Love is the enterprise of pursuing an unrealizable unity with the Other

Evidence

Thus as a reaction to the failure of the third ekstasis, the for-itself wishes to be identified with the Other’s freedom as founding its own being-in-itself. To be other to oneself—the ideal always aimed at concretely in the form of being this Other to oneself—is the primary value of my relations with the Other. This means that my being-for-others is haunted by the indication of an absolute-being which would be itself as other and other as itself and which by freely giving to itself its being-itself as other and its being-other as itself, would be the very being of the ontological proof—that is, God. This ideal can not be realized without my surmounting the original contingency of my relations to the Other; that is, by overcoming the fact that there is no relation of internal negativity between the negation by which the Other is made other than I and the negation by which I am made other than the Other. We have seen that this contingency is insurmountable; it is the fact of my relations with the Other, just as my body is the fact of my being-in-the-world. Unity with the Other is therefore in fact unrealizable. It is also unrealizable in theory, for the assimilation of the for-itself and the Other in a single transcendence would necessarily involve the disappearance of the characteristic of otherness in the Other. Thus the condition on which I project the identification of myself with the Other is that I persist in denying that I am the Other. Finally this project of unification is the source of conflict since while I experience myself as an object for the Other and while I project assimilating him in and by means of this experience, the Other apprehends me as an object in the midst of the world and does not project identifying me with himself. It would therefore be necessary—since being-for-others includes a double internal negation—to act upon the internal negation by which the Other transcends my transcendence and makes me exist for the Other; that is, to act upon the Other’s freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 941 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Love fails because both parties cannot escape objectifying each other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 93; Love is constitutively unstable across three distinct dimensions — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 960; To love is always to want to be loved in return, generating indefinite regress. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 958 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The ideal of loving unity with the Other is structurally unrealizable and breeds conflict #corroborates (0.92) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 941