Works of Love

The central argument is that Christian love is a duty commanded by God, and that this command transforms love from a spontaneous feeling into a deliberate action that can endure regardless of the beloved's response. Kierkegaard rejects the Romantic assumption that love is primarily a matter of inclination, passion, or preference. Erotic love and friendship, he argues, are forms of self-love in disguise: they love the beloved or friend because of what that person offers to the lover, and they are therefore dependent on the other's qualities and reciprocity . Neighborly love, by contrast, loves the other because God is the middle term, and it is this structure that makes it capable of loving the unlovely and the enemy .

Preferential love—erotic love and friendship—is directed toward a specific person because of their particular qualities, and it is therefore exclusive and dependent on the beloved's continued attractiveness or reciprocity. Kierkegaard treats this as a refined form of self-love: the lover loves the beloved as an extension of himself . Neighborly love is universal and commanded, directed toward every person simply because they are a human being equal before God. Kierkegaard's argument for the superiority of neighborly love is not that preferential love is evil, but that it cannot provide what it promises: permanence, freedom, and protection from despair. Only a love grounded in God's eternal command can endure when the beloved changes or dies .

Kierkegaard distinguished between discourses, which are exploratory and poetic, and deliberations, which are more directly exhortatory and addressed to the reader as a moral agent. Works of Love is subtitled 'Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses,' and the tension between the two genres is deliberate. The book is meant to be read aloud and to work on the reader slowly, not to argue a thesis but to enact a transformation. Kierkegaard's Socratic awareness of the reader—as both the center of awakened understanding and the initiator of action—is central to the book's method . The deliberation does not merely inform; it places the reader under the command it describes.

The most persistent criticism is that Kierkegaard's suspicion of preferential love is excessive, even pathological, and that it valorizes self-denial for its own sake. Critics have charged that the book comes 'dangerously close to valorising self-denial purely for its own sake,' a view that 'might not unreasonably be charged with spiritual masochism' . Defenders respond that Kierkegaard does not reject erotic love and friendship outright; he insists that they must be transformed by the love of neighbor, so that the beloved is loved not merely as an object of preference but as a neighbor. M. Jamie Ferreira's commentary argues that the book's rigor is balanced by a concern for the concrete needs of the other, not merely an abstract duty .

The first English translation was by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, published by Princeton University Press in 1946 . A later translation by Howard and Edna Hong was published by Harper in 1962 , and the Hongs produced a revised edition for Princeton University Press in 1995 as volume 16 of Kierkegaard's Writings . The Hongs' 1995 edition is the standard scholarly version, with extensive notes and a historical introduction. The Swenson translation remains historically significant and readable, but it predates the critical apparatus that the Hong edition provides. Readers should be aware that the book's key terms—'neighbor,' 'duty,' 'preferential love'—are technical and their translation shapes the argument's force.

Works of Love is the midpoint of Kierkegaard's authorship and the monumental high point of his analysis of love, which had been a theme since Either/Or . It extends the ethical and religious concerns of the earlier pseudonymous works but does so under Kierkegaard's own name, without the distancing device of a pseudonym. Its argument that love is a duty grounded in God anticipates the more explicitly theological analysis of The Sickness Unto Death, where despair is diagnosed as a failure to rest in the power that established the self. The book also revises the apparent celebration of marriage in Either/Or: Judge William's defense of married love is now seen as a form of preferential love that must be transformed by the command to love the neighbor.