i thought this was a lucid explanation of how we should logically approach the question of how to live our lives. not only by looking at what we want or desire, but at a deeper level what we care about, have interest in, what is important to us, and finally, what we love. i like how frankfurt shows that self-love, despite its reputation, can be one of the purest forms of love there is (if one defines love as frankfurt does). i thought it terse how frankfurt pointed out that when confronted with a decision regarding two seemingly incompatible desires, we can make a decision and decide which side of the fence we are on by taking an active role to achieve one's interests and what one cares about in the face of desires that are in direct opposition to those interests. these interests we side with are conducive to our agency, and thus a very important part of the kind of person we take ourself to be.

i don't agree with a few more fundamental stances frankfurt seems to take in this account of love. being big on choice and freedom, or the appearance of it, a few questions arise. when someone can't muster the will to do 'x', for example, is this because he can't or simply because he chooses not to or chooses not to want to? does this individual simply not see the value in doing 'x' herself, and thus doesn't choose to muster the will to do 'x'? i think the value implicit in much of the love frankfurt talks about is created and projected by individuals, as agents, and this would result in different foundations within the topic, but the end result would be comparable.

overall a great book.

was with it and then he lost me but i liked his writing a lot.

I liked it, even though I don't like philosophy. And my dislike of the philosophy is probably why it seems to me like he wrote all those 100 pages only in order to make a very good punchline. :)

The topic looks paradoxical, how one can deal with love matter by pure philosophical reasoning?! And this makes the book very interesting to read: it talks about something very deep in our life with an approach I have not heard like it before.

Also, note that the concept of love in the book is not mere romantic love and Frankfurt asserts that he prefers to discuss other forms of love like parents/children due to intrinsic problems in talking about romantic one.

Creo que es mi segundo libro de filosofía. Lo leí por recomendación de un podcast llamado urbi et Orbi (recomendado).

Frankfurt nos lleva a analizar tres puntos. Cómo vivir, las razones del amor y el amor propio. Y, me quedé con lo siguiente:

Es importante vivir bajo los criterios ue hemos considerado importantes y que nos importan a nosotros. Por lo tanto, juzgar los criterios de los otros es innecesario e imposible porque no hay como definir cuáles criterios son buenos o malos y bajo cuál parámetro juzgar.

El amor es desinteresado e incluye amar lo que el amado ama y le importa. Por lo tanto, es importante que los dos amén o les importe las mismas cosas (en su mayoría)

El amor propio es sumamente importante y es uno de los amores más puros.

Si no leen tanta filosofía, como yo. Les recomiendo escuchar el podcast y en específico el capítulo sobre el amor.

Typically cryptic philosophical jargon but it makes some great points. I suspect there are a few chapters that anyone can identify with.

This book varied between hand-waving logical argument and insightful provocation to personal reflection. Despite my three-star review, it is worth reading. It's not a tremendous book, and to this reader it did not deliver on the promise of its title, but the book can still be a meaningful one if approached by the right attitude.

Ultimately, I think I was most disappointed that Frankfurt's arguments could not really displace an evolutionary biology perspective on the "reasons of" love in his context. He often compares the kind of focused devotion he's considering that is both beyond conscious choice and that guides and supplies life with meaning and purpose to a parental relationship with children. He makes this comparison over and over, so clearly it means something to him as evidence of the kind of love he means and how deep and intrinsic that kind of love can be. In comparing the love of parents for children, however, he seems to discount the evolutionary basis for that devotion, which can arguably provide a pretty good reason for why that should exist. At one point or another he mentions it in passing but gives the genetic motivation for parents to invest energy in offspring no real consideration as being capable of fully explaining the phenomenon. If one were really investigating the "reasons" for love, at least, I don't think it's fair to avoid considering evolutionary biology. Maybe he gets a pass by considering the reasons "of" love but I think he mostly just goes on to discuss what he wants to discuss. Alternatively, if one fully pursues that line of thinking, one might arrive at very different conclusions about the nature of love.

The book started to be more meaningful for me in the second half where the author describes a situation that I found all too relatable. In so articulating the problematic scenario, it convinced me to follow the remainder of the arguments more closely out of personal reflection. I quote the relevant passage from page 53 that made me pause in honest sadness.

"It is an interesting question why a life in which activity is locally purposeful but nonetheless fundamentally aimless--having an immediate goal but no final end--should be considered undesirable. What would necessarily be so terrible about a life that is empty of meaning in this sense? The answer is, I think, that without final ends we would find nothing truly important either as an end or as a means. The importance to us of everything would depend upon the importance to us of something else. We would not really care about anything unequivocally and without conditions.

"Insofar as this became clear to us, we would recognize our volitional tendencies and dispositions as pervasively inconclusive. It would then become impossible for us to involve ourselves conscientiously and responsibly in managing the course of our intentions and decisions. We would have no settled interest in designing or in sustaining any particular continuity in the configurations of our will. A major aspect of our reflective connection to ourselves, in which our distinctive character as human beings lies, would thus be severed. Our lives would be passive, fragmented, and thereby drastically impaired. Even if we might perhaps continue to maintain some meager vestige of active self-awareness, we would be dreadfully bored."

It shames me to admit but I have felt like this. The past few years, and in particular much of the repetitious sequestered survival of the past pandemic year have left me feeling hollowed out, going through the motions, alone, sometimes unloved, sometimes unlovable, sometimes unable to love, and with the permanent freeze of our future, ever more reminded that, as I continue to grow older, whatever future state I might once have aspired to may remain forever elusive and perhaps there is no articulated future state at all both desirable and achievable. Feeling empty.

And therefore I pursued the remainder of Frankfurt's book more closely to see if he writes a sound prescription to this lamentable state of affairs.

It's hard to say. After some rationalizing meanders about the nature of internal ambivalence, he ends the book on an almost conversational note about a pretty girl he met once telling him that on the whole you may not want people to be honest but just need to keep your sense of humor, as though the whole extent of his booklong arguments amount to nothing; as though the author and reader were just two guys chatting at the bar, anything goes, albeit deeply about matters of seeming import, like the nature of love, etc. (What else do guys talk about at the bar anyway?)

So I don't know, a tour de force this book is not, but also perhaps not useless. He synthesizes the work of other philosophers without a heavy-handed concern for weighty citation or analysis. He cherry picks for his topic, not, I sense, because he is lazy about ideas but because he is trying to wrap his mental arms around the topic and see what really makes sense based on what he's read and what he knows and what he can reason out. In that sense, the book was warm because it's like a couch conversation with a philosopher in casual mode but interested in digging through what things mean and what to do about them. I imagine this guy would be much less approachable in reality, but on the page he's okay. On the page it's like he's puffing on a pipe but you don't have to smell the smoke.

This has been a horrible, loosely written review, but I felt I needed to write about this book mostly because I felt it made me reflect about myself and want to change for the better so I don't die not having lived (or, on the order of Nancy Hedford's critique of Zefram Cochrane, loved). It also made me realize how I have already changed, not always for the better, although perhaps I have grown in the ability for self-reflection, if not self-awareness. I'm still lonely and still trying to recapture that personal sense of purpose--an Aristotelian efficient cause these days remains elusive.

I loved it.

While I really liked and found useful Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", and thought his "On Truth" interesting even if more obvious, I was left somewhat unsatisfied and unconvinced by this book.

On the plus side, his writing style is, as always, an unalloyed pleasure -- clear, concise, and well constructed. And he does, IMHO, a good job of defining and exploring a concept of love.

But he veers off into irrelevancy in the last third of the book with his examination of self-love, which he basically ends up defining as the commitment to finding things to love and then loving them... which is clearly implied in his definition of love and hence is something of a rehash of the first two thirds.

Perhaps worse, in the first two thirds of the book he reflects on all the ways in which one can become confused about love -- by loving the "wrong" things (mostly, but not always, people), by becoming confused about what one loves, by encountering contradictions in trying to love disparate things, and so on... but then he doesn't give us any useful guidance as to how to tell what one loves or what one should love or how to resolve any of the numerous other complexities that he points out.

One could argue that he was writing a philosophy book and not self-help... which is perfectly true... but when you provide no guidance as to how to map the central definition you are exploring to the real world (other than something akin to "you know it when you feel it"), then I can't help but think that you have fatally compromised the relevance of your work to anyone other than the most permanent residents of an ivory tower.

Love And The Goals Of Life

This short, beautifully written book by Henry Frankfurt, (1929 --July 16, 2023) Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, is based upon lectures Frankfurt delivered in 2000 and 2001 titled "Some Thoughts about Norms, Love, and the Goals of Life." In his book, Frankfurt argues that love and the ability to love give meaning to a person's life and that the purest form of love is, ultimately self-love. By 'love', Professor Frankfurt does not mean romantic love. Rather, he characterizes love as 1. disinterested, 2.personal, 3. involving the self-identification of the lover with the beloved and 4. constraining one's action -- a person loves someone or something because he or she can't help doing so.

Frankfurt's book consists of three short chapters. The first chapter, "The Question: How shall we Live?" argues that caring and love, rather than moral behavior, gives meaning to a life and define a person's basic commitments and goals. Professor Frankfurt is not a rationalistic philosopher who extolls the power of reason to set goals. Rather, I think Frankfurt sees love as a matter of an existential commitment -- a person can't help loving what he or she loves. Love is not a question of thinking things through to conclude which subjects and persons merit one's care and concern.

The second chapter "On Love and its Reason" elaborates on the opening chapter and offers the four-fold definition of love I have summarized above. Frankfurt points out that the loves of a person define what that person is and give his or her life goals and meaning. What a person loves is prior to reasoning about one's choices, as evidenced, for Frankfurt, by one of the purest and most common forms of love, the love of a parent for his or her young children. In love, ends and means intersect, in that actions taken in furtherance of the interest of the beloved become themselves final goals rather than only instrumental goals.

In the final chapter, "The Dear Self", Frankfurt argues that the purest form of love is ultimately self-love, rejecting critiques of self-love by philosophers such as Kant. In this chapter, I think, Frankfurt basically equates self-love with self-knowledge. A person who loves himself, for Frankfurt, knows his own mind, knows what he wants and cherishes, and pursues it wholeheartedly without ambivalence. Most people don't know what they want and are plagued by competing goals which restrict severely their ability to love wholeheartedly. Frankfurt characterizes such behavior as showing an inability to fully love oneself. In addition to Kant, Frankfurt in this chapter makes insightful references to St Augustine, Kierkegaard, and especially Spinoza. Frankfurt distinguishes again between morality and love as establishing the contours of a meaningful human life. For Frankfurt, a person can love someone or something wholeheartedly and yet be immoral. In addition to the philosophers Frankfurt mentions, I think there are many parallels to existential thought, especially that of Heidegger, behind Frankfurt's lucid and restrained prose.

This book will appeal to thoughtful readers who want to reflect upon and try to understand their lives and what matters to them. It shows that philosophy remains a meaningful, life-giving endeavor rather than the sterile, academic exercise seen by philosophy's detractors.

Robin Friedman

The last paragraph - describing the secretary (making a note she’s not a professional philosopher) and how she’s good looking whilst he’s single seem utterly unnecessary. I genuinely hope that’s not the sense of humor the author plans to hold onto.

بجد؟
كسمين النهاية انا هموت من الضحك
It’s a good book though you should read it
I will probably read it again in a couple years