Description
Book SynopsisWhat 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 i
Trade ReviewNearly every page offers up new insight and the book as a whole is a truly impressive achievement. It makes a serious contribution to analytic philosophy while at the same time being highly readable. * European Journal of Philosophy *
May's book represents a major contribution to our understanding of love. … The sense that May is striving single-handedly to dismantle some of society's most sacrosanct beliefs, together with the wonderful clarity of the writing, which is rigorous without ever feeling technical, and the strength of the original premise, make Love: A New Understanding compellingly readable. 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 *
Truly ambitious…an engaging and unique account of love. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
May's general account of love as seeking ontological rootedness is profound and convincing. … [His] book offers one of the most significant philosophical accounts of the nature of love, which shows how through love we can become at home in the world. * The Philosophical Quarterly *
May devotes a great deal of research to identify the meaning and the sense of love in the existence of human beings. In the last paragraph of the study he concludes modestly that discussing the issue is only auxiliary to experiencing it…in this lies May's book's greatest merit: to see it [love] as intrinsically human. * Robert Zaborowski, Metapsychology Online Reviews *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Part I: Dead Ends: Why We Need a New Understanding of Love 1. The neglected question: what is love's specific aim? 2. Back to the future: secularizing divine agape 3. The six major conceptions of love in Western history: a summary 4. Why we need a new conception of love Part II: Love: Towards a New Understanding 5. Love and the promise of rootedness 6. What is ontological rootedness? 7. God as paradigm of a loved one - but not of a lover 8. Love as recognition of lineage 9. Love as recognition of an ethical home 10. Love as recognition of power 11. Love and the call to existence 12. Relationship 13. Fear: the price of love 14. Destructiveness 15. Why love isn't the same as benevolence 16. What divine violence teaches us about love 17. Self-interest as a source of self-giving 18. Exile as love's inspiration 19. Why some epochs (and people) value love more than others 20. The languages of love 21. The primacy of loving over being loved 22. Attentiveness: love's supreme virtue 23. Love and death 24. "Overshooting" the loved one: love's impersonal dimension 25. Can we love ourselves? Part III: Narratives of Love As Rootedness 26. The Bible: love as a discovery of home 27. The Odyssey: love as a recovery of home Part IV: How Is Love Related to Beauty, Sex, and Goodness? 28. Why beauty is not the ground of love 29. How important is sex to love? 30. The real relation between love and beauty 31. Can we love the ugly? 32. Can we love evil? Part V: The Child as the New Supreme Object of Love 33. Why parental love is coming to trump romantic love 34. The conservatism of romantic love 35. Why isn't friendship the new archetypal love? 36. Conclusion: the child as the first truly modern archetypal object of love Notes Bibliography Index
