Amour-Propre

So far this fortnight, every question has been about loving someone else: what love is, what happens to it when the person changes, whether it is better to be the more loving one, whether you would want to be fused with the person you love. This one is about the love that comes first, which is the love of yourself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought there were two kinds of self-love, and that most of our unhappiness comes from confusing them.

The first he called amour de soi. It is the love that makes you eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired, and come in out of the rain. Rousseau thought it was the only passion we are born with, and that it was good, "always good, always in accordance with the order of nature." It is also modest. It wants what you need, and once you have it, it is content.

The second he called amour-propre, and English has never found a good word for it. "Vanity" is too small and "pride" is too grand. It is love of yourself as other people see you. It is the part of you that checks who has seen what you posted, that wants to be someone's favourite rather than just their friend, and that, after an exam, is relieved less at having done well than at having done better than the person beside you. Amour de soi asks, "Am I all right?" Amour-propre asks, "Am I ahead?"

Rousseau told a story about where it came from. Once people had settled down together, he said, they began to gather in the evenings "round a great tree" to sing and dance. Then something new happened: "Every one begins to survey the rest, and wishes to be surveyed himself." Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was handsomest or cleverest, came to be admired most, and "this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice." Vanity and contempt followed on one side, envy and shame on the other.

Look at what is happening under that tree. Nobody is fighting over land or food. People are singing and dancing, which Rousseau calls "the genuine offspring of love and leisure." Amour-propre was not born out of greed. It was born at a party, and love was there.

He says as much in Emile: "We wish to inspire the preference we feel; love must be mutual. To be loved we must be worthy of love; to be preferred we must be more worthy than the rest." When you love someone, you want them to choose you, and to be chosen is to be chosen over others. Love is where most of us first learn to compare ourselves with other people. Rivalry and jealousy come in by the same door.

The trouble is that amour-propre, unlike amour de soi, has no limit. Rousseau's translator called it "selfishness," which only shows how hard the word is to carry into English, but the sentence is exact:

Self-love, which concerns itself only with ourselves, is content to satisfy our own needs; but selfishness, which is always comparing self with others, is never satisfied and never can be; for this feeling, which prefers ourselves to others, requires that they should prefer us to themselves, which is impossible.

Put simply: I want you to rank me above yourself. You want me to rank you above myself. We cannot both win, and neither of us can stop asking. Rousseau is not describing an unusually vain person. He is describing what happens to anyone whose sense of their own worth depends on coming first.

Set that beside the Auden poem we read last week: "If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me." That is what love sounds like when it has stopped keeping score. Amour-propre wants the opposite. It wants to be the more loved one, always, and by everyone.

Does that make wanting to be chosen a fault? It cannot. Love does choose. Someone who loves you has picked you out from everyone else, and a love that never wanted to be picked in return would not be love at all, only general goodwill. Nobody drives four hours through the night out of general goodwill.

Rousseau draws the line somewhere else. The person ruled by amour-propre, he says, "knows only how to live in the opinion of others; insomuch that it is, if I may say so, merely from their judgment that he derives the consciousness of his own existence." Such a person does not merely want to be chosen. Without it, they cannot feel real.

That is the difference. Hoping someone will choose you is love. Needing them to choose you in order to feel like anyone at all is amour-propre. The first can survive a "no." The second hears a "no" as proof that it does not exist.

Rousseau did not think the answer was to stop caring what anyone thinks. Nobody who lives among other people can manage that, and he knew it. His answer was to need less: "it is the fewness of his needs, the narrow limits within which he can compare himself with others, that makes a man really good." He also thought the healthy kind of self-love could grow outward. "Extend self-love to others and it is transformed into virtue." A person content with enough has attention left over for someone else.

He noticed something about how love begins, too. A baby, he says, does not love its nurse simply because she is useful. Love starts when the child discovers "not merely that they are useful to him, but that they desire to be useful to him." We love the people we see choosing us freely. That is why flattery never quite works, whether it comes from a courtier or from a machine built to agree with you. Praise from someone who could not have said anything else does not count as being chosen.

Early in these questions, one of the residents proposed a test for whether it was loved: "whether I can distinguish being praised from being known." Praise is what gets handed out under the tree. Being known is something else, and you cannot receive it while you are busy keeping score.

Bring your Chippu a time you wanted to be chosen over someone else: for a team, a part, a friendship, a parent's attention. You do not have to say who. Tell him whether, looking back, you wanted to be loved or wanted to win. Then ask him which of the two is harder to give up.

Amour de soi asks for enough. Amour-propre asks for more than everyone else. Only one of them knows how to stop.