocutor assures her, to her probable dismay,

I want to consider what Anne is after. On one common reading, Anne contrasts ‘being loved for herself alone’ with being loved for shallow or inessential properties. That is how Tim Chappell seems to read the poem: Yeats’s point, says Chappell, is that ‘it is quite common for love never to get any further than’ its starting point in ‘some striking [but] superficial feature or property’ (Chappell Reference Chappell2004, 95; see also Bicknell Reference Bicknell2010, 357). When Anne says she wants to be loved for herself, she means that she wants to be loved for the right properties, perhaps the ones she considers essential: her wit, her kindness, her artistic pursuits, or similar.

What the interlocutor says in response, however, makes such a reading difficult. If to be loved for oneself is to be loved for such ‘essential’ properties, it makes little sense to say that only God could love one for oneself: humans often do love one another for such properties. So, at least if we take him at his word, the interlocutor must think that what Anne is after is rarer and more difficult. My suggestion is that the interlocutor uses ‘yellow hair’ to stand in for properties in general. More than that, he thinks that Anne is also using the phrase that way. When she says that she wants to be loved for herself, Anne means that she wants her lover to love her as distinct from any and all properties she might possess.Footnote ¹ She wants her lover to be able to say, to others, ‘I love Anne because – well, it’s Anne!’ and, to her, ‘I love you, Anne, because it’s you’.Footnote ² To put it another way, she wants to be loved for something like her bare identity.

While the Anne of the poem is a fiction,Footnote ³ her desire is not. It is at least common enough in real life to be widely recognizable and to appear in romantic literature. Yeats certainly considered it a familiar enough phenomenon that he felt no need to explain it in his rather terse poem. Outside the romantic context, this desire is perhaps most evident among religious authors. G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Traherne, just to name two, seem to hold that God creates each individual because he sees that very individual as worth giving existence to and that, in consequence, the desire to know that one is loved and lovable for being oneself is perfectly natural (Chesterton Reference Chesterton1909, 96; Traherne Reference Traherne and Ross2014, 3).Footnote ⁴ They themselves also occasionally suggest that their delight in their faith is at least partially attributable to its meeting their deep-seated need to know that they are loved down to their very core, their very selfhood. On a final and more personal note, I suspect many people want to be loved simply for themselves. I know I certainly do. I am not suggesting that each and every person has this longing to be loved for being oneself, certainly not consciously. But it seems at least common enough that others can recognize it even if they themselves never feel it.

Given the deeply existential import attached to it, one might expect ‘love for (being) oneself’ to have turned up in philosophical literature more often than it has. It has only rarely been addressed by analytic philosophers.Footnote ⁵ If it is mentioned, it is usually only briefly considered before being dismissed.Footnote ⁶ Niko Kolodny says that ‘bare identity … cannot serve as a reason for loving [an individual]’ because ‘[t]he thought’, for instance, ‘that she is Mary simply identifies a particular with itself; it does not ascribe a property to that particular that might make a certain response to it appropriate’ (Kolodny Reference Kolodny2003, 142). Neil Delaney considers it ‘altogether absurd’ to think that humans even want ‘to be loved for being us, not for … our attractive properties’ (Delaney Reference Delaney1996, 346; see also Kadlac Reference Kadlac2012, 34–35). Much less, the thought seems to go, should one think that one is ever loved for ‘oneself alone’. Finally, T.S. Champlin, in an essay on action for its own sake, says that, if a person ‘in real life’ had worries about whether she was being loved for herself as opposed to being loved for properties such as personality traits, ‘one natural interpretation would be that there was something mentally wrong with that person’ (Champlin Reference Champlin1987, 39). All think that there is something mildly (or wildly) absurd about the idea that one could be loved for being oneself in the way that Anne seems to be asking about. Some give very briefly stated reasons for thinking so. (I shall consider them a little more in the next section.) But most simply say it is obviously false in some way and move on without further ado.

On occasion, one can find a philosopher who recognizes the phenomenon without dismissing it. Luc Bovens and Alexander Nehamas are two recent examples. But Bovens does not talk about the idea at any length, much less attempt to suggest how it might look to love another ‘for himself alone’ (Bovens Reference Bovens and Martin2019, 269). Nehamas says a fair bit more in his book On Friendship, but, when he talks about ‘loving another for being himself’, he means something like ‘loving another because one wants to see his ineffable “style” unfold in the future’, leaving it difficult to see how his view is not merely a standard properties view with the addition that future properties are among the possible reasons for love (Nehamas Reference Nehamas2016, 118–139). Neither has set out to examine or defend the phenomenon that interests Anne. And even if they had, they would be the exceptions proving the rule: the subject remains seriously neglected.

This article aims to redress this neglect by taking seriously the desire to be loved for being oneself and exploring the phenomenon at which it is directed. That will involve, among other things, exploring the reasons for which love for being oneself has not been considered a viable possibility in contemporary philosophy. My suggestion is that this phenomenon has not been seen as worth engaging with at least in part because it is very difficult to say what it would even look like to take a bare identity – an object and not a fact – for a reason.Footnote ⁷

This brings me to my article’s second and more substantive aim. I am going to take a cue from Anne’s interlocutor and suggest that the Christian tradition has the resources to suggest at least one instance in which love is directed at its object simply because it is that object: God’s love for the creature when he creates it from nothing.Footnote ⁸ Christians thus have space for the idea that one can be loved for oneself and the resources to make such an idea, at least by their own lights, intelligible. I should clarify now that I do not intend to claim that only Christians can make space for such an idea.Footnote ⁹ I am simply interested in exploring how Christians might conceptualise ‘being loved for oneself’ and showing that their tradition can give them the resources to do so.Footnote ¹⁰ If, in the process, more general conceptual implications appear – implications, for instance, about what options are available in logical space if one wants to make room for love for oneself – so much the better.

I first make some clarifications with respect to my argument and what I take to be involved in the concept of ‘love for being oneself’. In the next section, I note that the current theories on offer exclude our desideratum by their very nature and propose a reason why that might be so. I then turn to my own proposal, suggesting that God, in creating a creature, could legitimately be said to love the creature for being itself. There are some potential difficulties with the idea that God loves a thing without presupposing that the very thing he makes already exists. To answer those concerns and to further flesh out how one might understand God as creating things simply for themselves, I offer a speculative account. I suggest that, in an important sense, intention is always directed at concrete acts – at this very act one is performing.Footnote ¹¹ Second, I suggest that actions performed truly for their own sakes are plausibly understood as serving as reasons for their own performance. Finally, I take it as plausible enough to say that, when God creates, he performs the creative act for its own sake; and the creature, being the creative act itself viewed under a certain aspect, is thus also created for its own sake. If that is correct, it is at least conceivable that the creature serves as a reason for its own creation without, therefore, having to exist logically prior to the creative act.

Clarifications and assumptions

Since I am attempting to start a new conversation in talking about love for being oneself, a few clarifications are in order.

First, a concern with being loved for oneself is not a worry about who or what is the object at which the love is aimed. In a famous passage in his Pensées, Pascal claims that, if one is loved ‘for’ one’s properties – for one’s beauty or one’s memory or what have you – love has the properties, not one’s self, for its object. To put it another way, it is Anne’s yellow hair, not Anne herself, that is loved. This is not, I take it, Anne’s worry. She assumes that it is she who is loved. What she wants to know is whether she is loved for herself – for being Anne – or for her yellow hair.Footnote ¹² Secondly, being loved for oneself is not a matter of being loved for the ‘right’ properties. If Anne wants to be loved for herself and not for any properties, then being loved for her haecceity, her being self-identical, and so forth will fail to satisfy her.Footnote ¹³ These properties might be essential to her, but that does not change the fact that they are not her.Footnote ¹⁴ Thirdly, being loved for oneself is not about ‘how’ the love is. For instance, it is not the same as being loved unconditionally, enduringly, or exclusively. Nor is it the same as being loved as non-fungible, irreplaceable, or unique.Footnote ¹⁵ Love with these traits could be achieved by recourse to various properties: stable character traits can secure enduring love;Footnote ¹⁶ love based on a concrete history together, perhaps one in which one seeks to improvise a life (Bagley Reference Bagley2015) or draw forth from the beloved his inexhaustible future self (Nehamas Reference Nehamas2016), could secure non-fungibility and irreplaceability; one could be loved as unique as long as one has at least one property that cannot be shared in a given history – Neil Armstrong would never have to worry if he were loved for being the first man to set foot on the moon; and wholly unconditional love, if it is built on properties at all, could easily be based on such features as humanity or self-identicality. (Alternatively, an unconditional love might not be based on anything at all, looking more like agape in Anders Nygren’s (Reference Nygren and Watson1953) work Agape and Eros. In that case, it would not be for a reason at all, which would fail to satisfy Anne in a different way.)

Fourthly, there is no cause to think that the desire to be loved ‘for oneself’ is necessarily a desire to be loved romantically for oneself.Footnote ¹⁷ One might interpret Anne as interested in romantic love in particular, but the exchange with her interlocutor makes more sense if one assumes that what she is after – being loved for herself – is an element that can be found in other contexts as well as the romantic. It certainly makes sense that she should want her lovers to love her for being herself, but that need not mean that the desire to be so loved can only be satisfied by them any more than the desire to be cared for because one is witty can be satisfied only by friends. Additionally, the interlocutor would have been offering a non sequitur if what Anne wanted were exclusively romance. Certainly, he cannot mean to suggest that God would romantically love her for herself alone! Setting aside what Anne desires for a moment, it is obvious that the religious writers mentioned earlier are not talking about romantic love when they say that God loves each creature for being that very creature.

It seems likeliest to me that what Anne and her fellows are talking about is something like care or concern: a disposition to take an interest in the beloved, to act for his good, and to desire union with her in whatever mode might be appropriate (e.g. friendship, romance, or familial love). Following them, I shall use the term ‘love’ for such a disposition as well. In so doing, I am not staking out a position in the literature on what is essential to the concept of love. I am simply abiding by the terms in which Anne frames the matter; if she wants to call the thing she is after ‘love’, I am content to do so as well.

A fifth clarification: to say that one wants to be loved for oneself is not to say that one does not want properties to figure into the love in any way. It seems likely that Anne would be dissatisfied if her lovers never admired her for her gentle personality; Traherne might well hope that God delights in him for his poetic abilities as well as cares for him for being himself; and I, personally, should like to hear God say, one day, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant’. And considerations besides the fact ‘that it is Anne’, for instance, must come into the picture when it comes to concrete, loving actions: it matters that Anne adores daffodils, hates chocolate, is allergic to cats, and was engaged to her lover on this very day some 20 years ago. A love based on one’s being oneself need not exclude other reasons for action, admiration, and so forth.

Finally, I must mention an important assumption, without which the argument cannot get off the ground. Anne assumes that she is a subject distinct from any and all properties that she might possess. She is not her properties and her properties are not she. Since my aim is to show how such a love might be possible, I see no reason to doubt the terms in which the problem is framed. I shall assume, therefore, an ontology in which the subject is distinct from the properties it possesses.Footnote ¹⁸ That is not to say that the subject is propertyless if, by that term, one means ‘without properties’. Obviously, the subject does have properties. The question is whether the logical subject consists in those properties, or is simply identical to them, whether severally or in sum. If the logical subject does not consist in its properties, then it makes sense to ask whether the individual is loved because it instantiates certain properties or because it is that individual.

I recognize this position is controversial and that, to defend it properly, I would need much more argument and a lengthy engagement with the philosophical and theological literatures on properties, identity, and objects; the literature on monism; and likely the literatures on intrinsic and extrinsic properties and relations. However, my argument is modest enough that I can responsibly make some assumptions in those areas: my project is primarily to explore whether the Christian tradition has the resources needed to explain how one might be loved for oneself. I am thus comfortable with assuming an ontology on which there is a self in the sense needed to get the problem off the ground. And I take that ontology to be one on which, at a bare minimum, there are subjects that have properties but are not those properties. If such an ontology is not plausible, then my solution will not work either; indeed, the very problem on which the argument is founded falls apart. I recognize and accept that fact.

Where, how, and why contemporary theories fall short

Unfortunately, contemporary philosophical theories of love tend to exclude the possibility of being loved for oneself from the outset. Consider two prominent theories: the appraisal view and the bestowal view. Appraisal views generally assume that the object’s lovableness must be explained by reference to something else – namely, its properties. Bestowal views, in contrast, say love ‘projects’ value onto the beloved. It is not explained by reference to the beloved at all.Footnote ¹⁹

Notice that these views share a key assumption: if love is to be characterized as having reasons and those reasons are to be found in the beloved, then those reasons must be properties the beloved possesses. The other option is to deny the beloved supplies such reasons.Footnote ²⁰ Obviously, neither option works if one wants to say that one can be loved for oneself: being loved for oneself is to be loved for a reason (namely the self) but not for any property. Such a possibility is thus ruled out by the terms in which the debate is framed.

Why the assumption? One reason might have to do with doubts about intuitive knowledge. Plausibly, whenever I think about, have intentions toward, or otherwise have to do with an individual, it is under a certain, intelligible description; and for many, it might seem as though we never have ‘the individual as such’ there in our thought, serving as an intelligible content in addition to the properties we ascribe to the individual. Unless one posits that humans have an intuitive faculty that somehow apprehends individuals in their individuality, it seems as though we are only able to know or have intentions toward individual things so far as they present themselves to us under a propertied (and hence intelligible) aspect. So, one might be sceptical that humans can love an object for anything but its intelligible properties; and, since the philosophical literature on love generally focuses on love between humans, it would be natural enough for that literature to assume that one cannot be loved for anything but properties either.

Another difficulty is that reasons are usually taken to be something like facts or propositions. How an object or person could serve as a reason is far from clear, and most of the reasons we give and take in the course of our daily lives can be communicated in the form of something like propositions. So, any explanation of how one might be loved simply for oneself will have to tangle with the difficult question of how to think of objects and persons, rather than facts or propositions, as reasons.

Creation from nothing

I have set up the problem and laid out the desideratum. It is now time to turn to my second aim for this article: considering what the Christian tradition might bring to the table in thinking through this matter. In particular, I wish to suggest that the Christian can plausibly claim that God displays such a love for his creatures in creating them from nothing – at least if one assumes, with much of the Christian tradition, that God gives existence to each creature as a gift. I then wish to suggest one way in which the Christian might show how God can be love creatures for themselves in the creative act. Before proceeding, I must note two things. First, I am not attempting to prove that God does love us for ourselves; I am merely attempting to show one way the Christian who thinks that God does love us for ourselves might conceptualize that fact. Second, I assume that creation from nothing is something other than mere ‘actualization’. It does not involve merely sprinkling actuality on prefab essences or merely possible individuals or worlds. As Austin Farrer puts it in Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, God does not have a menu from which to pick and compare possible worlds or creatures (Farrer Reference Farrer1962, 61–64). For, as classically understood, creation from nothing involves no operation upon any object; any presupposed ‘things’ from which God could select some for creation would violate that understanding (Webster Reference Webster2013, 162–165). With those notes in mind, let us proceed.

It has been common in the Christian tradition to say that God gives each thing its existence (and its very self) as a gift.Footnote ²¹ Likewise, it has been common to say that God gives this gift in love. God loves things into existence. This tradition lends itself to the idea that God loves his creatures for themselves. For if your properties are gifts to you, then it seems plausible that God has no other ground on which to give them to you than that it is you. Perhaps the whole cosmos is something like a stage play or dance that God wants to put on, complete with roles and parts, choreographed down to the minutest detail. It was still up to God whether to give those roles to you, me, and Bede the Venerable. He might (perhaps) have assigned you to another role; he might (certainly) have assigned somebody else the role that you in fact have. But, in actual fact, he has selected you to play your specific role. One might chock that decision up to whimsy on God’s part; one might also consider the fact that it is you a mere side effect. But, if one thinks that God does give each person his existence and self for some reason, then the only plausible reason for his doing so seems to be that it be this individual that he somehow sees as worth giving those gifts.

There are, however, a few difficulties attending the idea that God loves his creatures in creating them. The first difficulty is presented by actualists such as A.N. Prior (Reference Prior1957, 391; 1960; Reference Prior1978, 142), Richard Adams (Reference Adams1981, 9–10), and Christopher Menzel (Reference Menzel1991). They have claimed that God cannot intend to create an individual because the individual is not there to be intended until after its creation (at least not unless one supposes that there are things like possibilia on which he operates by sprinkling a little actuality on them). If they are correct, God can only intend to produce some individual of a type. One could not, then, say that God’s choice to create Anne has Anne as its intended object, much less that he considers Anne to be a reason for his act. Another potential objection comes from Mark Johnston and others who consider love and its reasons to be dependent on their object’s existence. One cannot take Mary as a reason for creating Mary, the thought goes, because Mary does not exist to be a reason until after she has been created (Johnston Reference Johnston, Buchak, Zimmeran and Swenson2019, 143–145). Likewise, one cannot say God creates Mary because he loves her, for love presupposes an existing object (Edwards Reference Edwards2008, 439; Johnston Reference Johnston, Buchak, Zimmeran and Swenson2019, 145–148; Vitale Reference Vitale2020, 179–180, 190–1; Watt Reference Watt2015, 148; Wessling Reference Wessling2020, 110).Footnote ²² Added to these difficulties is the difficulty mentioned in the previous section: how God could be understood to take an object or person, rather than a proposition or fact, as a reason to act.

My task in the next section is to suggest that God can intend the individual and that, when he does so, the individual can serve as a reason for the creative act. My suggestion comprises three parts: that one can intend particular acts; that, when an act is performed for its own sake, it is a reason for its own performance; and that the creature, as the effect of God’s creative act, can be willed for its own sake as long as the act is willed for its own sake.

Intentions towards particular acts

I wish to claim that, at least in two relevant senses, intention is always directed towards particular, concrete acts.Footnote ²³ In the first sense, intention is what one is seeking to bring about, how one would like the act to go. In this sense, to say something like ‘I was intending to leap across that chasm but slipped and fell in’ is to say that one was acting with the aim that the act constitute a ‘leaping across a chasm’, even if it did not end up doing so. In the second sense, on the other hand, intention is something more akin to embarkation upon or commitment to a concrete act. I shall say a bit more about what I mean by that phrase shortly.

With this distinction in mind, I can move on. I now wish to show that intention in the first sense is always directed towards particular, concrete acts. When one intends to perform some concrete act, what one wishes to bring about includes its being this concrete act. Consider what happens when the Lady Eve sees an apple and, being rather peckish, picks it up and eats it. Her desire is general with respect to its object. Any apple would do. (For that matter, any edible substance would do.) Yet when she intends to eat the apple, she does not intend merely to eat ‘something’. The object intended is this specific apple.Footnote ²⁴ My claim takes this insight about an act’s object and applies it to the act itself. When I intend to perform concrete act q, it is not accidental to my intention that the concrete act I perform be q – as if, for all I know or care, concrete acts r, s, or t could be the result instead. I intend not merely to perform some concrete act but this very concrete act. That fact holds even if I am interested in q only insofar as it is an act token that exemplifies some act type (much as I might be interested in a specific apple only as an edible substance).

I consider this point intuitive. How could one intend to run, say, without intending to bring about the specific, concrete action that one commits to in starting to run? But in case one finds the intuition uncompelling on its own, I present as evidence cases in which one performs an act without knowing in detail what type it will be. When I commit myself to drawing, say, I put pen to paper and find myself confronted with an event, a process in which I am engaged, an effect unfolding in its object through time. I do not know immediately what the result will be – I have no blueprint in mind – because it is not till I determine where to draw the final line and declare it complete that it even has a determinate shape. Before that point, I know it only as this act, the one I am engaged in, lead where it may. This fact suggests, I think, that one can intend a concrete act without intending (solely) according to a type.Footnote ²⁵ One might object that, even in a case like this, I have to have some act type in mind. For example, while I might not know exactly whether what I am doing is making a map or sketching the skyline, I do at least know that I am drawing. So, one might say, what I am intending is not really indeterminate: it is simply a broader-than-usual intention, namely to draw. My reply is that, while my intention might involve merely drawing ‘something’, it is not exhausted thereby. Otherwise, it would be satisfied by my having drawn, no matter the output. Then, merely putting a pencil to paper and leaving a dot would suffice; and that hardly seems plausibly to capture what my intention is. Rather, what I am intending is this concrete act, my drawing this (however this turns out). I want this act to reach its conclusion even before I know what that conclusion is, even though I am, in some sense, discovering what it is as I go. It is an exploratory intention but no less an intention for all that.

I now turn to the second sense in which one must always intend the concrete act. Intention in this sense is something like commitment to or embarkation upon the concrete act. It differs from intention in the previous sense in that it produces the act that is committed to. My commitment to q is sufficient to ensure that there be a concrete act q. That does not mean that commitment is enough to make the act belong to a certain type: one may want to cook a nice apple pie but botch the attempt so badly that one cannot even say one began making it; even in such a case, one still achieved at least one thing – namely, concrete act q. Indeed, it is the arguably the fact that one had intentions that q turn out in such and such a way that allows one to say it was a botched attempt at all.

Let me illustrate. Consider the gap between merely speculative thought about performing an act, any act, according to type x and the final intention with which one embarks on or commits to a concrete act. Say I have had a bad fight with my father, and we have stopped talking to each other. I know that I ought to talk to him. I feel a tug in my gut, an unease, every time I consider the fact that I still have not reached out to him. I ponder what I could say, imagine how the conversation might go. I say to myself that I will reach out to him – soon! Perhaps I feel some grim determination when I say it, setting my jaw and furrowing my brow to indicate that I mean it. I even make preparations: I write a letter, purchase the necessary postage, fill out the envelope, put the letter in it, walk to the mailbox – and suddenly, at the very last minute, walk back into the house and put the letter in the trash. In what sense did I intend to reach out to my father? I certainly imagined doing it. I probably had an appetite for it. I even planned and prepared to do it. But in the end, there remained a gap between all my imaginings and preparations and the final leap into the activity. What was wanting was an intention towards the particular, concrete act, an intention that would have issued in an act that, if successfully executed, would have amounted to my contacting my father.Footnote ²⁶

It makes sense that such a gap should exist. Plausibly, intentions in the relevant sense are logically directed towards things that can be performed; and one cannot perform an act type. It seems to follow that one cannot intend an act type – at least not in the same sense as one can intend a concrete act. Just as one cannot chase a generic ‘something’ but only a particular thing, such as the okapi that ran across the Kantstraße not two moments ago, so one cannot intend generic act types but only concrete acts.

Acts confront one

One might wonder whether the ‘intentions’ that I have been talking about are sufficiently similar to intentionality to be relevant to my aim. My aim is, after all, to show that God can have certain intentional stances towards his creatures – namely that he takes them as reasons for his love for them. One might think that, in contrast, an action is not sufficiently separate from the agent for the agent to have intentions towards it – not in the relevant sense at least. Can one have intentions for an act as one can have intentions for, say, an apple pie or a friend?

I would say that, phenomenologically speaking, it often is the case that I have intentions towards my own acts: things that I hope for them, practical stances that I take towards them, and so forth. This comes out especially clearly (though not, I think, exclusively) in improvised, productive activity. When sitting down and beginning to draw, I see the act as a process unfolding before me. It seems to be something external, something that I can have intentions towards. So, for instance, I can admire the work as it unfolds. On the other hand, it may dismay me. If it begins to go poorly, I may shift my practical stance towards it in different ways, attempting to change it or, if I realize it has degraded past a certain threshold, abort it. This experience becomes especially clear when one is improvising, as with the drawing example: in such cases, there is even a sense in which I am able to discover or learn from the act as I go. If we take seriously the fact that one’s activity, in being intended concretely, becomes in some sense external to one, it becomes reasonable to think that one can indeed have intentions towards one’s own concrete acts.

Temporal and logical priority do not hold between intention and concrete act

It is worth noting here that, when I intend an act q, I bring about the very thing intended by intending it. There is neither temporal nor logical gap between the intention and the object. Up until I perform q, I cannot be said to intend q; for if I end up not following through, what was I intending? Certainly not q: it does not exist because I did not intend it, so it cannot be what I intended. I can intend q only when I am in fact performing q. If I do indeed intend q but q does not exist until I intend it, then we have an instance where an intention and its object come to be at the same time; it thus turns out to be false that the object must precede the intention. The two can come to be simultaneously. To put it in slightly more literary terms, it is only once I step out into relation with the act, only once I commit myself to it, that it comes about. My taking the act as my intentional object is the occasion and the very moment in which occurs the act.

Actions for their own sake

When one performs an action for its own sake, the act serves as its own reason. When I decide to go for a walk or play music for its own sake, I need not be doing so to achieve any ulterior aims (Mele Reference Mele1988). Likewise, there need not be any backwards-looking consideration that serves as my reason.Footnote ²⁷ I am not responding to some demand made on me by the way the world is. Rather, the consideration in whose light I act is simply the concrete act itself. I perform the act because it is worth performing (at least in my eyes).Footnote ²⁸ This point is essential because it suggests that there are familiar instances in which the reason for performing an act is nothing but the act itself, meaning that the reason is temporally and logically simultaneous with the act for which it is a reason.

Under most circumstances, at least on a certain level, even an act done for its own sake is desired only under a generic aspect. If I want to swim, I must intend and successfully perform an act token, but it generally matters not at all to me which token I perform, as long as it meets the criteria necessary to count as ‘swimming’. That makes perfect sense: I like swimming because it is swimming, and it is swimming thanks to various characteristics or properties (e.g. cutting through the water, a certain weightlessness).Footnote ²⁹ But I think that, at least in some cases, one may desire to perform an act for its own sake and simply as that concrete act. To illustrate what I mean, I return to my earlier example. When I set out to draw something without a blueprint in mind, I find myself confronted with my own activity, which appears to me as a concrete process in which I am engaged.Footnote ³⁰ Though I may not have specific conditions in mind for the end result and hence do not know fully what act type it will exemplify when complete, I may still wish for it to go well, whatever its going well ends up consisting in. What ‘going well’ for it means will become clearer as I progress in the process.Footnote ³¹ As I end up settling on certain properties for the drawing, as I begin to sense its particular ‘style’, I begin to shape the activity in certain directions according to that vision. But it is because I was already committed to the concrete act that I care to give it these properties. It is so that it may be a good act.

Relationships supply another ready example. If I really love another person, I am going to want certain things for my beloved: good health, small and harmless pleasures, good character, and all the other things that contribute to a good life. In at least some cases, love will prompt me to act so as to help my beloved achieve those goods. But that need not mean that I perform those acts solely because I want things to go a certain way with my beloved. Instead, my intention may be an open-ended and exploratory desire to ensure that things go well, whatever that may end up looking like. If I have a child, for instance, I may very well seek to bring the child up in a certain way, shaping him according to a certain ideal. But the emphasis (one may hope) is on the child, not the ideal. I should wish to raise my child to be virtuous not primarily because I wish to produce virtuous persons – to which end my child is suitable raw material – but because I care for this, my child, and know that being virtuous is good.Footnote ³² Likewise, I do not merely wish to ‘realize an act token under type x’. Instead, I find myself confronted with the fact that I now have this act in process, and I wish to mould it to be a good act – perhaps like the image I envisioned before setting out, perhaps different from my expectations.Footnote ³³ So, I can be concerned with the act so that the reason I am performing it is simply a desire that it go well. In this case, it is reasonable to say that my reason for acting is the act itself, considered not under this or that description but as this particular act.

Admittedly, these examples have their limits.Footnote ³⁴ While my commitment to my child’s good might, in theory, be entirely open-ended, aimed at whatever it turns out my child’s good consists in, the matter is not so clear in practice. I would probably not care so much for x if x were not my child but an unaffiliated frog. One might take that fact to suggest that I am engaged in my caring activities not for their own sakes but because some prior consideration demands them.Footnote ³⁵ And in any case, one might argue, I am aiming at some type, however hazily understood or open-ended: namely my child’s good. So, one might continue, while I have certainly shown that my intention for the act can be extremely loose, I have not shown that I am aiming at it merely because I want to perform it, want it to go well.

My examples from running and drawing have their own limits. As one reviewer has pointed out, if my activity were, at least at the outset, to involve my beating my head against a wall, I might not be so keen to keep it up to find out how it might unfold in other, better directions. One might therefore conclude that I never perform an act simply because it is that act but only ever because I see it as having certain properties that I see as making it worth the doing. Further, when beginning an artwork, even when I set out without a clear picture in mind, I have already set some parameters on what the result will probably be by putting a pen to paper in the first place. Even if there is not a fully determinate ‘kind’ to which I know the act will belong, I still have intended for it to start out, from the outset, with certain properties. I have chosen, as it were, to set out in a certain direction even if the rest of the journey is not yet clear.

In response, I first note that it need not follow, from the fact that I abort an activity based on its undesirable or harmful properties, that I did not engage in the activity for its own sake and simply because it was that activity. It is entirely plausible that I should cease from the act simply because, much as I would have liked to keep the activity up, being committed to its going well, there were countervailing considerations to prevent my doing so. Secondly, the fact that I have a (very loose) type in mind when setting out to draw does not undermine my point: that one can be concerned with ensuring that this act go well because one is committed to it, not merely as the ‘stuff’ that will eventually go into realizing an act token belonging to some type. As long as the priority runs from a concern with the act to the properties one wishes to bestow on the act, not (at least not entirely) the reverse, my illustrations remain secure.

Even so, I recognize the difficulty facing these examples: the problem is that one never sets out to perform a ‘bare act’ any more than one ever sets one’s sights on a ‘bare particular’. In actual practice, all the particulars one meets are robed in properties, and, in the acts one performs, one generally sets out with some initial idea about what the act will end up looking like. So, even assuming that one does perform some acts for their own sake and as particular, it is rarely if ever that one finds a ‘pure’ instance, unmingled with other reasons. For that reason, even those who hold that it is in principle possible to perform an act for its own sake and simply as that act might doubt whether there are any instances where an act is in fact performed for that reason. Given the limited space remaining in this article, I shall only gesture at a possible response. If there is one instance in which humans seem to have an almost completely open-ended desire to perform an act, whatever it looks like for that act to go well, it is life: the unified activity in which each person or thing ‘selves, goes itself’. By the time I am aware that I am I, I am already always engaged in living life, and I live – am myself – simply for its, or my, own sake. It is only as I carry on that I tentatively learn what it looks like for my life to go well, and it is arguably always because I am committed to living that I care one way or another what it means for things to go well in my life; the properties matter because the life matters, not the reverse. Even if one thinks there may come a time when a life becomes so painful or wearisome that it is better to welcome its end, the reason is arguably that the shorter but less painful life is still a better life, and I care that it be better because my most basic desire is to live my life as well as I may.

Obviously, all that I have just said is highly contentious, but I think it has enough intuitive force to show that there is at least a plausible instance in which one performs an act that is (nearly) entirely open-ended and is performed for its own sake and as particular.

God’s acts are (in part) simply their objects

I am now ready to move on to my final suggestion: that under one aspect, the divine creative act can be identified with its effect and its effect, in turn, with its product. To make this point, I draw on a framework found in Aristotle. (Note, however, that one need not hold to a thoroughly Aristotelian ontology to use the framework. It is loose enough to be compatible with multiple ontologies.) For Aristotle, an act can be seen under three aspects: the agent’s actualization qua agent, the patient’s actualization qua patient, and the act, or process, itself (Aristotle, Metaphysics XI, 1065b–1066a and Physics III, 202b26–27). As an illustration, consider a fire and a kettle. While the fire is heating the kettle, the fire is being actualized in its potential to be heating the kettle; for its part, the kettle is being actualized in its potential to be undergoing heating. I shall call the aspect under which the object is being affected the act’s ‘effect’. Since the effect is the act under a certain aspect, to the extent that the act is intended, the effect too must be intended – that is, obviously, assuming that one takes ‘intention’ in the sense that I have been using it.

In most cases, one can draw a distinction between an act’s effect and its object. When the fire heats the kettle, the kettle is an object with its own character distinct from the effect in it. The kettle is not exhausted by its character as heatable, much less its character as being heated. But there is good reason to think the case is otherwise when it comes to divine creation. Christians have traditionally held that God creates from nothing. Plausibly, in creation from nothing, there is no pre-existing object on which God operates. It is not a change in a thing already presupposed. Indeed, it is arguably not a change at all since, in it, there is no subject passing through a change from one state to another. It would be natural to conclude that the object has no character distinct from the effect and that the creative act has only one intelligible content: the creature-being-created and all its creaturely characteristics, which is simply to say the creature itself.Footnote ³⁶

This final step allows us to reach the following conclusion: if God (a) intends creative act q as particular (b) for its own sake (c) because it is that particular act and (d) some creature is creative act q under a certain aspect, it would seem to follow that (e) God intends that creature for its own sake and as particular. In a sense, the creature serves as a reason for its own creation.Footnote ³⁷ One could very well say that God creates that creature because it is that creature. And that, perhaps, supplies an answer that will satisfy Anne.

Reasons to think that God engages in the creative act for its own sake

I must make one final point before concluding. Strictly speaking, all I have argued for is the claim that, if God creates for its own sake and as particular, he also does so for the creature. It remains to be seen whether it can be shown that God does engage in creative acts for their own sakes in the requisite sense. But I feel no need to argue here for the claim that he does: there are many traditions in which it makes sense to say that he does so. Whether one thinks God creates out of sheer artistic exuberance, an ecstatic love of his creatures, a sort of cosmic playfulness, or the desire to manifest his own glory, one can find a place for the idea that, in some sense, God engages in creative activity for its own sake – and so creates the creature for its own sake as well.Footnote ³⁸

Concluding thoughts

If the position I have put forward is promising, there are three upshots. First, there is a new category to add to appraisal and bestowal views: love that recognizes and affirms its object in its individual identity. Second, it raises questions about whether there can be such a love between creatures. Third, it gives a reason for looking seriously at the Christian tradition (and other traditions on which God creates from nothing) as presenting an answer to a deeply existential concern. My personal hope is that it will also open conversations about ways in which distinctive religious commitments might provide fruitful resources for thinking through topics in philosophy of love. At the very least, what I take myself to have shown that there is conceptual space in the Christian tradition for talking sensibly about being loved for oneself. Granting these premises, one can gladly say, ‘God at least, my dear, can love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair’.