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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
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
