Love
A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
What is love's real intent? Why can love be so ruthlessly selective? How is it related to sex, beauty, and goodness? And is the child now the supreme object of love?
In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one.
After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful).
Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."
Readers will find Love "Excitingly new, yet immediately recognizable--that's the paradox at the very heart of love, and it is what Simon May has achieved." --Los Angeles Review of Books
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.
