Love : a history
Simon May (Author)
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. Brilliantly, May explores the very different philosophers and writers, both skeptics and believers, who dared to think differently: from Aristotle's perfect friendship and Ovid's celebration of sex and "the chase," to Rousseau's personal authenticity, Nietzsche's affirmation, Freud's concepts of loss and mourning, and boredom in Proust. Against our belief that love is an all-powerful solution to finding meaning, security, and happiness in life, May reveals with great clarity what love actually is: the intense desire for someone whom we believe can ground and affirm our very existence. The feeling that "makes the world go round" turns out to be a harbinger of home--and in that sense, of the sacred
History
1 online resource (xiv, 294 pages)
9780300177237, 0300177232
740447233
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