Love : a history
"Love - unconditional, selfless, unchanging, sincere, and totally accepting - is worshipped today as the West's only universal religion. To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos. In this pathbreaking and superbly written book, philosopher Simon May does just that, dissecting our resilient ruling ideas of love and showing how they are the product of a long and powerful cultural heritage. Tracing over 2,500 years of human thought and history, May shows how our ideal of love developed from its Hebraic and Greek origins alongside Christianity until, during the last two centuries, "God is love" became "love is God"--So hubristic, so escapist, so untruthful to the real nature of love, that it has booby-trapped relationships everywhere with deluded expectations
Print Book, English, 2011
Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2011
xiv, 294 pages ; 22 cm
9780300187748, 9780300118308, 0300187742, 0300118309
1027900633
Love plays God
The foundation of Western love : Hebrew scripture
From physical desire to paradise : Plato
Love as perfect friendship : Aristotle
Love as sexual desire : Lucretius and Ovid
Love as the supreme virtue : Christianity
Why Christian love isn't unconditional
Women on top : love and the troubadours
How human nature became loveable : from the high Middle Ages to the Renaissance
Love as joyful understanding of the whole : Spinoza
Love as enlightened romanticism : Rousseau
Love as religion : Schlegel and Novalis
Love as the urge to procreate : Schopenhauer
Love as affirmation of life : Nietzsche
Love as a history of loss : Freud
Love as terror and tedium : Proust
Love reconsidered