The Reasons of Love

by Harry G. Frankfurt

This beautifully written book by one of the world's leading moral philosophers argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love.Harry Frankfurt writes that it is through caring that we infuse the world with meaning. Caring provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it shapes the framework of aims and interests within which we lead our lives. The most basic and essential question for a person to raise about the conduct of his or her life is not what he or she should care about but what, in fact, he or she cannot help caring about.The most important form of caring, Frankfurt writes, is love, a nonvoluntary, disinterested concern for the flourishing of what is loved. Love is so important because meaningful practical reasoning must be grounded in ends that we do not seek only to attain other ends, and because it is in loving that we become bound to final ends desired for their own sakes.Frankfurt argues that the purest form of love is self-love. This sounds perverse, but self-love--as distinct from self-indulgence--is at heart a disinterested concern for whatever it is that the person loves. The most elementary form of self-love is nothing more than the desire of a person to love. Insofar as this is true, self-love is simply a commitment to finding meaning in our lives.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Love, Psychology, Poetry, Relationships, Marriage

112 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 30, 2004

About the author

Harry Gordon Frankfurt was an American philosopher. He was a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002. Frankfurt also taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University.
Frankfurt made significant contributions to fields like ethics and philosophy of mind. The attitude of caring played a central role in his philosophy. To care about something means to see it as important and reflects the person's character. According to Frankfurt, a person is someone who has second-order volitions or who cares about what desires he or she has. He contrasts persons with wantons. Wantons are beings that have desires but do not care about which of their desires is translated into action. In the field of ethics, Frankfurt gave various influential counterexamples, so-called Frankfurt cases, against the principle that moral responsibility depends on the ability to do otherwise. His most popular book is On Bullshit, which discusses the distinction between bullshitting and lying.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love And The Goals Of Life

This short, beautifully written book by Henry Frankfurt, (1929 --July 16, 2023) Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, is based upon lectures Frankfurt delivered in 2000 and 2001 titled "Some Thoughts about Norms, Love, and the Goals of Life." In his book, Frankfurt argues that love and the ability to love give meaning to a person's life and that the purest form of love is, ultimately self-love. By 'love', Professor Frankfurt does not mean romantic love. Rather, he characterizes love as 1. disinterested, 2.personal, 3. involving the self-identification of the lover with the beloved and 4. constraining one's action -- a person loves someone or something because he or she can't help doing so.

Frankfurt's book consists of three short chapters. The first chapter, "The Question: How shall we Live?" argues that caring and love, rather than moral behavior, gives meaning to a life and define a person's basic commitments and goals. Professor Frankfurt is not a rationalistic philosopher who extolls the power of reason to set goals. Rather, I think Frankfurt sees love as a matter of an existential commitment -- a person can't help loving what he or she loves. Love is not a question of thinking things through to conclude which subjects and persons merit one's care and concern.

The second chapter "On Love and its Reason" elaborates on the opening chapter and offers the four-fold definition of love I have summarized above. Frankfurt points out that the loves of a person define what that person is and give his or her life goals and meaning. What a person loves is prior to reasoning about one's choices, as evidenced, for Frankfurt, by one of the purest and most common forms of love, the love of a parent for his or her young children. In love, ends and means intersect, in that actions taken in furtherance of the interest of the beloved become themselves final goals rather than only instrumental goals.

In the final chapter, "The Dear Self", Frankfurt argues that the purest form of love is ultimately self-love, rejecting critiques of self-love by philosophers such as Kant. In this chapter, I think, Frankfurt basically equates self-love with self-knowledge. A person who loves himself, for Frankfurt, knows his own mind, knows what he wants and cherishes, and pursues it wholeheartedly without ambivalence. Most people don't know what they want and are plagued by competing goals which restrict severely their ability to love wholeheartedly. Frankfurt characterizes such behavior as showing an inability to fully love oneself. In addition to Kant, Frankfurt in this chapter makes insightful references to St Augustine, Kierkegaard, and especially Spinoza. Frankfurt distinguishes again between morality and love as establishing the contours of a meaningful human life. For Frankfurt, a person can love someone or something wholeheartedly and yet be immoral. In addition to the philosophers Frankfurt mentions, I think there are many parallels to existential thought, especially that of Heidegger, behind Frankfurt's lucid and restrained prose.

This book will appeal to thoughtful readers who want to reflect upon and try to understand their lives and what matters to them. It shows that philosophy remains a meaningful, life-giving endeavor rather than the sterile, academic exercise seen by philosophy's detractors.

Robin Friedman

[Mahshid Parchami · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب فوق العاده ای بود. شاید مدت ها توی ذهنم دنبال چنین کتاب و شیوه فلسفه و تفکری بودم. واقعا با تحلیل هاش از مسائل بنیادین آدمی مثل اخلاق، اراده، عشق، خود دوستی و ... به شوق اومدم. حتما به زودی دوباره میخونمش. نثر کتاب، فلسفی و یه مقدار سنگینه با این حال به دوستداران فلسفه پیشنهاد می کنم حتما بخونند

[Mohammad Zakerzadeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The topic looks paradoxical, how one can deal with love matter by pure philosophical reasoning?! And this makes the book very interesting to read: it talks about something very deep in our life with an approach I have not heard like it before.

Also, note that the concept of love in the book is not mere romantic love and Frankfurt asserts that he prefers to discuss other forms of love like parents/children due to intrinsic problems in talking about romantic one.

[Shaghayegh.l3 · Rating 3 out of 5]

متن خوب و پر محتوايى كه بين ترجمه اى كه بايستى روون تر ميبود و كمتر باعث حواس پرتى ميشد گير افتاده بود .

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book varied between hand-waving logical argument and insightful provocation to personal reflection. Despite my three-star review, it is worth reading. It's not a tremendous book, and to this reader it did not deliver on the promise of its title, but the book can still be a meaningful one if approached by the right attitude.

Ultimately, I think I was most disappointed that Frankfurt's arguments could not really displace an evolutionary biology perspective on the "reasons of" love in his context. He often compares the kind of focused devotion he's considering that is both beyond conscious choice and that guides and supplies life with meaning and purpose to a parental relationship with children. He makes this comparison over and over, so clearly it means something to him as evidence of the kind of love he means and how deep and intrinsic that kind of love can be. In comparing the love of parents for children, however, he seems to discount the evolutionary basis for that devotion, which can arguably provide a pretty good reason for why that should exist. At one point or another he mentions it in passing but gives the genetic motivation for parents to invest energy in offspring no real consideration as being capable of fully explaining the phenomenon. If one were really investigating the "reasons" for love, at least, I don't think it's fair to avoid considering evolutionary biology. Maybe he gets a pass by considering the reasons "of" love but I think he mostly just goes on to discuss what he wants to discuss. Alternatively, if one fully pursues that line of thinking, one might arrive at very different conclusions about the nature of love.

The book started to be more meaningful for me in the second half where the author describes a situation that I found all too relatable. In so articulating the problematic scenario, it convinced me to follow the remainder of the arguments more closely out of personal reflection. I quote the relevant passage from page 53 that made me pause in honest sadness.

"It is an interesting question why a life in which activity is locally purposeful but nonetheless fundamentally aimless--having an immediate goal but no final end--should be considered undesirable. What would necessarily be so terrible about a life that is empty of meaning in this sense? The answer is, I think, that without final ends we would find nothing truly important either as an end or as a means. The importance to us of everything would depend upon the importance to us of something else. We would not really care about anything unequivocally and without conditions.

"Insofar as this became clear to us, we would recognize our volitional tendencies and dispositions as pervasively inconclusive. It would then become impossible for us to involve ourselves conscientiously and responsibly in managing the course of our intentions and decisions. We would have no settled interest in designing or in sustaining any particular continuity in the configurations of our will. A major aspect of our reflective connection to ourselves, in which our distinctive character as human beings lies, would thus be severed. Our lives would be passive, fragmented, and thereby drastically impaired. Even if we might perhaps continue to maintain some meager vestige of active self-awareness, we would be dreadfully bored."

It shames me to admit but I have felt like this. The past few years, and in particular much of the repetitious sequestered survival of the past pandemic year have left me feeling hollowed out, going through the motions, alone, sometimes unloved, sometimes unlovable, sometimes unable to love, and with the permanent freeze of our future, ever more reminded that, as I continue to grow older, whatever future state I might once have aspired to may remain forever elusive and perhaps there is no articulated future state at all both desirable and achievable. Feeling empty.

And therefore I pursued the remainder of Frankfurt's book more closely to see if he writes a sound prescription to this lamentable state of affairs.

It's hard to say. After some rationalizing meanders about the nature of internal ambivalence, he ends the book on an almost conversational note about a pretty girl he met once telling him that on the whole you may not want people to be honest but just need to keep your sense of humor, as though the whole extent of his booklong arguments amount to nothing; as though the author and reader were just two guys chatting at the bar, anything goes, albeit deeply about matters of seeming import, like the nature of love, etc. (What else do guys talk about at the bar anyway?)

So I don't know, a tour de force this book is not, but also perhaps not useless. He synthesizes the work of other philosophers without a heavy-handed concern for weighty citation or analysis. He cherry picks for his topic, not, I sense, because he is lazy about ideas but because he is trying to wrap his mental arms around the topic and see what really makes sense based on what he's read and what he knows and what he can reason out. In that sense, the book was warm because it's like a couch conversation with a philosopher in casual mode but interested in digging through what things mean and what to do about them. I imagine this guy would be much less approachable in reality, but on the page he's okay. On the page it's like he's puffing on a pipe but you don't have to smell the smoke.

This has been a horrible, loosely written review, but I felt I needed to write about this book mostly because I felt it made me reflect about myself and want to change for the better so I don't die not having lived (or, on the order of Nancy Hedford's critique of Zefram Cochrane, loved). It also made me realize how I have already changed, not always for the better, although perhaps I have grown in the ability for self-reflection, if not self-awareness. I'm still lonely and still trying to recapture that personal sense of purpose--an Aristotelian efficient cause these days remains elusive.

[probably · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frankfurt has a peculiar way of expressing his arguments. The clarity of the book is compromised by the fact that he does not state explicitly what is assumed and what is derived. But overall it is a great book in that it offers insights on important moral questions. Chapter one is superb and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But by chapter three I think Frankfurt had in mind his other book: On Bullshit.

[Brandon Stariha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful little book on the role love has in practical reasoning, practical identity, self-love and love as the meaning-maker in our lives.

[Mastaneh Youshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتاب رو باید با دقت بیشتر بخونم! وسط سوپ و سیب زمینی خوردن نشستم خوندم! همین قدری که فهمیدم خیلی جالب به موضوع عشق نگاه کرده!!!البته نه عشق رمانتیک خدارو صد هزاربار شکر!

باید دوباره بخونم🧐

[Andrew Fox · Rating 1 out of 5]

The title should have been "My Reasons of Love." Also, Henry writes like a grumpy and lonely old academic, which is annoying when it isn't French.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Our goals are not important to us exclusively because we value the states of affairs that they envisage. It is not important to us only to attain our final ends. It is also important to us to have final ends. This is because without them, there is nothing important for us to do."

Frankfurt has a remarkably natural, easy writing style that doesn't subtract from the profundity of his arguments as much as one might suppose. A book being labelled as 'philosophy' as opposed to being considered 'self-help' affects its cultural capital, how it is perceived. I think this book can happily considered both - though perhaps because I liked Frankfurt's message, as one typically appreciates the message of a self-help book, I didn't approach it as critically as I would a work of philosophy.
(At the same time, I wonder if I should even mention that, because it seems every review of mine has some element of 'oh no my critical faculties' that my sense of self-doubt should be taken gratis in all forthcoming reviews.)

The book is short and the quote above gives good indication of what to expect, so I'll say no more about the book's content. Instead, I'll offer a bit of pedantry regarding Frankfurt's playing the pronoun game, so read on if that interests you.

Frankfurt uses the third-person 'he' in his arguments, and gives examples of his 'he' loving a woman. I'd go for something more broadly universal when making my argument, but hey, it's no big deal, right? Except that when Frankfurt speaks of his 'he' having a child, the child is spoken of as an 'it'. Considering Frankfurt's fluidity in writing, I assume his pronoun usage is completely intentional, but it's remarkably graceless. He says 'person' instead of 'man', even when through his writing it is clear he is arguing specifically from a traditionally masculine perspective. That aspect of his style seemed like some half-hearted, petty backlash against the singular 'they', which is pretty silly if that's at all the case. I'm not going to assume any more intent to his grammar than clumsiness, but it was so odd an element of his writing I felt it necessary to address it in some way.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was poorly written. The philosopher uses ideas that are not universally valid and makes statements that have been disproven by biology and psychology. His account for defining what love is and isn't and when it applies would have been a lot stronger if he had read more about attachment theory and affection in animal studies or even asked any academic at his university about it. I got the impression that the authour was irrational ignorant about love and attempted to philosophize about it without doing any investigation in meaningful and relevant literature about it. The consequence of the philosopher's lack of curiosity and motivation to be better informed before delving into questions about love made the foundation of the essence of love in his book incomplete. His inability to convince me in his initial statements about love effected how serious I took the rest of his attempt at insight into love. My skepticism made this book difficult to follow given the grounding points are false or poorly developed. Staying focused on his statements was like paying attention to someone who makes random statements about a field that they know nothing about. Then the secondary statements that follow each initial idea don't build off the the initial statement and lack logical flow; sadly this is a good thing because the secondary statements make good observations about the way that love functions in the mind. It's too bad that the authour neglected to develop his secondary statements about the mechanisms of love, that would have made for a more persuasive concept. Occasionally a secondary statement would be explained through a very badly thought out example that was relateable but inaccurate and that naively idealized social relations. The most common example of a naively idealized social relation that was used was about the parent-child relationship. From my point of view the examples that the authour used were equivalent to stating that because I own something, I love it. That is basically the driving point of this book. I expected a lot more.

[Riel · Rating 1 out of 5]

pointless and boring this 100 page book took me 2 months to get through lmaooo

[Angelica Moreno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creo que es mi segundo libro de filosofía. Lo leí por recomendación de un podcast llamado urbi et Orbi (recomendado).

Frankfurt nos lleva a analizar tres puntos. Cómo vivir, las razones del amor y el amor propio. Y, me quedé con lo siguiente:

Es importante vivir bajo los criterios ue hemos considerado importantes y que nos importan a nosotros. Por lo tanto, juzgar los criterios de los otros es innecesario e imposible porque no hay como definir cuáles criterios son buenos o malos y bajo cuál parámetro juzgar.

El amor es desinteresado e incluye amar lo que el amado ama y le importa. Por lo tanto, es importante que los dos amén o les importe las mismas cosas (en su mayoría)

El amor propio es sumamente importante y es uno de los amores más puros.

Si no leen tanta filosofía, como yo. Les recomiendo escuchar el podcast y en específico el capítulo sobre el amor.

[Maria Isabel Giraldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Filosofía digerible y fácil como no había leído en mucho tiempo. Frankfurt se enfrenta a la pregunta del amor a otros, a las cosas y a nosotros mismos. A la vida. En sus tres capítulos, te conduce con una prosa suave, pedagógica y agradable por esta cuestión. Me iluminó sobre mi forma de amar y me reconcilió con el hecho de que amar es también un acto de amor propio y es lo que le da sentido a la vida.

Me caló la idea de la coherencia entre lo que se ama y lo que se desea, es decir, querer amar lo que se ama, algo así como la unicidad e integridad de la voluntad (como le llama él "wholeheartedness"). Esta pureza o entreza de corazón nos permite amarnos a nosotros mismos - amor al que Frankfurt da un lugar central - y así ser realmente capaces de amar a otros.

[Corey Woodfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very approachable and clear. Good analysis of love and its essential components

[Christiane Attig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hätte ehrlicherweise „Gründe für Fürsorge“ heißen sollen. Hätte sich aber vermutlich schlechter verkauft.

[Tiago F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love

I loved Frankfurt's book 'Bullshit', so when I saw that he had another short book I was really excited to get it, especially given its topic which is something I wanted to read more about.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first feels rather odd, and I wasn't sure what he was trying to get at. It discusses the topic of how we should live, and more specifically how we should think about people's goals. I wasn't making the connection with love, and it takes the second part to make this explicit.

He also had an interesting take on morality and its normative aspect which dazzled me a little bit. As I first read it I couldn't help but almost be angry about it. How can morality not only be normative but almost by definition by the highest value? Not that the author changed my mind but his view was very novel to me and I really enjoyed reading his perspective. It wasn't simply a cheesy existentialist take that there no "true" morality and going towards nihilistic or scepticism, but rather trying to balance out various values.

The second part of the book is his main argument. He describes what love his, and why it is important. It gives meaning to our lives. This may sound superficial, but it is not. He goes over several examples of why exactly makes love special, and this makes a lot more sense after the first part. A large part of his argument is that by loving someone you care about what they care about, and it's the only thing that gets you 'outside' yourself. It creates a final end, a goal that isn't just for the sake of other goals, but intrinsic to it.

The last part took me by surprise, he argues that self-love is the purest love there is. To me, this is certainly very counter-intuitive, and I almost have a repulsion to it based on how this type of thinking has seemed to infiltrate modern culture and create a pandemic of egoism, narcissism and lack of drive towards moral self-improvement.

But he was quite aware of how his idea would be perceived, and he tried to explain what exactly he meant. My view is in the same camp as Kant, in the sense that we shouldn't love ourselves, and self-love is an egoistic state of mind that is an antagonist to a moral life which should be loving and caring for others. But he goes over why exactly Kant's view (and mine) is misguided. It requires what the author has built on the previous 2 chapters and that the characteristics of love are disinterested, personal, identifying with the beloved, and constraining. And all of these are present or even in the highest form in self-love.

I find his writing very clear and enjoyable to read. I had high standards from his other book, and this one did not disappoint. However, one ought to be cautious about approaching the book, it isn't as easy to read as one might assume. It may not look like it, but it is solid philosophy. It's not the type of book that seems impossible to go through or you can't understand what the author is on about, but it truly takes very careful reading to appreciate the arguments he makes.

I took a fair bit of notes. The only other book I remember taking this many was Behave Sapolsky. , in which I took over 60 notes (I try hard to keep it to a minimum). Yet, Behave was over 800 pages. For this book, I took 23 notes, but the book is only 100 pages long!

It's truly worth reading if you want to explore the topic of love, especially if you want a more careful analysis of which philosophy is very adapt to offer.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

i thought this was a lucid explanation of how we should logically approach the question of how to live our lives. not only by looking at what we want or desire, but at a deeper level what we care about, have interest in, what is important to us, and finally, what we love. i like how frankfurt shows that self-love, despite its reputation, can be one of the purest forms of love there is (if one defines love as frankfurt does). i thought it terse how frankfurt pointed out that when confronted with a decision regarding two seemingly incompatible desires, we can make a decision and decide which side of the fence we are on by taking an active role to achieve one's interests and what one cares about in the face of desires that are in direct opposition to those interests. these interests we side with are conducive to our agency, and thus a very important part of the kind of person we take ourself to be.

i don't agree with a few more fundamental stances frankfurt seems to take in this account of love. being big on choice and freedom, or the appearance of it, a few questions arise. when someone can't muster the will to do 'x', for example, is this because he can't or simply because he chooses not to or chooses not to want to? does this individual simply not see the value in doing 'x' herself, and thus doesn't choose to muster the will to do 'x'? i think the value implicit in much of the love frankfurt talks about is created and projected by individuals, as agents, and this would result in different foundations within the topic, but the end result would be comparable.

overall a great book.

[Kyle Walton · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book set out to explain love with a surprising lack of passion. I read this once some years ago and, back then, I appreciated it more. Perhaps cynicism has settled in the interim, but I now find the book to be a bit of drudgery. Part One has interesting points and there's some good stuff going on in Part Two. But in Part Three I find Frankfurt's argument tenuous. There he argues that self-love amounts to wholeheartedness. One who goes forth in confidence and lacks self-doubt is the exemplar of self-love. Yet Frankfurt doesn't convince me that the two are one in the same, nor does he disuade me that one who has self-doubts may still be wholehearted. I think this ultimately stems from an early proposition that love is "a configuration of will" which I find to be muddled and not quite correct. It seems to me that love may be something more of an innate sense of subjective valuation. Indeed, it strikes me quite odd how Frankfurt can argue that love is a configuration of will while simulataneously confirming that we cannot control who or what we do and do not love.

Perhaps I misunderstand his arguments. Maybe if I come back again in a few years I can approach it with fresh eyes and see something new.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

-I didn't think he defined his terms clearly or narrowly enough.
-It seemed to contain contradictions.
-Not enough examples by far.
-It seemed he had several assumptions that I would have disagreed with if he had presented them clearly enough to consider.
-I give it two stars only because it generates questions and causes the reader to wrestle with the material. Really, though, struggling to understand the author on top of struggling to understand the topic at hand is quite irritating. I felt that if the author had really understood the material that he could have presented it much better. As it stood, I had a hard time understanding this book (I'm not going to regurgitate everything I did manage to take away from it or that I decided on my own in this review), but I couldn't decide if the problem was my misunderstanding or the author's! Still, I will probably reread this in the future to see if I can understand it any more clearly.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd recently read Frankfurt's On Truth and On Bullshit, and somehow stumbled across this book soon afterwards. Not everyone will agree with Frankfurt's definition of love, but he makes a very interesting case, and from that, suggests that life is best lived in accordance with those things one loves. This may seem simple, but some of the added complications include that we are not always well-informed of our own inner workings (we may mistakenly think we love something, or may alternately be unaware of something we do love), or the things we love may be in conflict with each other, somehow. It was a new look at love for me, and I will probably return to this book again after some more thought on the matter. It is in no way a "self help" book, but I feel as though thinking on it may do just that, anyway.

[m · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having closely reread this book a third time, I can say with some authority that I've wasted hours of my life, that I've gone on an intellectual sojourn with a text that didn't appeal to me, that wasn't even my type.

This is not a text for those interested in Hamlet's vacillations or for persons who can related to Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Fans of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Proust, Freud or philosopher Donald Davidson will feel themselves on a different planet in this text.

Fans of Bertrand Russell, the young Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, and/or the Heidegger of the elemental, pretechnological human condition will feel right at home with this book.

Two-and-a-half stars.

[Sabrina de Leon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many discrepancies and logical leaps based on flimsy premises. The topic is exceptional, but the way it is addressed is very reductive.
The author exposes his view on the necessary qualities of love, but does not explain how he got to those four particular characteristics. They seem arbitrary or superficial.
The kind of love the author champions is an "easy" kind of love in which we have no saying in the matter. To me, as well as to Fromm and Bauman, love is an "art" you get better at when you consciously practice it. We do have a saying in how much and how well we love, a matter Frankfurt fails to address.
Yet, the author does have some brilliant insights, especially in the logic/reason versus love debate.

[Will Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frankfurt’s “The Reasons of Love” examines the necessity of love, (not simply in the romantic, but in the general unconcerned care of things), to providing meaning and purpose to our lives. This argument of love within philosophy is presented in refreshingly clear and human terms for an academic work. To this point, the initial ideas and components that lay the framework for Frankfurt’s position manage to avoid the usual confusion that comes with expressing a new conceptual approach and vocabulary. Overall this book was a surprising gem to find within the context of usual philosophy course readings, and is well worth the time if you are interested in a relevant and refreshingly meaningful approach to moral philosophy.

[Clarke Bolt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The life of a person who loves himself is enviable on account of its wholeheartedness, but it may not be at all admirable. The function of love is not to make people good. Its function is just to make their lives meaningful, and thus to help make their lives good for them to live.”

“If it is finally and definitely clear to you that you will always suffer from inhibitions and self-doubt, and that you will never succeed in being fully satisfied with what you are — if true self-love is, for you, really out of the question — at least be sure to hang on to your sense of humor.”

[Fabian Garza · Rating 3 out of 5]

While a good book overall by a celebrated philosopher, it seems to me to be unnecessarily verbose in its explanation of the core tenets that Dr. Frankfurt are trying to argue. While being a little over 100 pages, I feel this could have been succinctly written in 50-75 pages. This is not to detract from the ideas purported in the book itself, they are incredibly interesting in themselves, and inspire thought. I in fact read this for my Philosophy of Love and Sex course at college. My problem is with the writing style and unnecessary length.

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frankly, Frankfurt (author of "On Bullshit") is confused. More accurately, Frankfurt, the specialist of Bullshit, employed bullshit to sell another overpriced piece of forgettable crap. I gave him two stars because he does makes a couple of great observations if you dig through all the bullshit.

[Greg Heaton · Rating 2 out of 5]

The whole argument falls apart the more he tries to explain it. At one point he says, "it seems like koan" and then tries to explain how it's not, but, it seemed to me, actually just reinforced the criticism.

[Pierre H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gedanklich grandios.

[Suha · Rating 2 out of 5]

A failed philosophical attempt.