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? There is, in fact, a way to discern this. To determine whether our relationship with something is actually disguised contempt, we need only ask whether it rests 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. Yet 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 itself—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, for no reason'. In other words, until the problem of values is resolved, the very possibility of human love remains unexamined.

This may seem an absurd conclusion. After all, there appear to be great loves—the love of Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
To this I would reply that I am not denying the existence of profound feelings, but rather questioning the existence of love itself; for, as I have argued, love is more than a mere feeling.
I would concede, moreover, not that they love each other, but that they 'wish to love each other'. They would die in the attempt, yet they fail to fully realise that love. This is, indeed, a classical doctrine: love is regarded as an ideal, an aspiration we endlessly pursue yet never fully attain. Once again, we are left confronting the question of whether this seemingly infinite task can ever be achieved.

Love thus becomes a problem. To resolve it, we must explore what we have termed the 'hidden face of love'—uncovering 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 degrade, unknowingly, into disguised contempt.
The clearest illustration of this phenomenon lies not in everyday behaviour but in the axiological doctrines we have already examined: subjectivism and eclecticism.