1/ Extension of the Domain of Love

What is love? To begin, we might define it simply as a feeling of pleasure experienced either at the thought of or in the presence of the beloved. This prompts the question: what is the nature of the 'beloved' we have in mind? Or, put differently, what can be loved?

For Kant, things cannot be loved; as mere means, they lack the dignity required to serve as the object of such a feeling. Persons, by contrast, as ends in themselves, are capable of being loved.

The idea I propose, however, is that things can indeed be loved and that, ultimately, any content of meaning=X can serve as a potential object of love. Nature, for instance, though not a person, can be loved: it is loved by the walker gazing in wonder at the forest, by the ecologist taking action to protect it, and so on. Music, too, can be loved—by the child squeaking a bow on the violin with clumsy hands, by the virtuoso pianist interpreting Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and by the audience.
This is a commonplace phenomenon: countless things appear to be loved by us, as previously noted ¹. Everything, including the absurd and even the immoral, seems to be loved by at least some individuals.

We may therefore propose that love is not solely a relationship between two human beings, or even two minds, but rather between a mind and any content of meaning=X.

What is the nature of this relationship? At first glance, it appears to be a feeling of pleasure, which might seem to bring love close to desire. Can these two concepts be equated? I do not think so, and I shall endeavour to explain why.

2/ The Reduction of Love to Desire

Hobbes explicitly equates love with desire: Pleasure, love, and appetite, which is also called desire, are divers names for divers considerations of the same thing. He does, however, introduce a subtle distinction between the two concepts: That which men desire they are said to love, and to hate those things for which they have aversion. So that desire and love are the same thing; save that by desire, we signify the absence of the object; by love, most commonly the presence of the same ².

This amounts to saying that love is merely desire fulfilled. It is clear, however, that Hobbes' subtle distinction is insufficient to differentiate the two concepts, since he explicitly states he perceives only one. Moreover, Hobbes' definition of love does nothing to distinguish it from desire: Of love, by which is understood the joy man takes in the fruition of any present good ³.

It may be a feature of subjectivism, as we have defined it ⁴, to place emphasis on desire while reducing love to it.

Spinoza, for his part, regards desire as the actual essence of man ⁵. Yet he explicitly associates desire with appetite rather than with love, defining love as follows: Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an external cause ⁶.
This does, however, effectively equate desire with love, if we consider that joy arises from advancing towards greater perfection and that what I desire is what I call good, evil, or perfection.
Love thus appears to amount to nothing more than desire—desire, that is, with a particular focus on the desired object.

1. Book II, I, B
2. Human Nature, Ch. VII
3. Leviathan, I, VI
4. Human Nature, Ch IX
5. Ethics, III, « Definitions of the emotions », 1
6. Ethics, III, prop. XIII, note