Kierkegaard distinguishes Christian love from natural human love which is represented by erotic love and friendship. According to him, erotic love and friendship as natural human love are rooted in mood and inclination; thus he regarded this love as “passionate preferences.” However, this is not true love because passionate preference is intrinsically another form of self-love. When one loves only one object passionately in forms of erotic love or friendship, the object of love is just “the other-self [and] the other-I” and self-love lies in the I and in the self. Therefore, self-love is “self ignite” meaning that “the I ignites itself by itself.” However, this does not mean that self-love must be eradicated; rather self-love provides an important insight what true love should be like; Jesus’ command of that you shall love your neighbor as yourself (self-love) supports this.
Kierkegaard thought that “[true love, that is,] Christian love depends upon the command [of loving one’s neighbor as yourself].” On Kierkegaard’s account, Christianity neither deny nor discard the natural human love that Kierkegaard distinguished as self-love; rather, Christianity needs the understanding of self-love in order to fulfill the command of neighbor-love. He says, “if its [command’s] as yourself comes as close to the life of self-love as is possible, then one’s neighbor is again a qualification as fatally close to self-love as possible.”
When it comes to the object of love, one’s neighbor, Kierkegaard asserts that “he [your neighbor] is just as near or ought to be just as near to you as you are to yourself … Neighbor is what philosophers would call the other, that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested. As far as thought is concerned the neighbor or other need not even exit.” Therefore, according to Kierkegaard, neighbor is not limited to those who dwell near us; all men can be our neighbor and “even one person is enough in order that you [we] may practice the law [the command of loving neighbor].” Therefore, neighbor cannot be defined objectively because it would refer to one particular object if it is defined who is our neighbor. In this sense, “Christian love teaches love of all men, unconditionally all.”
Teleological suspension arises from here. It is difficult for us to love those who seem unworthy to love like criminal, dictator, decimator, and so on. However, according to Kierkegaard, to love our neighbor is given to us as the duty and everyone is one’s neighbor. Thus, as in the case of Abraham who suspended the ethical to fulfill his duty to God, when we receive neighbor-love as our duty to God, it means we put our religious concerns over ethical demands proving our love in God. Finally, when we suspend the ethical to fulfill our duty of neighbor-love, “the selfishness of preferential love [is] rooted out and the equality of the eternal [, that is the fact that everyone is equal before God, is] preserved.”