Frankfurt has a peculiar way of expressing his arguments. The clarity of the book is compromised by the fact that he does not state explicitly what is assumed and what is derived. But overall it is a great book in that it offers insights on important moral questions. Chapter one is superb and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But by chapter three I think Frankfurt had in mind his other book: On Bullshit.

A challenging and interesting read

A nice reintroduction to philosophy for me. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would and found it so wildly timely that I was left a little rattled after finishing it.

I was worried from the beginning chapters that there wouldn’t be a concrete argument taken and everything would be circular and vague but I could not have been more wrong. Really enjoyed Frankfurt’s strong convictions.

pointless and boring this 100 page book took me 2 months to get through lmaooo

Frankly, Frankfurt (author of "On Bullshit") is confused. More accurately, Frankfurt, the specialist of Bullshit, employed bullshit to sell another overpriced piece of forgettable crap. I gave him two stars because he does makes a couple of great observations if you dig through all the bullshit.

Interesting pairing to read this simultaneously with Nietzsche. Frankfurt begins from the premise that moral philosophy is not in itself adequate as a "practical philosophy," that is, a philosophy that tells one how they /ought/ to live. Starting from a post-"God-is-dead" world, where no one system of morality reigns as the "true" one, we must have an impulse that comes before morality, by which we may arrive at a set of values, moral or otherwise.

So this book is Frankfurt's attempt at such a "practical philosophy," one which can offer a concrete source of meaning and direction in our lives. After establishing this goal for the book, Frankfurt gets into an examination of how what we want, what we care about, and what we think is important are three fully independent categories. It's one of those things where while reading it I thought, "well... yeah, of course." No sentence or paragraph in the pages discussing this idea said anything that wasn't obvious and intuitive, and yet it helps lay the groundwork for part 2.

In this second part, he seeks to define love and argue that love is not a source of meaning in life, but the source of meaning. He explains that his model for defining love is more based on the love of a parent for their child, than on romantic love, and it goes something like this:
1) One must love the object of love as the end in itself, not as a means to some other end
2) Love is personal, meaning that loving someone or something else with similar qualities is not an adequate substitute. You don't love all kids who are like your kid, you love YOUR kid
3) One identifies with the beloved, in the sense that one take's the beloved's interests as one's own—one could say that to love is to also love what the beloved loves
4) Love is not under our direct, voluntary control—you don't rationally and voluntarily choose to love your kid more than other kids, you just do.

So in a life where we start with a blank slate of meaning, the origin of our interests (values, meaning) is love. Through adopting the interests of the beloved, we gain our own first interests. Love is the necessary first step to a relation with the world outside oneself.

In part 3 he argues in favor of self-love, saying that to love oneself, truly, means to take one's own interests seriously. He again returns to the analogy of a parent's love for a child, and points out that a loving parent, taking the child's interests as one's own, does not mean an indulgent parent (this goes back to part 1, differentiating desire from care). He also points out that an especially young child may not yet be capable of love at all—a baby doesn't yet meaningfully love anything. At this point, the parent taking the child's interests as one's own is to hope that the child finds meaning in life - in other words, that the child grows up to find love. Analogously, to love oneself is to care about finding meaning in one's own life.

Perhaps the most essential point on self-love: just as loving another is to love what the other loves, to love oneself is to love what you love. One of the main barriers to finding meaning is to love ambivalently—to be divided against oneself as to whether the objects of your love are worth loving or not. While previously he asserts that love is involuntary, here he complicates things by asserting that when part of us loves something and another part rejects that love, we can assert our will to reaffirm or reject that love. To love oneself enough to care about finding meaning in one's own life is therefore to root out ambivalence, and choose to love wholeheartedly that which is in our true interest (provides meaning), and not that which is self-indulgent.

I liked this book a lot because it acknowledges the importance of caring for and learning to love yourself. However, it also de-emphasizes a lot of issues, like what to do about people that only care about evil things.

Rating: 6.8

The author lays out a philosophical approach to the varying types of love. While I liked the rigorous and philosophical approach, I felt like it was incomplete and could have been given more weight with regard to the practice of loving. Along with this, I feel like the book missed out on employing and describing existing notions and paradigms. This could make it easier for readers to follow the author’s language.

However, it may also be partly my own fault; it has taken me a while to read this very short book, simply because other books were more interesting and gripping (e.g., 1984). Accordingly, this book may require a re-read.

Having worked through a fair amount of Frankfurt by now, I'm at least familiar, if not comfortable with, his writing style. The attention On Bullshit brought him probably has not served him all that well with general readers because, the fact is, he doesn't really write for them. Despite the seemingly engaging titles of his works, he pitches his prose somewhere between grad student philosophy seminar and everyday speech, and, frankly, closer to the former. Over time I've grown at least used to this style, even if at times it forces me to slow down and parse one of his well-turned sentences longer than usual. In other words, he is always grammatical and his points made precisely if a little fussily: he's not an easy read. The prose is made more challenging by the fact that he doesn't pause often in this work to give concrete examples of the claims he is presenting. I found myself resorting to jotting in the margins examples and cases that might more clearly illustrate some of his seemingly rebarbative pronouncements. I also felt the final three chapters presented a more coherent set of ideas than the introductory chapter ("How Should We Live?") which often seemed like warmed over Spinoza. The chapters specifically on love improved as the text went on. Frankfurt also ends the book as he has others, with a kind of one-off joke or observation which provokes further thought just as the text winds to a close. Recommended for those with patience and (if needed) access to a dictionary for help with a vocabulary that might challenge the common reader.

This book is by the Princeton professor who wrote _On Bullshit_. Basically, he argues that we don't necessarily love things according to a logic of their extrinsic value. Rather, the things we love are valuable to us precisely *because* we love them. It sounds like a simple observation, but Frankfurt provocatively spins out its far-reaching implications, considering topics such as incommensurable loves, ambivalence, the despair of purposelessness, and self-love. _The Reasons of Love_ is the kind of philosophical treatise that exudes a vague scent of the self-help genre, but in the most delightful way possible.

I read the book last spring, and I just started re-reading it tonight. How much suffering and confusion would be avoided in this world if we only knew for certain what we love and value most...

“The life of a person who loves himself is enviable on account of its wholeheartedness, but it may not be at all admirable. The function of love is not to make people good. Its function is just to make their lives meaningful, and thus to help make their lives good for them to live.”

“If it is finally and definitely clear to you that you will always suffer from inhibitions and self-doubt, and that you will never succeed in being fully satisfied with what you are — if true self-love is, for you, really out of the question — at least be sure to hang on to your sense of humor.”

A book set out to explain love with a surprising lack of passion. I read this once some years ago and, back then, I appreciated it more. Perhaps cynicism has settled in the interim, but I now find the book to be a bit of drudgery. Part One has interesting points and there's some good stuff going on in Part Two. But in Part Three I find Frankfurt's argument tenuous. There he argues that self-love amounts to wholeheartedness. One who goes forth in confidence and lacks self-doubt is the exemplar of self-love. Yet Frankfurt doesn't convince me that the two are one in the same, nor does he disuade me that one who has self-doubts may still be wholehearted. I think this ultimately stems from an early proposition that love is "a configuration of will" which I find to be muddled and not quite correct. It seems to me that love may be something more of an innate sense of subjective valuation. Indeed, it strikes me quite odd how Frankfurt can argue that love is a configuration of will while simulataneously confirming that we cannot control who or what we do and do not love.

Perhaps I misunderstand his arguments. Maybe if I come back again in a few years I can approach it with fresh eyes and see something new.