Las razones del amor: El sentido de nuestras vidas

Very approachable and clear. Good analysis of love and its essential components

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.

Re-read this book (which I’ve read several times before) for an ethics class I taught this fall. The picture it paints of love and human agency is one that I find deeply compelling, even if it’s also one that is a bit elusive. Frankfurt is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers to read; I always feel like he is speaking to something real and important about the human experience.

A failed philosophical attempt.

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.

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.

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.

-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.