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

Having closely reread this book a third time, I can say with some authority that I've wasted hours of my life, that I've gone on an intellectual sojourn with a text that didn't appeal to me, that wasn't even my type.

This is not a text for those interested in Hamlet's vacillations or for persons who can related to Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Fans of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Proust, Freud or philosopher Donald Davidson will feel themselves on a different planet in this text.

Fans of Bertrand Russell, the young Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, and/or the Heidegger of the elemental, pretechnological human condition will feel right at home with this book.

Two-and-a-half stars.

pointless and boring this 100 page book took me 2 months to get through lmaooo

Frankfurt’s “The Reasons of Love” examines the necessity of love, (not simply in the romantic, but in the general unconcerned care of things), to providing meaning and purpose to our lives. This argument of love within philosophy is presented in refreshingly clear and human terms for an academic work. To this point, the initial ideas and components that lay the framework for Frankfurt’s position manage to avoid the usual confusion that comes with expressing a new conceptual approach and vocabulary. Overall this book was a surprising gem to find within the context of usual philosophy course readings, and is well worth the time if you are interested in a relevant and refreshingly meaningful approach to moral philosophy.

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.

Frankfurt has a peculiar way of expressing his arguments. The clarity of the book is compromised by the fact that he does not state explicitly what is assumed and what is derived. But overall it is a great book in that it offers insights on important moral questions. Chapter one is superb and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But by chapter three I think Frankfurt had in mind his other book: On Bullshit.

Frankly, Frankfurt (author of "On Bullshit") is confused. More accurately, Frankfurt, the specialist of Bullshit, employed bullshit to sell another overpriced piece of forgettable crap. I gave him two stars because he does makes a couple of great observations if you dig through all the bullshit.

I liked this book a lot because it acknowledges the importance of caring for and learning to love yourself. However, it also de-emphasizes a lot of issues, like what to do about people that only care about evil things.

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

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.

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

متن خوب و پر محتوايى كه بين ترجمه اى كه بايستى روون تر ميبود و كمتر باعث حواس پرتى ميشد گير افتاده بود .