Can we love every single human being? Does this ideal make sense at all, including, in particular, during wartime? Answering emphatically in the positive to these questions, the aim of this article is to defend the plausibility and feasibility of universal love. It does so by relying on Kierkegaard’s analysis of the commandment to love one’s neighbor in his Works of Love (1847), and by using a conception of individuality inspired by Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self in The Sickness unto Death (1849). Assuming a specific conception of love – according to which, first, love is by definition between individuals and, second, amounts to a compassionate caring for the relevant individual that necessarily involves joy in their presence – the article tackles two problems, one conceptual and the other practical. Beginning with the latter, it demonstrates how love (as a joyful compassionate caring) can be provoked in response to any human being, so that love is, in practice, always possible. Then, turning to the conceptual problem, it shows that every human being can be encountered as an individual (as opposed to one among many), so that the conception of loving universally is coherent. Hence, love for any human being is possible in principle as well as in practice, and this is true even in the most challenging case when the neighbor is one’s enemy.

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