Self-love

Self-love may be referred to as that love of self which puts a person's individual good or desires above the general or divine good. In this sense it implies seeking one's own advantage regardless of anyone else's and is particularly frowned on in Christian teaching where mortification, humility, obedience and charity have variously been recommended to counteract such tendencies. However, in the sense in which the Christian is enjoined to love his neighbour as himself, lack of self-love is not taken to imply masochism; can one put one's neighbour's interests first without, through self-love, knowing by experience what these interests are likely to be ? In a sense, it could be said that all activity proceeds from self-love in response to the desire for happiness with the consequent reflection on how to act in conformity with such desire. The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth, and freedom is rooted in one's capacity to love. One can only really love productively if one can love one's self. If one is only able to love others one cannot real love at all. It follows that selfishness and self-love are not the same, they are opposites. It is loving one's self too little, self-hatred, that causes the concern to compensate by snatching from life the satisfaction that one blocks one's self from attaining.

A part of a person may love itself with particular intensity and such love may ensure the part's separation from the whole. Such exaggerated affection for itself is the part's denial of its transcendence and of its mind which is its relatedness in the whole of the world. Such destructive partiality is seen both when a disrelated part of the person attends primarily to itself but also when there is insistence that the personal reflection dominate in all experiences. The self-love of the part, instead of enjoying its own being in the whole, attempts to suffuse the whole with its own limited way of being.