The whole argument falls apart the more he tries to explain it. At one point he says, "it seems like koan" and then tries to explain how it's not, but, it seemed to me, actually just reinforced the criticism.

The title should have been "My Reasons of Love." Also, Henry writes like a grumpy and lonely old academic, which is annoying when it isn't French.

کتاب خوبی بود ولی من نفهمیدم چی میگه.
باید یه بار دیگه بخونمش.
جمله هاش طولانی بود و مفهوم به راحتی قابل درک نبود

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.

Spodziewałam się czegoś zupełnie innego, ale to tylko moje oczekiwania, co nie jest zbyt istotne w tej recenzji.
Pierwszy rozdział, nie przypadł mi do gustu.
Ciągle powtarzania tych samych zdań innymi słowami, ale wydaje mi się, że może to być winą polskiego tłumaczenia. Filozoficzna książka z dosyć trudnym słownictwem, na pewno nie dla każdego. Książka wydaje się napisana dosyć subiektywnie.

كتاب جيد، لكن الكاتبة معقدة الموضوع

I wanted to read something out of my normal genres. This philosophy book is well written and digestible for the layman. However, I re-learned that I'm not interested in philosophy. Too abstract.

Beyond the nature phenomena about Love.
Fro Plato to Aristoteles, Kant, Russel and your self. Actually love without any condition and matter its truly from GOD.

ترجمه داغان

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...

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. :)

Gedanklich grandios.