Love: The Fundamental Relationality Shaping Existence

Most people think of love as something they feel – an emotion that rises and falls, connects and disconnects. But what if love is not merely something in us, but something that constitutes us? What if love is not a property we occasionally possess, but a fundamental structure of existence itself – the very fabric through which we are bound to each other and to reality? This is the philosophical claim behind love as relationality: that love is not incidental to what it means to be human, but essential to it. Understanding this idea requires a shift from thinking about love as a personal feeling to recognizing it as an ontological force – one that shapes the nature of being.

What does “love as relationality” actually mean? 🔗

To understand love as relationality, we first need to understand relationality itself. According to Wesley Wildman of Boston University, the core claim of a relational ontology is that the relations between entities are ontologically more fundamental than the entities themselves. This is a direct challenge to the more familiar “substantivist” view, which holds that individual things exist first, and relations come after. In a relational ontology, you do not first exist as a self-contained being who then enters into relationships – you are, in a deep sense, constituted by those relationships. The relations come first.

Love, viewed through this lens, is not simply a feeling one individual has toward another. It is the relational force that weaves beings together into a shared reality. It is what makes the connections between people, and indeed between all aspects of existence, not merely functional or accidental, but meaningful and constitutive. To say that love is the heart of relationality is to say that care, mutual recognition, and interconnection are not extras added onto existence – they are what existence is made of.

The philosophical foundations: from the Greeks onward 🔗

The idea that love has deep structural significance is ancient. The Greeks, famously, did not use a single word for love. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes three central Greek concepts: eros, the passionate desire that seeks something beyond itself; philia, the affectionate bond of friendship, loyalty, and mutual care; and agape, an unconditional love that transcends personal gain and extends to all humanity. These are not three separate feelings but three dimensions of a single relational reality.

What matters philosophically is the direction each form of love points us. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that agape, in its paradigm theological sense, does not respond to value already present in the beloved – rather, it creates value in its object through the act of loving. This is a striking claim: love is not just reactive but generative. It does not merely respond to what is there; it brings something into being. This creative, constitutive quality of love is precisely what philosophers who see love as relational mean when they say it is integral to being, not just a property of individuals.

Plato’s treatment of eros in the Symposium points in a similar direction. For Plato, eros is not merely sexual craving – it is a deep desire that orients the soul toward transcendence, toward beauty in its truest form. The erotic impulse, properly understood, is one of aspiration toward what lies beyond the isolated self. Aristotle extended this thinking through philia, arguing in the Nicomachean Ethics that the highest friendship is one where each person values the other for who they are in themselves, not for personal utility. In Aristotle’s famous image, genuine friendship involves “two bodies and one soul” – an image that already suggests the boundary between self and other is not as fixed as we often assume.

Love and the structure of being: key philosophical voices 🔗

Martin Buber and the primacy of the “in-between” 🔗

One of the most powerful articulations of love as relational comes from the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber. As scholars at Aarhus University explain, for Buber the self exists authentically only in genuine dialogue with the other. The “I” and the “Thou” do not first exist as completed beings who subsequently meet – they come into being through the meeting itself. The relation is not a bridge between two pre-existing islands; the relation is primary, and the individuals emerge from it. Buber called this space of genuine encounter the “in-between” (das Zwischen), and it is here, in the relational space, that authentic human existence takes shape.

This has direct implications for how we understand love. Love, in Buber’s framework, is not a feeling one person has about another. It is a mode of genuine meeting – of being present to the other as a real “Thou” rather than an object to be used or classified. It is the quality of relation itself, not just a sentiment.

Heidegger and being-with 🔗

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Martin Heidegger argued that human beings – what he called Dasein – must be understood as “beings-in-the-world,” constituted by their relationships to the practical and social contexts that give meaning to their actions. For Heidegger, there is no neutral, pre-relational self that then steps into the world. Being is always already being-with others. Scholars of Heidegger’s work note that his ontology represents a fundamental break from substance-based thinking, recovering instead a tradition in which being is understood primarily in terms of relation.

Love, on this reading, is not a departure from our ordinary being-in-the-world – it is its deepest expression. When we love someone, we are not stepping outside our normal existence into some special emotional realm. We are, rather, realizing the relational structure of existence itself in its fullest possible way.

Whitehead and relational process 🔗

In the tradition of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead argued in Process and Reality (1929) that the basic units of reality are not isolated substances but “actual occasions” – moments of experience that prehend, or relate to, others. Every entity is a nexus of relations; to exist is to become in relation. This framework aligns strikingly with the idea that love – as the force of genuine care and connection – is not a sentiment layered over a neutral reality, but reflects how reality is actually structured at its most fundamental level.

Love as constitutive: not a property, but a way of being 🔗

What these philosophical perspectives converge on is a crucial distinction: between love as a property (something an individual has or expresses) and love as constitutive (something that shapes what a being fundamentally is). Research published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice argues that moral philosophy has too often ignored the ontological implications of love and interpersonality – treating love merely as an attitude or sentiment rather than as a relation that fundamentally determines the nature of those involved.

When love is understood as constitutive rather than merely expressive, several important shifts follow. First, the self is no longer understood as a closed, self-sufficient entity. A self that is constituted through love is inherently open – defined not by what it possesses or achieves in isolation, but by the quality of its connections and commitments. Second, other people are no longer external objects toward whom I may or may not direct feelings. They are part of the relational field that makes me who I am. To damage a relationship is, in some sense, to damage a part of the self. Third, love becomes not a luxury but a necessity – not something to be added once basic existence is secured, but the very medium in which human existence takes meaningful shape.

Love, interdependence, and the holistic view 🔗

The relational understanding of love leads naturally toward a holistic picture of reality. If love is the force of genuine connection – the acknowledgment that others are not instruments but ends in themselves, that our well-being is bound up with theirs – then the model of existence it implies is one of deep interdependence. This stands in sharp contrast to a dominant modern habit of fragmented thinking, in which we treat different domains of life – personal relationships, professional activity, the natural world – as separate and essentially unrelated compartments.

As contemporary analyses of the Greek forms of love suggest, eros, philia, and agape are not three mutually exclusive categories but three modalities of a single relational movement. Eros reaches toward the other out of desire and longing; philia sustains the other through recognition and reciprocity; agape extends care unconditionally, without requiring anything in return. Together, they trace the full arc of love as a relational force – from intimate passion to stable friendship to universal compassion. Each form opens the self outward. Each enacts, in its own way, the ontological truth that the human being is not a closed system but a relational being.

This also connects to a broader ethical and ecological dimension. If love understood as relationality means that our existence is genuinely bound to the existence of others, then it becomes impossible to regard others – human or otherwise – with pure indifference. Agape in particular calls upon individuals to recognize the interconnectedness of all humanity, rising above purely self-interested perspectives. This is not a sentimental claim but a philosophical one: if the self is relational, then the well-being of others is not merely a moral obligation added from outside – it is part of what the self genuinely is and needs.

Love and self-knowledge 🔗

There is a further dimension worth noting. Phenomenological work on the ontology of persons and love has explored how love directed at the singular uniqueness of another – not their general characteristics but their particular, irreplaceable selfhood – reveals something important about the nature of personhood itself. To love someone in the fullest sense is not to love a set of qualities that happen to be bundled together in one individual; it is to love that person in their irreducible singularity. This kind of love cannot be replaced by another, even if the other person has all the same qualities – which tells us something important: what love recognizes and responds to is not interchangeable features, but the irreplaceable relational presence of a particular being.

This is not just a point about romantic love. It applies to any genuine relation in which we acknowledge the other as truly other – as someone whose existence matters in their own right. And it implies that the practice of love, in all its forms, is also a practice of attentiveness, of learning to see others in their irreducible reality rather than through the filter of our own needs and projections. In this sense, loving well and knowing well are deeply connected. The relational self that love calls us to be is also a more perceptive, more genuinely engaged self.

Why this matters: love as the ground of human flourishing 🔗

Philosophers across traditions – from Aristotle’s account of friendship to Buber’s dialogical philosophy to Whitehead’s process ontology – converge on the view that human beings are not self-sufficient atoms but relational beings whose deepest flourishing depends on the quality of their connections. Theological philosophers such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bernard Lonergan have argued that love – in its three modalities of eros, philia, and agape – is not merely a dimension of human experience but constitutive of the meaning of human existence itself. Love is not what we do after we have secured our existence; it is the condition under which existence becomes genuinely meaningful.

What this means practically is significant. If love is constitutive rather than merely incidental, then the structures we build – social, political, economic, cultural – either support or undermine the relational conditions in which human beings can actually flourish. A culture that systematically erodes genuine connection, mutual recognition, and care is not just making life less pleasant; it is attacking something central to what it means to be human at all. Understanding love as the fundamental form of relationality shaping existence is, in this way, not a sentimental claim but a serious philosophical and practical one.

What do you think? If love is truly constitutive of what we are – not just something we feel but something that shapes the very structure of our being – does that change how you understand the relationships you are already in? And if the self is genuinely relational, what responsibilities does that place on us toward those whose lives are bound up with ours?

References

1. https://people.bu.edu/wwildman/media/docs/Wildman_2009_Relational_Ontology.pdf
2. https://iep.utm.edu/love/
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/
4. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/9/778
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
6. https://philpapers.org/rec/FILHRO
7. https://cupofpeace.com/?p=184
8. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/B:ETTA.0000042899.06985.91.pdf
9. https://www.neuroetpsycho.com/en/the-many-faces-of-love-a-psychoanalytic-perspective/
10. https://www.planksip.org/the-philosophy-of-love-eros-philia-and-agape-in-ancient-and-modern-contexts/
11. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/593f/293433c952f1e1e4183fb06b66c03745f9df.pdf
12. https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/e27bfd20-253c-4d89-b6bf-3b7a50304c3a/content