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Istoria iubirii
„Iubirea este fascinatia pe care o simtim fata de oameni si lucruri care trezesc in noi speranta ca astfel am gasit un temei durabil pentru viata noastra.“ - Simon May
Dragostea: neconditionala, altruista, neschimbata si sincera, este vazuta in lumea occidentala ca si „crezul universal“. Filosoful Simon May reuseste in aceasta carte revolutionara si atent scrisa sa disece ideile aparute de-a lungul vremii despre dragoste si sa arate ca sunt de fapt produsul unei puternici mosteniri culturale. Mergand de-a lungul a peste 2500 de ani de-a lungul istoriei, May arata cum idealul nostru despre dragoste s-a dezvoltat din originile sale ebraice si grecesti, ulterior alaturi de valorile crestine, pana in urma cu doua secole sintagma „Dumnezeu este dragoste“ s-a transformat in „Dragostea este Dumnezeu“.
Dragostea: neconditionala, altruista, neschimbata si sincera, este vazuta in lumea occidentala ca si „crezul universal“. Filosoful Simon May reuseste in aceasta carte revolutionara si atent scrisa sa disece ideile aparute de-a lungul vremii despre dragoste si sa arate ca sunt de fapt produsul unei puternici mosteniri culturale. Mergand de-a lungul a peste 2500 de ani de-a lungul istoriei, May arata cum idealul nostru despre dragoste s-a dezvoltat din originile sale ebraice si grecesti, ulterior alaturi de valorile crestine, pana in urma cu doua secole sintagma „Dumnezeu este dragoste“ s-a transformat in „Dragostea este Dumnezeu“.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published June 28, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
March 22, 2017
Without a history of love and lovers, would we know how to love? Simon May suggests an interesting and new approach in describing love within a historical-discursive framework.
The novelty comes from defining love as “ontological rootedness”, “the rapture we feel for people and things that inspire in us the hope of an indestructible grounding for our life. It is a rapture that sets us off on – and sustains – the long search for a secure relationship between our being and theirs”. Love seen as an existential grounding based on otherness results in the disintegration of the myth of unconditional love.
Another notable development in the philosophy of love is the author’s thesis about love`s deification: the history of the idea of love from “God is love” to “Love is god”. He describes the last phase in terms of hybris and argues that love comes to satisfy the religious needs of the modern man, something that Nietzsche did not realise when he lamented: “Almost two thousand years – and not a single new god!”; “Love plays God”, as Simon May had the wit to reply.
To show the construction and deconstruction of an emotion, the author should have insisted more on the Orphic mystery cults and Assyro-Babylonian mythology when depicting the roots of the idea of love. However, for the purpose of the book, how Plato and the Judaic tradition view love is revealing enough, since these sources are not only more influential in Western culture, but also a synthesis of the above.
One of the book‘s shortcomings is the fact that in the chapter dedicated to this problem the author argues that “God loves them [Israel‘s people] as the guardians of his law; and his choosing of them to receive the law, given to Moses on Mount Sinai, is itself an act of his love”. Scholars in history of religions have concluded that the early religion of Israel (before the prophets) was based not on love, but on fear. Israel‘s God as a moral and loving divinity would have been impossible to imagine before Jeremiah and Isaiah. Simon May acknowledges that Yahweh can be cruel, but it resolves into “[t]his is how all love works.” Nevertheless, his argument is reinforced by the idea that not the moral comportment evokes love, but what he calls “ontological rootedness”.
The book focuses on four major changes regarding how love was perceived over the course of time in Western cultures, starting from the premise that “the emotion of love is universal, but the way this emotion gets interpreted varies greatly from one society and epoch to another.” The author uses four formulae in order to illustrate the paradigm shifts of the particular emotion – the value of love, the power to love, the object of love, and the lover. The procession of forms through history indicates a slow but certain deification of love: from love directed to God as a supreme virtue, to a transcending force meant to elevate the human condition to a divine level, to love as an emotion worthy of any human with the same intensity that was formerly reserved to God, and finally, to a potency of being authentic through love, to “actualise his own nature” . From exploring beyond individual, to exploring the individual, and from manifestation of love for and to God, to love for the sake of love, these are the cultural transformations.
Excerpt from the review published in Philobiblon – Vol. XX (2015) No.1.
The novelty comes from defining love as “ontological rootedness”, “the rapture we feel for people and things that inspire in us the hope of an indestructible grounding for our life. It is a rapture that sets us off on – and sustains – the long search for a secure relationship between our being and theirs”. Love seen as an existential grounding based on otherness results in the disintegration of the myth of unconditional love.
Another notable development in the philosophy of love is the author’s thesis about love`s deification: the history of the idea of love from “God is love” to “Love is god”. He describes the last phase in terms of hybris and argues that love comes to satisfy the religious needs of the modern man, something that Nietzsche did not realise when he lamented: “Almost two thousand years – and not a single new god!”; “Love plays God”, as Simon May had the wit to reply.
To show the construction and deconstruction of an emotion, the author should have insisted more on the Orphic mystery cults and Assyro-Babylonian mythology when depicting the roots of the idea of love. However, for the purpose of the book, how Plato and the Judaic tradition view love is revealing enough, since these sources are not only more influential in Western culture, but also a synthesis of the above.
One of the book‘s shortcomings is the fact that in the chapter dedicated to this problem the author argues that “God loves them [Israel‘s people] as the guardians of his law; and his choosing of them to receive the law, given to Moses on Mount Sinai, is itself an act of his love”. Scholars in history of religions have concluded that the early religion of Israel (before the prophets) was based not on love, but on fear. Israel‘s God as a moral and loving divinity would have been impossible to imagine before Jeremiah and Isaiah. Simon May acknowledges that Yahweh can be cruel, but it resolves into “[t]his is how all love works.” Nevertheless, his argument is reinforced by the idea that not the moral comportment evokes love, but what he calls “ontological rootedness”.
The book focuses on four major changes regarding how love was perceived over the course of time in Western cultures, starting from the premise that “the emotion of love is universal, but the way this emotion gets interpreted varies greatly from one society and epoch to another.” The author uses four formulae in order to illustrate the paradigm shifts of the particular emotion – the value of love, the power to love, the object of love, and the lover. The procession of forms through history indicates a slow but certain deification of love: from love directed to God as a supreme virtue, to a transcending force meant to elevate the human condition to a divine level, to love as an emotion worthy of any human with the same intensity that was formerly reserved to God, and finally, to a potency of being authentic through love, to “actualise his own nature” . From exploring beyond individual, to exploring the individual, and from manifestation of love for and to God, to love for the sake of love, these are the cultural transformations.
Excerpt from the review published in Philobiblon – Vol. XX (2015) No.1.
March 7, 2015
There is one point made in this book ; Love (following the death of God) has replaced religion as the source of meaning for human life, and this places an intolerable burden on the very fallible nature of individual human beings. It's an obvious, but profound point, and one that has been made by several existentialist philosophers in the past. The author drops this thesis in the first couple of chapters, but then goes on a historical survey of the different ways love has been regarded by different strands of thinking in Western philosophy. It sounds like a good idea, but the text is dogged down by turgid prose and unnecessary (or at least it seemed to me) detours, leading to an unsatisfying reading experience. It bears all the hallmarks and negative stereotypes of academics writing for academics. Despite my strong interest in the subject, I freely admit that I was unable to finish this book.
February 19, 2021
More like 3.5 stars but whatever. The concepts explored in this novel were really well done. The concept that love is a form of divinity and also a form of suffering were really compelling to me. I think it went a little too heavy on the "God is love" concept and was a little dense for my tastes. I think I took one or two micronaps over the course of this book tbh. Overall though it was really fascinating to read and dive into the concept of love with. Love is already so hard to define and I think this book did a really good job exploring any and all defintions that occurred of it over history.
March 21, 2024
The conclusion and the chapters on Old and New Testament are well-written and convincing. The notions of unconditional or cosmopolitan love are not, May shows, directly derivable from Jesus' deeds and speeches. He claims to give a truer picture of love in the Bible, and the way it encourages humans to love god, he later explains, if not carried to the extreme, and seen as the striving for what he labels "ontological rootedness," can serve as the appropriate model for our age (that deifies love too much) for interpersonal relations.
I admire May's ambition to address contemporary issues of value as a philosopher, and the prose is smooth and charming. He never runs out of nice ways to generalize a thinker's idea. But I do feel the middle chapters on troubadors, Spinoza, Freud, etc. are a bit too thinly researched and May seems to have lost the thread of the book midway through. Minor complaints though.
I admire May's ambition to address contemporary issues of value as a philosopher, and the prose is smooth and charming. He never runs out of nice ways to generalize a thinker's idea. But I do feel the middle chapters on troubadors, Spinoza, Freud, etc. are a bit too thinly researched and May seems to have lost the thread of the book midway through. Minor complaints though.
October 6, 2016
While the book's subject matter is of infinite interest to me, its presentation didn't fulfill my expectations. I appreciate research, but not without a point of view or some kind of synthesis. I expected to be changed or at least challenged, but I feel I would have done better to just read the work of the authors cited in it.
October 13, 2017
I first heard of Simon May after listening to Philosophy Bites, a british podcast. I have listened to that episode about 30 times, and each time I listen I gain new perspectives on how and why we love. This book is an expanded version of that podcast, delving deeper into how love grounds us in the world.
January 16, 2015
Farklı kişilerden farklı bakış açıları ele alınmış. Dili yer yer ağır ve yavaş bir okuma gerektiriyor. Aşkın dinler, filozoflar, düşünür ve edebiyatçılar için ifade ettiği şeyleri merak edenler okusun derim :)
April 24, 2016
This was a slow burn, but it was worth it.
April 3, 2024
What a wan and passionless product of what should be a fascinating project! I kept waiting for May to come alive, but it never happened. He states his thesis cursorily up front (that love is the feeling of ontological rootedness, and that the Western world has supplanted god with love as its ultimate source of value but the concept can't bear the weight), so I expected some further explication of his definition of love after the historical survey. But it never arrived! The last chapter sees him slagging off some other theorists of love but leaves his own position supported only by vague gesturing. Maaaaybe "ontological rootedness" is a good way to describe some aspects of love, but it hardly seems the final word May wants to grant it. How does it explain the allure of the bad boy or girl, or distinguish between different kinds of love? Isn't "ontological rootedness" just an awkward way to describe value -- that which gives us a sense of meaning? Seems a bit facile to say "love is what gives us the feeling of meaningfulness in our lives." No doubt true but too gaseous to hold much explanatory power.
The historical survey is a little better, but not by much. May highlights important sources and thinkers in the history of the concept, including the Hebrew Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Ovid, Augustine, French troubadours, Spinoza, the German Romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust, among others. His outline seems pretty reasonable from a distance, but like a pointillist painting, doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. He gives Wikipedia-level analysis of his subjects, often eliding important distinctions and giving more of a pop-culture level gloss. For instance, his primary takeaway from Spinoza is that he declared God and nature to be the same thing (i.e., pantheism). Clare Carlisle convincingly dismantled this view in Spinoza's Religion, showing that "Deus sive Natura" was not a load-bearing principle of Spinoza's thought, which might be better characterized as non-interventionist panentheism. Perhaps that's ancillary to May's points, but it heavily damages his credibility to confidently state things that just aren't quite right. The only thinker where I really trusted him to get under the hood was Proust, and that's pretty late in a book full of dissatisfying critical theorizing.
I remain deeply interested in the subject of this book, which made its failures all the more frustrating. I'd recommend looking elsewhere for anything more than a surface-level survey though. Maybe I'll go back to Denis de Rougement, another predecessor May is quick to denigrate but who offers a much richer analytical experience. I might recommend this to college freshmen but probably not to anyone seeking greater depth. 2.5/5
The historical survey is a little better, but not by much. May highlights important sources and thinkers in the history of the concept, including the Hebrew Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Ovid, Augustine, French troubadours, Spinoza, the German Romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust, among others. His outline seems pretty reasonable from a distance, but like a pointillist painting, doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. He gives Wikipedia-level analysis of his subjects, often eliding important distinctions and giving more of a pop-culture level gloss. For instance, his primary takeaway from Spinoza is that he declared God and nature to be the same thing (i.e., pantheism). Clare Carlisle convincingly dismantled this view in Spinoza's Religion, showing that "Deus sive Natura" was not a load-bearing principle of Spinoza's thought, which might be better characterized as non-interventionist panentheism. Perhaps that's ancillary to May's points, but it heavily damages his credibility to confidently state things that just aren't quite right. The only thinker where I really trusted him to get under the hood was Proust, and that's pretty late in a book full of dissatisfying critical theorizing.
I remain deeply interested in the subject of this book, which made its failures all the more frustrating. I'd recommend looking elsewhere for anything more than a surface-level survey though. Maybe I'll go back to Denis de Rougement, another predecessor May is quick to denigrate but who offers a much richer analytical experience. I might recommend this to college freshmen but probably not to anyone seeking greater depth. 2.5/5
October 16, 2019
I am doing some research on love and to determine what a curriculum on love (learning to be mor loving) would look like. I decided to begin with Simon May's book because it is a history of love. The premise in the introduction is that we as a culture have moved from God is love to Love is God. He is saying we need a good philosophy of love in order to question our current beliefs about love and re-think how we have come to believe what we believe about love: it is eternal, unconditional and selfless. There are a lot of "how to" books which are more of a psychology of love but we do not want to think deeply about what love really is. We want it to be the answer to every problem we have.
I found the Introduction and the first chapter or two really drew me into the exploration. The next two chapters show that a philosophy of love used to be and was grounded in Plato and Aristotle. But as he continued on I could not understand why he picked some of the people he picked to represent centuries of belief about love. He goes to great lengths to explain their view but not how it is connected the past or future. At least I had a difficult time seeing the time line. Not that he never did this but I just seemed to get mired down and felt myself plodding through this book. At the end, chapter 17, he does connect with the first chapter and does a good summary.
The contribution that I appreciated was his belief that love is "ontological grounding", it gives us definition and establishes our place in the world. People who help us feel grounded are people we fall in love with, connect with. He is saying this is the primary purpose of love, not pleasure, security, protection from evil or pain etc. It is a deeper connection than just a feeling we have for someone or something. He does deconstruct how God is the source of love for all people and he is definitely no a fan of using God's love for us (if there is a G0d) as a model of how we should love God or one another. He uses the Christian tradition and biblical foundation as the root of our misunderstanding. Perhaps it is our misinterpretation of the Bible that has brought us to our current state of belief.
I found helpful insights in this book that may become more important as I move on to other authors in my exploration.
I found the Introduction and the first chapter or two really drew me into the exploration. The next two chapters show that a philosophy of love used to be and was grounded in Plato and Aristotle. But as he continued on I could not understand why he picked some of the people he picked to represent centuries of belief about love. He goes to great lengths to explain their view but not how it is connected the past or future. At least I had a difficult time seeing the time line. Not that he never did this but I just seemed to get mired down and felt myself plodding through this book. At the end, chapter 17, he does connect with the first chapter and does a good summary.
The contribution that I appreciated was his belief that love is "ontological grounding", it gives us definition and establishes our place in the world. People who help us feel grounded are people we fall in love with, connect with. He is saying this is the primary purpose of love, not pleasure, security, protection from evil or pain etc. It is a deeper connection than just a feeling we have for someone or something. He does deconstruct how God is the source of love for all people and he is definitely no a fan of using God's love for us (if there is a G0d) as a model of how we should love God or one another. He uses the Christian tradition and biblical foundation as the root of our misunderstanding. Perhaps it is our misinterpretation of the Bible that has brought us to our current state of belief.
I found helpful insights in this book that may become more important as I move on to other authors in my exploration.
August 28, 2022
Love is a mysterious thing! It is a word peppered through almost any vocabulary but its definition seems remarkably fluid. I am constantly attempting to settle on its ultimate meaning in my life, as it seems my heart is hell-bent on its pursuit (with rather complicated results, thus far, I must confess.) I found this book while searching for ideas around personality type and identity. I'm always interested in the history of philosophical thought and the origins of our modern concepts of Love (a thing that Hollywood has co-opted to rather devastating results.) It seems so odd to me that the current expressions and pursuit of love, sex, and relationship are so assumed when our history as a species is littered with vastly differing perspectives and understandings.
This book serves as a rich and poetic examination of how those ideas have changed, shifted, and subverted throughout time in their meanings. I wrote down many a quote! And! In conclusion, am still uncertain. But! In my quest to understand love, this book holds a rather foundational place and will richly reward anyone who would wander through its passages.
I was also pleasantly surprised to find much rich insight into my own religious roots as it dug deeply into the implication of both Jewish and Christian understandings of love as defined by their various traditions. It also housed some rather striking critiques of both teachings that were plenty food for my voracious thinking.
Highly recommended for the interested, for those wandering on the great pilgrimage of love.
This book serves as a rich and poetic examination of how those ideas have changed, shifted, and subverted throughout time in their meanings. I wrote down many a quote! And! In conclusion, am still uncertain. But! In my quest to understand love, this book holds a rather foundational place and will richly reward anyone who would wander through its passages.
I was also pleasantly surprised to find much rich insight into my own religious roots as it dug deeply into the implication of both Jewish and Christian understandings of love as defined by their various traditions. It also housed some rather striking critiques of both teachings that were plenty food for my voracious thinking.
Highly recommended for the interested, for those wandering on the great pilgrimage of love.
February 14, 2018
In LOVE: A HISTORY, Simon May chronicles the evolution of Love through the ages, from the Hebrew scriptures to the works of well-known philosophers that have influenced and permeated pop culture. He shows the complex tapestry of Love with all its contradictions as the work of many minds over several thousand years and that in the end it's always up to us to come up with our own definitons.
His core idea is that Love has developed from a devine power to a God in its own right. With the rise of atheism, more and more people embrace Love as some kind of last resort: Love is divine, love is eternal, it surpasses all boundaries and is supposedly the biggest force in the universe.
May's book is a hard read but for me it was well worth it.
His core idea is that Love has developed from a devine power to a God in its own right. With the rise of atheism, more and more people embrace Love as some kind of last resort: Love is divine, love is eternal, it surpasses all boundaries and is supposedly the biggest force in the universe.
May's book is a hard read but for me it was well worth it.
July 10, 2019
“In 2 cuvinte”: din punct de vedere informativ, este o lucrare foarte buna prin trecerea cu un ochi peste curentele filosofice, ce au stârnit gânduri și discuții despre iubire. Desigur, autorul și-a lăsat amprenta prin comentariile la fiecare aspect ce tine de iubire și, un fel de, istorie a ei. De ce “un fel de”? Deoarece nu cred ca ar putea exista o istorie a unei simțiri, emoții, sentiment. Însă ca noțiune, cred ca are dreptul la propria sa istorie...:)
*din punct de vedere stilistic, cartea mi s-a părut destul de greoaie in lectura. Multe fraze întortocheate, gânduri expuse, pe-alocuri neînțelegând acestea sunt gândurile autorului sau “celui pus sub întrebare”. Ori traducerea e de vina?!...
*din punct de vedere stilistic, cartea mi s-a părut destul de greoaie in lectura. Multe fraze întortocheate, gânduri expuse, pe-alocuri neînțelegând acestea sunt gândurile autorului sau “celui pus sub întrebare”. Ori traducerea e de vina?!...
April 4, 2018
Everyone should read this book. They should teach it in school. Love has become our God. We have been taught to pursue it, to nurture it and follow it forever. But love has not always been perceived in such a light: it has been presented as a madness, a burden upon us, and endowing is with responsibilities. Moreover, the Greeks did not talk of one love, but two-eros and agape- and, over time, it seems that the two have merged. We place so much importance on love but it so often disappoints us. However, these disappointments, arguably, come from our misunderstandings about love. Anyway, if it was not already obvious, I found this book fascinating and accessible.
October 25, 2021
There are some really bad takes in this book. Mostly that the notion of love is one that belongs to the Christian faith, that humans aren’t self-sufficient (but God helps us try to be), and the author uses slurs for developmentally disabled individuals. I can’t believe Yale University Press let something *this bad* get published. There are plenty of other books that provide better ideas of love than one attached to the idea that there is no love if the Christian god isn’t involved.
September 12, 2020
May provides a helpful background for conceptualizations of love in Western secular and religious contexts. He calls into question some commonly held views; the book is a worthwhile read. "Love: A History and Theory" might be a more accurate title.
Read
February 18, 2023Learned very few new things. Lots of sophistry in his writing, and lots of repetition. The book would have been more honest if it was shorter, and if he had grouped the different authors/frameworks in 3 major groups.
March 12, 2023
I guess the title should probably be Love, A Western History because it's mostly about traditions of Western philosophy. Anyway I have loved this book because it's a good way to get some kind of overview of the topic. I haven't yet found a book that would do it better, even though I'd really love to find one that would have a geographically wider perspective. I think May's book is a decent way to start with. Also his hypothesis that love would be a sense of rootedness, belonging, home, I find it quite interesting.
May 16, 2012
The main premise for this book is that the spread of atheism has led to love becoming the supreme virtue, replacing God. However, humans, being human, are incapable of unconditional love and May finds the attempt creating expectations that are impossible to fill. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing throughout his journey through the history of the philosophy of love. I intend to rework through this book as a reference.
March 20, 2012
"My suggestion is that we will love only those (very rare) people or things or ideas or disciplines or landscapes that can inspire in us a promise of ontological rootedness."
Very interesting take on the historical development of Western ideas of love. Made me question some of the things I take for granted about it.
Very interesting take on the historical development of Western ideas of love. Made me question some of the things I take for granted about it.
March 29, 2014
Very informative. A tad wordy for my taste. Over all I enjoyed the historical content. I also enjoyed the connections made between religious, philosophical, literary figures, and how their work influenced the way people thought about love. It really made it clear that our ideas about love influences our personal lives, our culture, and the way societies interacts with one another.
February 1, 2017
An examination of how the notion of love has changed since antiquity, and what some of the great thinkers had to say on the subject. Not the easiest to read in places, but highly recommended for those of a philosophical bent.
November 23, 2012
Thought provoking.
April 27, 2015
Cartea cuprinde aspecte profund cercetate din istorie şi filosofie. Recomand a se citi în doze mici.
Read
January 5, 2019Very interesting, informative, insightful intellectual history of key moments in the development of conceptions of love in the Western tradition with a clear and insightful philosophical theory to frame and interpret them
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews