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Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion
What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all?
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 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 the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."
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 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 the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
304 pages, Hardcover
Published May 2, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 6, 2023
Love is "the joy inspired by whomever or whatever we experience as rooting, or as promising to root, our life."
May has numerous goals in this book. He reviews the traditional accounts of love in Western culture and finds them to be incoherent or inadequate to our time. He also shows how the modern development of romantic love tried to turn that love into a secularized version of divine love in a way that is impossible for humans and could only lead to disappointment.
He then develops his own rich account of love, as this idea of someone who roots us in life. 21 short chapters develop this idea fully. He then demonstrates how he arises in foundational texts of the Western tradition--Genesis and the Odyssey.
He also describes how Western culture has shifted to the child being the supreme object of love (instead of beauty, God, or our romantic partner). He argues that this is the first truly modern love and that parental love as developing seems free of the expectations of divine love, and thus has the chance to truly transform human loving in good ways.
There is so much in this book that one could spend years pondering and exploring it all.
On personal note: I did not read it for self-help purposes, but I found that the book was deeply revelatory, helping me to better understand myself, my former marriage, how it ended, developments in my divorce, experiences and emotions I've grappled with the last few years, including resentment, and also how I was able to finally let go and begin moving in directions. These theories gave new perspectives and language to my experiences.
May has numerous goals in this book. He reviews the traditional accounts of love in Western culture and finds them to be incoherent or inadequate to our time. He also shows how the modern development of romantic love tried to turn that love into a secularized version of divine love in a way that is impossible for humans and could only lead to disappointment.
He then develops his own rich account of love, as this idea of someone who roots us in life. 21 short chapters develop this idea fully. He then demonstrates how he arises in foundational texts of the Western tradition--Genesis and the Odyssey.
He also describes how Western culture has shifted to the child being the supreme object of love (instead of beauty, God, or our romantic partner). He argues that this is the first truly modern love and that parental love as developing seems free of the expectations of divine love, and thus has the chance to truly transform human loving in good ways.
There is so much in this book that one could spend years pondering and exploring it all.
On personal note: I did not read it for self-help purposes, but I found that the book was deeply revelatory, helping me to better understand myself, my former marriage, how it ended, developments in my divorce, experiences and emotions I've grappled with the last few years, including resentment, and also how I was able to finally let go and begin moving in directions. These theories gave new perspectives and language to my experiences.
March 28, 2021
I started this book unsatisfied with the portrait of love prevalent in the contemporary pop-culture. For example, the unconditional love that fails to explain why we love some and not others. May's book rejects this understanding, as well as others advanced throughout the history, and offers an alternative understanding of love as a joy at the promise of ontological groundedness. I find it a useful metaphor to reflect on and aspire to in building a home - in all senses of that word.
Reviews describe the hereby presented view as "narrowly encultured" - a beautifully evil phrase which contains a grain of truth. It certainly is mired in the language of hardcore Christian theology, including Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, and Western culture's canon, such as Odyssey. Rather than by argumentation, claims are evaluated on the basis of how they fit with other claims, judged by aesthetic criteria of this "narrowly encultured" view. For example, while the view of love described as secularized and sanitized love of God is rejected, the vicious God of the Old Testament is presented as a role model of the loved one. In a similar fashion, the contemporary romantic love in our secular and disenchanted world is claimed to preserve the Christian dichotomies of body/soul, earthly/transcendent, or particular/universal.
Overall, I was surprised at the rather pessimistic outlook of the book, in which the lover has a somewhat passive role rather than actively building a relationship of love. While the lover has to provide only attentivenes, the loved one must offer the entire promise of ontological rootedness, including both ethical and aesthetic compatibility. There are no words about compromise or growing together.
What I liked the best is the last part about child as the new supreme object of love. It is perhaps the most controversial, but also the offers a fresh perspective without the theological verbiage, but with biting remarks on the status quo:
Reviews describe the hereby presented view as "narrowly encultured" - a beautifully evil phrase which contains a grain of truth. It certainly is mired in the language of hardcore Christian theology, including Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, and Western culture's canon, such as Odyssey. Rather than by argumentation, claims are evaluated on the basis of how they fit with other claims, judged by aesthetic criteria of this "narrowly encultured" view. For example, while the view of love described as secularized and sanitized love of God is rejected, the vicious God of the Old Testament is presented as a role model of the loved one. In a similar fashion, the contemporary romantic love in our secular and disenchanted world is claimed to preserve the Christian dichotomies of body/soul, earthly/transcendent, or particular/universal.
Overall, I was surprised at the rather pessimistic outlook of the book, in which the lover has a somewhat passive role rather than actively building a relationship of love. While the lover has to provide only attentivenes, the loved one must offer the entire promise of ontological rootedness, including both ethical and aesthetic compatibility. There are no words about compromise or growing together.
What I liked the best is the last part about child as the new supreme object of love. It is perhaps the most controversial, but also the offers a fresh perspective without the theological verbiage, but with biting remarks on the status quo:
In our time, romantic love is [...] expected to flower into well-managed and respectfully "negotiated" relationships of mutual devotion that succeed in reconciling spontaneity with predictability.
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July 24, 2019I won a copy of this book during a Goodreads giveaway. I am under no obligation to leave a review or rating and do so voluntarily. So that others may also enjoy this book, I am paying it forward by donating it to my local library.
March 7, 2020
Fascinating theory that has been oddly ignored. May suggests that what we mean by “love” is the belief that some other can offer us a sense of having a meaningful place in the world, can offer us the promise of complete satisfaction. He also suggests that of course this is a false promise, and so depends on us making an error and remaining deceived. Nevertheless, he sees being in this state of error as essential to the fulfillment of the human condition. We aren’t fully human unless we feel alienated in the world and suffer, and then falsely believe that some other (maybe God, a country, or more recently our children) can give us complete satisfaction. We are lucky, he tells us, to live in an era when we are all alienated and suffering, and so can feel love. At most other times, it seems, people were able to feel at home in the world, to have meaningful and active lives...and so were deprived of the great suffering that leads to a life of desirous delusion.
I think he’s largely right that this is what we mean when we say “love.” Also, he’s right that this rise in the importance of Romantic love as the source of all meaning arises in the late 18th and early 18th centuries. Of course, he doesn’t see this rise in alienation, which is what he sees as accounting for the rise in love, as having anything to do with capitalism—he sees is at resulting from the disenchantment of the world caused by the scientific revolution.
May does clearly point out that our ability to “love” in this way depends completely on our being thrown into a world we have no say at all in making. But he cannot imagine that being in a world we actually can take part in constructing would be preferable. We are much better of, he suggests, in a world that we can only struggle to adapt to. The alternative would be having to negotiate socially with groups of others for how to construct the world...and such sociality seems terrifying to him. Love offers us a chance to create our own narcissistic little private goals, and the illusion of social connection in an objectified other.
Overall, I agree with his explanation of love...but not his valuation of it. It also is not quite as original as he seems to think it is. I’ve been arguing this position for years, and I certainly didn’t come up with it myself—I mostly got if from Lacan. May seems unaware of others, like Lacan, who have argued this position before. The multiple origins of the theory itself seems to suggest there might be something to it.
However, I suspect this book is just too troubling to most people, and will largely remain ignored. Love, as May himself points out, is such a crucial illusion to us, so important to helping us maintain our state of ignorance, suffering, and oppression, that few people can bring themselves to question it at all. If we could all read this book and argue about it, it might go a long way to freeing us from the human bondage we suffer from. But then, there is nothing we hate more, in modern (i.e. capitalist) culture than a truth that will free us from suffering.
I think he’s largely right that this is what we mean when we say “love.” Also, he’s right that this rise in the importance of Romantic love as the source of all meaning arises in the late 18th and early 18th centuries. Of course, he doesn’t see this rise in alienation, which is what he sees as accounting for the rise in love, as having anything to do with capitalism—he sees is at resulting from the disenchantment of the world caused by the scientific revolution.
May does clearly point out that our ability to “love” in this way depends completely on our being thrown into a world we have no say at all in making. But he cannot imagine that being in a world we actually can take part in constructing would be preferable. We are much better of, he suggests, in a world that we can only struggle to adapt to. The alternative would be having to negotiate socially with groups of others for how to construct the world...and such sociality seems terrifying to him. Love offers us a chance to create our own narcissistic little private goals, and the illusion of social connection in an objectified other.
Overall, I agree with his explanation of love...but not his valuation of it. It also is not quite as original as he seems to think it is. I’ve been arguing this position for years, and I certainly didn’t come up with it myself—I mostly got if from Lacan. May seems unaware of others, like Lacan, who have argued this position before. The multiple origins of the theory itself seems to suggest there might be something to it.
However, I suspect this book is just too troubling to most people, and will largely remain ignored. Love, as May himself points out, is such a crucial illusion to us, so important to helping us maintain our state of ignorance, suffering, and oppression, that few people can bring themselves to question it at all. If we could all read this book and argue about it, it might go a long way to freeing us from the human bondage we suffer from. But then, there is nothing we hate more, in modern (i.e. capitalist) culture than a truth that will free us from suffering.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews