Love as the foundation of Being
About alienation and the role of upbringing
Introduction
Love is not merely a feeling that comes and goes, a romantic ideal, or a moral virtue. Love is the foundational principle of existence itself — the force that connects, sustains, and holds space for all that is. Yet modern humanity seems more alienated from this essential principle than ever before. In relationships, in work, in education, love has become rare, conditional, framed by expectations and achievements. This alienation becomes painfully clear in the way we raise our children. For how can one love unconditionally, if one has never been seen unconditionally?
This essay explores love as a philosophical foundation, a social diagnosis, and a pedagogical calling.
Love as a philosophical fundamental concept
In the philosophical tradition, love is not peripheral. In Plato’s Symposium, love (eros) leads the soul from the transient to the eternal, from physical desire to the contemplation of Truth and Beauty. Love is the movement toward the essence of things, toward unity.
For Spinoza, we find a similar idea: the highest form of knowledge is the intellectual love of God — a love not rooted in emotion, but in existence itself; a unification with the order of the whole.
The twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas radicalizes this relational view. For him, philosophy does not begin in thought, but in the encounter with the Other. In the face of the Other, an appeal arises — a call to responsibility. This original turning toward the Other — without conditions, without guarantees — is an ethical form of love.
Here, love is not sentimentality, but the foundation of human relationship and ethics. What these visions share is an understanding of love as a mode of being: a way of inhabiting the world that is fundamentally relational and open. Love not only connects human beings to one another, but also connects humanity to Being itself.
The alienation of Love in modern times
Yet in contemporary society, we seem to drift ever further from this essential connection. In a culture driven by performance, optimization, and competition, love is often reduced to a form of exchange. It becomes something you must earn — through success, through good behavior, through meeting the expectations of others.
Erich Fromm argued in the last century that love suffers under the logic of capitalism: having prevails over being. People begin to treat one another as products — even their own children.
Martin Buber also described this alienation in his famous distinction between the I-It and I-Thou relationships. Where love enables the I-Thou encounter, in our time the I-It relation dominates: a world where the other is measured, used, and controlled.
In its true form, love is impractical in this context, perhaps even naive. It resists control, efficiency, and measurability. It is not productive, but present. And it is precisely this presence that is so often missing.
Parenting as a mirror of the love crisis
Nowhere is this crisis more palpable than in parenting. Parents are under constant pressure — from work, economic uncertainty, social expectations, mental health struggles, and unprocessed trauma. Despite their loving intentions, many parents are emotionally unavailable. They are tired, distracted, tense or caught in destructive patterns unconsciously inherited from their own childhood.
The love they offer their children is often conditional: dependent on behavior, success, or simply on not being too difficult. The child learns that love must be earned. That it must perform in order to be seen. In this way, the inner foundation of unconditional love is replaced early on by fear, self-doubt, and a relentless drive for achievement.
Parents are not to blame; they are products of a culture that has forgotten love itself. They reproduce what was done to them — not out of malice, but out of inability. This is precisely why it is philosophically necessary to approach upbringing not merely psychologically or pedagogically, but existentially — as the place where the bond with being, with love itself, is either passed on or broken.
The philosophy of Unconditional Love in upbringing
What does it mean to love unconditionally? It is more than tolerance or acceptance. It is being present — without judgment, without the need to correct or perfect. Simone Weil called this form of love attention: a pure, silent presence toward the other, without the desire to possess or change them.
Unconditional love in upbringing means that the child is seen in its being, not merely in its behavior. It also means that the parent must dare to face themselves, with all the shadows and patterns they carry. For only those who know and accept themselves can truly create space for another.
Love is not the same as approving everything. It also means setting limits, protecting, and guiding — but always from a place of deep connection. Love sets boundaries not to control, but so that the other may live and be. In this sense, love is not weak or soft, but powerful, clear, and sustaining.
Final remarks
If love is indeed the essence of being, then a crisis of love is a crisis of existence itself. And if upbringing is the place where that love is first embodied, then upbringing becomes the first place of healing.
This calls for more than pedagogical advice. It requires re-sourcing: a return to the source — a rediscovery of love as a basic attitude, as spaciousness, as presence.
Whoever seeks to love unconditionally must first learn how to be. Perhaps this is the most radical form of upbringing — and at the same time, the most deeply human.
