“We don’t love because the ones we love are so impressive or so charming or so beautiful or good,” he said. “There isn’t really any fully formed person there for you prior to the unfolding of your relationship with them…You enact them in the work of coming to know them. Love is the commitment to this work.”

To illuminate his claims, Noë turned to the theory of art. The aim of aesthetics, he observed, is not to “judge works of art with respect to whether they are, for example, beautiful or original.” Instead, aesthetic engagement is “the work of achieving the [art] object and oneself. It’s the work of making a relationship with it.”