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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
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- 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
About the author
Simon May is visiting professor of philosophy at King's College London. His other books include Love: A History, Nietzsche's Ethics and his War on "Morality," The Power of Cute, Thinking Aloud, a collection of his own aphorisms (a Financial Times Book of the Year), and How To Be A Refugee: One Family's Story of Exile and Belonging. His work has been translated into ten languages.
Summary
Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards those we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a promise of home--in a world that we supremely value. He also proposes that the child is supplanting the romantic partner as the supreme object of love.
Additional text
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.
