What we call 'love' might, in reality, be a form of disguised contempt, merely masked as love..
A troubling question arises: do we truly love anything, or are our feelings merely forms of disguised contempt? In fact, there is a way to discern this. To determine whether our relationship with something is actually disguised contempt, we need only ask whether it is based on an implicit insult—whether it violates one of the essential conditions of love.

We have established that an essential condition of love is the ability to demonstrate how what we wish to love holds value. However, we have previously argued that values are unfounded, that we have yet to identify a basis for them, and that, as a result, we are unable to demonstrate the value of what we love or the negative worth of what we hate.

It seems, then, that until axiology is established as a science and resolves the problem it has set out to address—the problem of values—our loves are merely forms of disguised contempt. Our relationships to things and people take the form: 'I love you, without knowing why', or 'I love you, without reason'. In other words, until the problem of values is resolved, the very possibility of human love remains unexamined.

This idea may seem absurd. After all, it appears there are indeed great loves, such as the love of Romeo and Juliet.
To this, I would reply that I am not denying the existence of profound feelings, but rather the existence of love itself; for, as I have argued, love is more than a mere feeling.
However, I concede not that they love each other, but that they 'want to love each other'. They would die to love each other, yet they fail to fully realise that love. Indeed, this is a classic doctrine: love is seen as an ideal, an aspiration we endlessly pursue yet never fully attain. Once again, we are left questioning the possibility of achieving this seemingly infinite task.

Thus, love becomes a problem. To resolve it, we must explore what we have termed the 'hidden face of love'—to uncover the essential conditions that love entails. In doing so, we must, so to speak, draw up the 'Tablets of the Laws of Love'.

Until this task is completed, we risk allowing our love to unknowingly degrade into disguised contempt.
The clearest example of this phenomenon lies not in everyday behaviours but in the axiological doctrines we have already examined: subjectivism and eclecticism.