I'd recently read Frankfurt's On Truth and On Bullshit, and somehow stumbled across this book soon afterwards. Not everyone will agree with Frankfurt's definition of love, but he makes a very interesting case, and from that, suggests that life is best lived in accordance with those things one loves. This may seem simple, but some of the added complications include that we are not always well-informed of our own inner workings (we may mistakenly think we love something, or may alternately be unaware of something we do love), or the things we love may be in conflict with each other, somehow. It was a new look at love for me, and I will probably return to this book again after some more thought on the matter. It is in no way a "self help" book, but I feel as though thinking on it may do just that, anyway.

This book made little sense to me. Yes he made maybe a handful of interesting comments that gave me something to ponder but most of the time I was wondering where the heck he was going with his argument. The ending I didn't like either. He ends with a story about a coworker who comments that being honest isn't important as people change their mind so having a sense of humour is better. This would have made more sense to put in the middle of the book but the end? That's it? Overall this book seemed convoluted to me. The best thing about this book was that it was only 100 pages!

I loved it.

Lucid, compelling, and wholeheartedly frustrating.

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

This book was poorly written. The philosopher uses ideas that are not universally valid and makes statements that have been disproven by biology and psychology. His account for defining what love is and isn't and when it applies would have been a lot stronger if he had read more about attachment theory and affection in animal studies or even asked any academic at his university about it. I got the impression that the authour was irrational ignorant about love and attempted to philosophize about it without doing any investigation in meaningful and relevant literature about it. The consequence of the philosopher's lack of curiosity and motivation to be better informed before delving into questions about love made the foundation of the essence of love in his book incomplete. His inability to convince me in his initial statements about love effected how serious I took the rest of his attempt at insight into love. My skepticism made this book difficult to follow given the grounding points are false or poorly developed. Staying focused on his statements was like paying attention to someone who makes random statements about a field that they know nothing about. Then the secondary statements that follow each initial idea don't build off the the initial statement and lack logical flow; sadly this is a good thing because the secondary statements make good observations about the way that love functions in the mind. It's too bad that the authour neglected to develop his secondary statements about the mechanisms of love, that would have made for a more persuasive concept. Occasionally a secondary statement would be explained through a very badly thought out example that was relateable but inaccurate and that naively idealized social relations. The most common example of a naively idealized social relation that was used was about the parent-child relationship. From my point of view the examples that the authour used were equivalent to stating that because I own something, I love it. That is basically the driving point of this book. I expected a lot more.

"Inspiring"

Don't be scared that it is a book of philosophy. It is an inspiring read. It has become such an inspiration for me: to wholeheartedly care for what we care.

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.

I'm sorry but Frankfurt's argument of a 'good life' just didn't make a lot of sense to me.
He's basically like
Care + Wholeheartness = happiness
But he does not really expand on what happens when your cares start conflicting each other, and whether or not wholeheartness can be the ultimate defeat of your happiness (ex. grief, love for a broken marriage, religion, etc.)

Wenn ein Buch auch nur zum Teil in moralischen Kontemplationen verwickelt ist, fällt es mir schwer, mich dafür zu begeistern. Bestimmt wäre „Gründe der Liebe“ ein massentaugliches, philosophisches Self-Help-Werk, aber mit mehr konnte es mir nicht dienen. Leider nur 2/5✨

If it is finally and definitively 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.

I have mixed feelings about this book because I believe ten years ago, I would have loved it. It is very theoretical, vague, repetitive at points and sometimes unnecessarily wordy. Now I see that you could just go read C.S. Lewis' Four Loves or 1 Corinthians 13 and be more enriched.