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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.
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.
