|
| The Reasons of Love | 
| Author: Harry G. Frankfurt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy New: $7.28
You Save: $5.67 (44%)
New (32) from $7.28
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 211249
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 112
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5
ISBN: 0691126240
Dewey Decimal Number: 177.7
EAN: 9780691126241
ASIN: 0691126240
Publication Date: January 2, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New Book! Delivered direct from our US warehouse in 3-6 days (Expedited) or 10-14 days (Standard). Expedited shipping recommended for speedy delivery. Over 1 million satisfied customers.
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This beautifully written book by one of the world's leading moral philosophers argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love. Harry Frankfurt writes that it is through caring that we infuse the world with meaning. Caring provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it shapes the framework of aims and interests within which we lead our lives. The most basic and essential question for a person to raise about the conduct of his or her life is not what he or she should care about but what, in fact, he or she cannot help caring about. The most important form of caring, Frankfurt writes, is love, a nonvoluntary, disinterested concern for the flourishing of what is loved. Love is so important because meaningful practical reasoning must be grounded in ends that we do not seek only to attain other ends, and because it is in loving that we become bound to final ends desired for their own sakes. Frankfurt argues that the purest form of love is self-love. This sounds perverse, but self-love--as distinct from self-indulgence--is at heart a disinterested concern for whatever it is that the person loves. The most elementary form of self-love is nothing more than the desire of a person to love. Insofar as this is true, self-love is simply a commitment to finding meaning in our lives.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Thinness, but . . . a fact/value problem August 14, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have reservations writing this review, because Frankfurt's "pop-philosophy" is receiving a wide readership, and that fact is indeed very valuable.
Frankfurt's style is clear; his ideas crystalline, his jargon minimal; his issues important. His advice often salient. But I cannot help but describe three of his books as "thin." Perhaps, this "thinness" is deliberate, to reach a larger mass audience. So, a trade-off requires I hedge my review.
I'll use one example of the "problems" I have with this level of thinness. I cannot imagine a competent, rigorous philosopher writing, "that question can be sensibly asked only on the basis of of a prior answer to the factual question of what he actually does cares about" (ROL, 26). This sentence can be read in several different ways, one in which the answer to a factual question precedes its ability to be valued. This reading is quite fine.
An alternative reading is that our values (what we care about) can only be determined by the facts in the decision. That's untrue. Other readings are also suggested, including a rush to "facts establish our values that are useful facts." These (mis)readings are problematic, and since this possibility of misreading confronts the reader frequently, more from sentential ambiguity than intent, it may be worth a "red flag."
The is/ought distinction, also known as the fact/value divide and the naturalistic fallacy, came into philosophical consciousness in the mid-18th century (David Hume). A minority of philosophers deny the divide, or deny its importance, and yet that does not seem to be Frankfurt's view. Yet, he frequently blurs, even if he does not cross, the epistemic/axiological divide.
Is this really important? That, too, is debated. Those of us who want to preserve the divide do so, not because it is critical to Frankfurt's theses, per se, but because it obscures his thesis. Factual questions are answered true/false, whereas values questions are answered good/bad (right/wrong). Surely, we don't need people confusing true for right, false for wrong (false in the sense of "not the case").
Catholicism's Natural Law Theory does precisely this, due to Aquinas' conflation of Aristotle's natural teleology with Aristotle's practical instrumental action, the former determined by a theoretical syllogism, the latter by a practical syllogism, and in Catholicism triangulated into a perverse "moral theory." And its objections to contraception, abortion, homosexuality, masturbation, etc., are all built on this fallacy.
Nature offers no guidance to how we must act, or whether those facts are of any value. Nature just "is." A fact. We may value that fact for some reason, but the fact is not itself the value, or vice versa. We impute the values. Ask a tsunami victim if Nature is morally good. It's incoherent. An auto accident is a fact. We determine how to value it (good for minimal damage, bad for death and destruction, because "harm" is something we find good to avoid, not because the fact is that value). We may use facts in our valuations, and I believe this is Frankfurt's meaning here.
With reservations like these, offset by the appeal of readers turning to philosophy for insights into their lives, I want to retain the assessment of "thinness," but I am reminded that babies cut their teeth on soft food before they tear into meat. Frankfurt is very good first food to introduce the value of philosophy, and why it might matter (a value, not a fact). But careful distinctions are also of value.
 Love and the Goals of Life August 29, 2006
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This short, beautifully written book by Henry Frankfurt, 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 insturmental 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. Franfurt 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
characteristically rich February 20, 2006
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is essentially a book on the nature of practical reason. Frankfurt's central claim is that "the origins of normativity do not lie... either in the transient incitements of personal feeling and desire [as some Humeans would have it], or in the severely anonymous requirements of eternal reason [as some Kantians would have it]. They lie in the contingent necessities of love." In other words, love is "the ultimate ground of practical rationality." The title reflects Frankfurt's main ambition, which is to identify and analyze the type of reasons for action provided by love. On the way to this goal, Frankfurt raises some difficult and important questions: How important is moral theory to the theory of practical reason? How important are moral values to the age-old question of how we should live? What is the nature of love? How does it differ from things like romantic attraction? If practical reason is grounded in love, does that mean that practical reason is essentially selfish? He also provides some fascinating answers--some of which are more elaborately defended than others. To give some examples: He argues, as he has before, that morality is in a sense overrated--at least by theorists of practical reason. Moral concerns and values do not always express what is most important to us; therefore, morality is not always the most important source of reasons for action. He also claims that love is characterized by four essential features. It manifests a disinterested concern for the beloved; it is "ineluctably personal"; it involves identification with the beloved; and it imposes constraints upon the will. Surprisingly, Frankfurt argues that the purest (though not necessarily most admirable or valuable) form of love is self-love. He then goes on to argue that once we properly distinguish self-love from self-indulgence we'll be able to see that self-love is not a form of selfishness. So to ground practical reason in love is decidedly not to explain all deliberation in terms of self-centred calculation.
There are moments when it gets a little precious for my tastes, but Frankfurt's work is undeniably honest and deep. It seems driven by a genuine and earnest desire to figure things out--to say something clear, helpful, and even beautiful about things that matter to us. His prose is refreshingly jargon-free. It is certainly a work of analytic philosophy, but he distinguishes himself from many contemporary philosophers by refusing to limit himself to discussions carried on in the latest journals. This means that technical terminology is kept to a minimum, and there is virtually no name-dropping. A reader familiar with the literature in contemporary ethics and practical reason will get more out of this than a novice. But it is a virtue of Frankfurt's work (not just in this book) that anyone sufficiently curious about these matters could read and profit from it. He refers to classic authors such as Aristotle, Kant, St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza. But nothing he writes assumes that the reader already knows their work.
The book clearly furthers an ongoing project. For years Frankfurt has argued that freedom of the will consists in having the will one wants, and that this requires being able to wholeheartedly identify with some desires rather than others. "The Reasons of Love" continues his efforts to elaborate on and justify that basic idea. This comes out most clearly in the last half of the last chapter, where Frankfurt explains how true self-love accomplishes the "wholehearted identification" that is necessary for the "volitional unity" that enables perons to achieve the kind of freedom that's worth having. The discussion here will resonate most with readers of his other works--particularly the numerous essays on identification, caring, volitional necessity, and autonomy.
That should not scare off the uninitiated. On the contrary: just about anyone inclined to ask themselves hard questions about freedom, love, reason, and the nature of the self is likely to find reading Harry Frankfurt deeply rewarding. He's careful and precise without being technical or overly-dry. More important, he never loses sight of the stuff most of us actually care about. My sense is that those unfamiliar with Frankfurt's work will find in "The Reasons of Love" a great place to start reading one of the most interesting and important philosophers writing today.
 Where are the reasons? February 12, 2006
8 out of 14 found this review helpful
I don't have academic training on philosophy argument and thus the book becomes a long and winding essay that is difficult to grasp. You can read the first chapter from http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7749.html and see if this is the kind of books you would like.
A Book to be Almost Unconditionally Loved March 3, 2004
26 out of 28 found this review helpful
Reasons of Love consists of three somewhat revised lectures given at University College London, in 2001. I take these lectures to be a more filled-out analysis of love and caring from his earlier articles, particularly, "Autonomy, Necessity, and Love," "The Faintest Passion," "On the Necessity of Ideals," and "The Importance of What We Care About." In a sense, Reasons of Love might be thought of as the broader applicatory story left out of these earlier essays. While I find myself disagreeing with the how parts of the story are told, it seems that he has picked out something true of the human condition that has generally been disdained, specifically self-love. This is a fascinating piece of moral philosophy and I highly recommend it.
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
