6 ideas
We do not love things because we have appraised them as valuable; rather, the act of loving is what makes something valuable to the lover. The worth of the beloved derives from the love itself, not from antecedent properties that justify it.
Love is defined not by passion or desire but by a selfless investment in the flourishing of the beloved as an end in itself. The lover wants good things for the beloved for the beloved's own sake, not for any benefit the lover gains.
We cannot decide to love or stop loving by an act of choice; what we love is fixed by our nature, not selected through deliberation. This involuntariness is precisely what gives love its grip on us and makes it a source of necessity rather than option.
Loving something supplies the final ends that all instrumental reasoning serves, ending the infinite regress of 'why pursue this?' Without things we love for their own sake, we would have no reason to do anything at all, because every justification ultimately bottoms out in something we simply care about.
Being unable to act against what we love is not a limitation but a form of freedom, because our will is unified rather than divided. The constraints love imposes are constraints we wholeheartedly endorse, so we are most free when we cannot bring ourselves to betray what we care about.
Properly understood, self-love is loving oneself's caring about other things — it is wholehearted commitment to whatever one already loves, free of internal conflict. Far from selfishness, it is the structural integrity of a will that does not work against itself, and it presupposes loving things beyond oneself.