Love
A History
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
“What is love? May plunders Western poetry, philosophy and psychology to find answers . . . Thought-provoking stuff” (The Sunday Telegraph).
Love—unconditional, selfless, unchanging, sincere, and totally accepting—is worshipped today as the West’s only universal religion. To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos. In this path-breaking and superbly written book, philosopher Simon May does just that, dissecting our ideas of love and showing how they are the product of a long and powerful cultural heritage.
Tracing over twenty-five hundred years of human thought and history, May shows how our idea of love developed from its Hebraic and Greek origins alongside Christianity until, during the last two centuries, “God is love” became “love is God”—so hubristic, so escapist, so untruthful to the real nature of love, that it has booby-trapped relationships everywhere with deluded expectations. Brilliantly, May explores the very different philosophers and writers, both skeptics and believers, who dared to think differently: from Aristotle’s perfect friendship and Ovid’s celebration of sex and “the chase,” to Rousseau’s personal authenticity, Nietzsche’s affirmation, Freud’s concepts of loss and mourning, and boredom in Proust. Against our belief that love is an all-powerful solution to finding meaning, security, and happiness in life, May reveals with great clarity what love actually is—and what it means.
“The most persuasive account of love’s nature I have ever read.” —Financial Times
“Intellectually engaging . . . Provocative.” —The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Philosopher May (Atomic Sushi) reexamines the Western notion of love arguing against the illusions not to be confused with characteristics of love, namely unconditionality, eternity, and selflessness. May begins his argument by deconstructing the root of these ideas; starting with the Hebrew Bible, he reviews stories such as God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son, and concludes that e should model human love not on how God is said to love us but on how we are commanded to love God. Delving through the New Testament, May provides numerous examples of conditional love. With detailed excerpts and discussion, he explores a wide range of the philosophies about love, including those of Plato and Socrates; Spinoza, Schlegel, and Novalis; Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust and how the concept of human love changed over time. May finds that our expectations of love are out of line with reality that unconditional, eternal, and selfless love may be an ideal that is impossible or extremely rare. However, people continue to seek love because they need ontological rootedness, which brings a rapture that sets us off on and sustains the long search for a secure relationship between our being and theirs. May s argument is not groundbreaking but his discussion of the philosophies provides a coherent narrative that is aided by his illustrative writing.
