takeaways:
- doubt love but don't doubt love
- this guy's favorite words are insofar and tantamount
- felt kinda insensitive to people with mental health issues
- 2 stars for the vocabulary or else i wouldve rated 1 star

Too many discrepancies and logical leaps based on flimsy premises. The topic is exceptional, but the way it is addressed is very reductive.
The author exposes his view on the necessary qualities of love, but does not explain how he got to those four particular characteristics. They seem arbitrary or superficial.
The kind of love the author champions is an "easy" kind of love in which we have no saying in the matter. To me, as well as to Fromm and Bauman, love is an "art" you get better at when you consciously practice it. We do have a saying in how much and how well we love, a matter Frankfurt fails to address.
Yet, the author does have some brilliant insights, especially in the logic/reason versus love debate.

Al libro y al autor llegue por la recomendación sobre otro de sus textos, que creo que es el mas famoso y relevante: On Bullshit. Creo que fue por alguna conferencia de Ernesto Castro lo que me llevo a revisar bibliografía de él. En fin. El libro me pareció interesante en cierta medida, sin embargo, a medida que transcurría el mismo, mas me parecía una repetición de una misma tesis, que, en últimas, defiende, así lo niegue el autor, un moralismo, pues parte de las mismas premisas que éste.
Si bien el propósito del libro es tratar sobre el tema del amor, para hacerlo el autor recurre (como creo frecuente en los gringos) a cimentar las premisas a manera de un Modus Tollens para llegar a una conclusión aún mas sólida, dejando en el camino un monto de supuestos que se dan para hacer mas verosímil la tesis que trata.
Como su título en español lo dice: se trata de las razones que nos motivan a amar, lo cual, se explica por su título en ingles, son el sentido de nuestras vidas. Pero para llegar a esa conclusión, el autor se vale de los criterios que cimentan la voluntad y, por ello, nuestros intereses. Pues todo acto humano debe ser dirigido en pro y por preocupación de los intereses que tenemos en nuestra relación con el mundo, ergo, lo que lo compone: personas y cosas, entonces, todo interés, según el autor, se forma en ocasión a la preocupación que nos causan las personas y las cosas, lo que determina nuestra voluntad y conducta. Así las cosas, el amor se trata de un tipo de preocupación que surge por el interés que tendemos a generar por los demás, lo que implica modificar nuestra voluntad en pro de cuidar a esos alguienes o algos.
Bien, así va el libro, argumentado este criterio, por lo cual termina por desembocar ante el innegable amor propio, el cual, es uno de los mas puros, sin embargo, para arribar a dicha conclusión el autor se vale de varios presupuestos que, podríamos decir, son peticiones de principio, buscando hacer de su argumento algo más verosímil y razonable, sin embargo, considero que, como texto que parte de un sujeto dado, olvida muchas veces las condiciones materiales que constituyen el objeto de su estudio, siendo más preciso, a mi consideración, los textos que Ortega y Gasset tiene sobre el mismo tema.
En una conclusión apresurada podría decir que se trata de un buen libro.

Didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped. He seemed to be reiterating the same things, and oftentimes contradicted things he said prior.

كتاب جيد، لكن الكاتبة معقدة الموضوع

Lucid, compelling, and wholeheartedly frustrating.

Took out one star because of the repetitiveness sometimes found in the book and because I felt that the third part was a bit clumsy.
Nevertheless I would recommend this. Here are the points that interested me the most:

-Critique of the ‘‘goodness first’’ moralist approach and openess to the ‘‘beauty first’’ one. Knowing how much authority it is reasonable to accord to the demands of morality cannot be resolved by morality itself. It is an issue of care, of love (parallels with Heidegger’s Sorge).

-”Caring is indispensably foundational as an activity that connects us and binds us to ourselves. It is through caring that we provide ourselves with volitional continuity. Caring manifests and depends upon our distinctive capacity to have thoughts, desires, and attitudes that are about our own attitudes, desires, and thoughts.” With self-awareness comes the risk of objectifying ourselves.

-Reflections on freedom: Love isn’t in our immediate voluntary control, but that does not mean that we are not free. When we learn that something is illogical, we do not  “Autonomy is essentially a matter of whether we are active rather than passive in our motives and choices - whether, however we acquire them, they are the motives and choices that we really want and are therefore in no way alien to us.” The closest to freedom a finite creature can get to: performing an action we want to perform and whose underlying motive we want to be motivated by.
On a similar note Josef Pieper says: “Acedia is the ‘despair from weakness’ which Kierkegaard analyzed as the ‘despairing refusal to be oneself’. Metaphysically and theologically, the notion of acedia means that a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being […] The contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work… it is man’s happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being.” I’m pretty sure St Maximus has a very similar view of freedom as being in conformity to our logos.

-Reflection on the source of value: What we care about is not necessarily what we recognize as having intrinsic value. Caring and love is more fundamental than reason. “It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance. The totality of the various things that a person cares about effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live […] Rather, what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it.”
Hence how love can be the creator of persons. Children need love from their parents to grow into persons. In general, whatever people love necessarily increases in importance and value.

-Clarity vs. reason: ‘‘The most basic and essential question for a person to raise concerning the conduct of his life cannot be the normative question of how he should live. That question can sensibly be asked only on the basis of a prior answer to the factual question of what he actually does care about. If he cares about nothing,he cannot even begin to inquire methodically into how he should live […] If we are to resolve our difficulties and hesitations in settling upon a way to live, what we need most fundamentally is not reasons or proofs. It is clarity and confidence… Rather, it requires us simply to understand what it is that we ourselves really care about, and to be decisively and robustly confident in caring about it.”
The Church Fathers say that every desire is ultimately a desire for God, even the sinful ones. What we need is clarity in regards to the true object of our desires, what we truly want.
True rationality, then, is the rational investigation of what we already care about to clarify it. John Vervaeke said ‘‘Socratic rationality is ultimately what do you care most about and why?

-Confidence vs. reason: Confidence does not depend on reasons. ‘‘The fact that people ordinarily do not hesitate in their commitments to the continuation of their lives, and to the well-being of their children, does not derive from any actual consideration by them of reasons; nor does it depend even upon an assumption that good reasons could be found. Those commitments are innate in us. They are not based upon deliberation. They are not responses to any commands of rationality… They are commands of love. The basis for our confidence in caring about our children and our lives is that, in virtue of necessities that are biologically embedded in our nature, we love our children and we love living.’’
Although I don’t like the aspect of biological determinism and would explain it in another way, the idea that confidence comes from a strong love is very interesting. The corollary is that uncertainty comes from conflicting loves.

-Paradoxical nature of love and meaning in life: ‘‘The appearance of conflict between pursuing one’s own interests and being selflessly devoted to the interests of another is dispelled once we appreciate that what serves the self-interest of the lover is nothing other than his selflessness. It is only if his love is genuine, needless to say, that it can have the importance for him that loving entails.’’
Meaning in life comes from self-sacrifice, devotion to someone else.

کتاب فوق العاده ای بود. شاید مدت ها توی ذهنم دنبال چنین کتاب و شیوه فلسفه و تفکری بودم. واقعا با تحلیل هاش از مسائل بنیادین آدمی مثل اخلاق، اراده، عشق، خود دوستی و ... به شوق اومدم. حتما به زودی دوباره میخونمش. نثر کتاب، فلسفی و یه مقدار سنگینه با این حال به دوستداران فلسفه پیشنهاد می کنم حتما بخونند

-I didn't think he defined his terms clearly or narrowly enough.
-It seemed to contain contradictions.
-Not enough examples by far.
-It seemed he had several assumptions that I would have disagreed with if he had presented them clearly enough to consider.
-I give it two stars only because it generates questions and causes the reader to wrestle with the material. Really, though, struggling to understand the author on top of struggling to understand the topic at hand is quite irritating. I felt that if the author had really understood the material that he could have presented it much better. As it stood, I had a hard time understanding this book (I'm not going to regurgitate everything I did manage to take away from it or that I decided on my own in this review), but I couldn't decide if the problem was my misunderstanding or the author's! Still, I will probably reread this in the future to see if I can understand it any more clearly.

While a good book overall by a celebrated philosopher, it seems to me to be unnecessarily verbose in its explanation of the core tenets that Dr. Frankfurt are trying to argue. While being a little over 100 pages, I feel this could have been succinctly written in 50-75 pages. This is not to detract from the ideas purported in the book itself, they are incredibly interesting in themselves, and inspire thought. I in fact read this for my Philosophy of Love and Sex course at college. My problem is with the writing style and unnecessary length.

"Our goals are not important to us exclusively because we value the states of affairs that they envisage. It is not important to us only to attain our final ends. It is also important to us to have final ends. This is because without them, there is nothing important for us to do."

Frankfurt has a remarkably natural, easy writing style that doesn't subtract from the profundity of his arguments as much as one might suppose. A book being labelled as 'philosophy' as opposed to being considered 'self-help' affects its cultural capital, how it is perceived. I think this book can happily considered both - though perhaps because I liked Frankfurt's message, as one typically appreciates the message of a self-help book, I didn't approach it as critically as I would a work of philosophy.
(At the same time, I wonder if I should even mention that, because it seems every review of mine has some element of 'oh no my critical faculties' that my sense of self-doubt should be taken gratis in all forthcoming reviews.)

The book is short and the quote above gives good indication of what to expect, so I'll say no more about the book's content. Instead, I'll offer a bit of pedantry regarding Frankfurt's playing the pronoun game, so read on if that interests you.

Frankfurt uses the third-person 'he' in his arguments, and gives examples of his 'he' loving a woman. I'd go for something more broadly universal when making my argument, but hey, it's no big deal, right? Except that when Frankfurt speaks of his 'he' having a child, the child is spoken of as an 'it'. Considering Frankfurt's fluidity in writing, I assume his pronoun usage is completely intentional, but it's remarkably graceless. He says 'person' instead of 'man', even when through his writing it is clear he is arguing specifically from a traditionally masculine perspective. That aspect of his style seemed like some half-hearted, petty backlash against the singular 'they', which is pretty silly if that's at all the case. I'm not going to assume any more intent to his grammar than clumsiness, but it was so odd an element of his writing I felt it necessary to address it in some way.

Love

I loved Frankfurt's book 'Bullshit', so when I saw that he had another short book I was really excited to get it, especially given its topic which is something I wanted to read more about.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first feels rather odd, and I wasn't sure what he was trying to get at. It discusses the topic of how we should live, and more specifically how we should think about people's goals. I wasn't making the connection with love, and it takes the second part to make this explicit.

He also had an interesting take on morality and its normative aspect which dazzled me a little bit. As I first read it I couldn't help but almost be angry about it. How can morality not only be normative but almost by definition by the highest value? Not that the author changed my mind but his view was very novel to me and I really enjoyed reading his perspective. It wasn't simply a cheesy existentialist take that there no "true" morality and going towards nihilistic or scepticism, but rather trying to balance out various values.

The second part of the book is his main argument. He describes what love his, and why it is important. It gives meaning to our lives. This may sound superficial, but it is not. He goes over several examples of why exactly makes love special, and this makes a lot more sense after the first part. A large part of his argument is that by loving someone you care about what they care about, and it's the only thing that gets you 'outside' yourself. It creates a final end, a goal that isn't just for the sake of other goals, but intrinsic to it.

The last part took me by surprise, he argues that self-love is the purest love there is. To me, this is certainly very counter-intuitive, and I almost have a repulsion to it based on how this type of thinking has seemed to infiltrate modern culture and create a pandemic of egoism, narcissism and lack of drive towards moral self-improvement.

But he was quite aware of how his idea would be perceived, and he tried to explain what exactly he meant. My view is in the same camp as Kant, in the sense that we shouldn't love ourselves, and self-love is an egoistic state of mind that is an antagonist to a moral life which should be loving and caring for others. But he goes over why exactly Kant's view (and mine) is misguided. It requires what the author has built on the previous 2 chapters and that the characteristics of love are disinterested, personal, identifying with the beloved, and constraining. And all of these are present or even in the highest form in self-love.

I find his writing very clear and enjoyable to read. I had high standards from his other book, and this one did not disappoint. However, one ought to be cautious about approaching the book, it isn't as easy to read as one might assume. It may not look like it, but it is solid philosophy. It's not the type of book that seems impossible to go through or you can't understand what the author is on about, but it truly takes very careful reading to appreciate the arguments he makes.

I took a fair bit of notes. The only other book I remember taking this many was Behave Sapolsky. , in which I took over 60 notes (I try hard to keep it to a minimum). Yet, Behave was over 800 pages. For this book, I took 23 notes, but the book is only 100 pages long!

It's truly worth reading if you want to explore the topic of love, especially if you want a more careful analysis of which philosophy is very adapt to offer.