Self-love

Views

The Hindu arishadvargas (major sins) are short-term self-benefiting pursuits that are ultimately damaging. These include mada (pride). Jainism believes that the four kashaya (passions) stop people escaping the cycle of life and death.

Gautama Buddha (c. 563-483 BC) and Buddhism believe that the desires of the self are the root of all evil. However, this is balanced with karuṇā (compassion).

Confucius (551–479 BC) and Confucianism values society over the self.

Yang Zhu (440–360 BC) and Yangism viewed wei wo, or "everything for myself", as the only virtue necessary for self-cultivation. All of what is known of Yangism comes from its contemporary critics - Yang's beliefs were hotly contested.

The thoughts of Aristotle (384–322 BC) about self-love (philautia) are recorded in the Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics. Nicomachean Ethics Book 9, Chapter 8 focuses on it particularly. In this passage, Aristotle argues that people who love themselves to achieve unwarranted personal gain are bad, but those who love themselves to achieve virtuous principles are the best sort of good. He says the former kind of self-love is much more common than the latter.

Cicero (106–43 BC) considered those who were sui amantes sine rivali (lovers of themselves without rivals) were doomed to end in failure.

Jesus (c. 4 BC-30 AD) prioritised the loving of God, and commanded his followers to love others selflessly, following his example. At the same time, in Mark 12:31 and Matthew 22:39, he taught one to love neighbor as self, implying a love of self. Early follower of Jesus, Paul the Apostle (c. 5–64/65 AD) wrote that inordinate self-love was opposed to love of God in his letter to the Phillipian church. The author of the New Testament letter of James had the same belief.

Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) believed excessive self-love (hyperēphania – pride) was one of eight key sins. His list of sins was later lightly adapted by Pope Gregory I as the "seven deadly sins". This list of sins then became an important part of the doctrine of the western church. Under this system, pride is the original and most deadly of the sins. This position was expressed strongly in fiction by Dante's The Divine Comedy.

Augustine (354–430) – with his theology of evil as a mere distortion of the good – considered that the sin of pride was only a perversion of a normal, more modest degree of self-love.

The Sikhs believe that the Five Thieves are the core human weaknesses that steal the innately good common sense from people. These selfish desires cause great problems.

In 1612 Francis Bacon condemned extreme self-lovers, who would burn down their own home, only to roast themselves an egg.

In the 1660s Baruch Spinoza wrote in his book Ethics that self-preservation was the highest virtue.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) believed there were two kinds of self-love. One was "amour de soi" (French for "love of self") which is the drive for self-preservation. Rousseau considered this drive to be the root of all human drives. The other was "amour-propre" (often also translated as "self-love", but which also means "pride"), which refers to the self-esteem generated from being appreciated by other people.

The concept of "ethical egoism" was introduced by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in his book The Methods of Ethics, written in 1874. Sidgwick compared egoism to the philosophy of utilitarianism, writing that whereas utilitarianism sought to maximize overall pleasure, egoism focused only on maximizing individual pleasure.

In 1890, psychologist William James examined the concept of self esteem in his influential textbook Principles of Psychology. Robert H. Wozniak later wrote that William James's theory of self-love in this book was measured in "... three different but interrelated aspects of self: the material self (all those aspects of material existence in which we feel a strong sense of ownership, our bodies, our families, our possessions), the social self (our felt social relations), and the spiritual self (our feelings of our own subjectivity)".

In 1956 psychologist and social philosopher Erich Fromm proposed that loving oneself is different from being arrogant, conceited or egocentric, meaning that instead caring about oneself and taking responsibility for oneself. Fromm proposed a re-evaluation of self-love in more positive sense, arguing that in order to be able to truly love another person, a person first needs to love oneself in the way of respecting oneself and knowing oneself (e.g. being realistic and honest about one's strengths and weaknesses).

In the 1960s, Erik H. Erikson similarly wrote of a post-narcissistic appreciation of the value of the ego, while Carl Rogers saw one result of successful therapy as the regaining of a quiet sense of pleasure in being one's own self.

Self-love or self-worth was defined in 2003 by Aiden Gregg and Constantine Sedikides as "referring to a person's subjective appraisal of himself or herself as intrinsically positive or negative".