Love

What is love's real intent? Why can love be so ruthlessly selective? How is it related to sex beauty and goodness? And is the child now the supreme object of love? <p/>In addressing these questions Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of ontological rootedness rather than as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts by beauty or goodness by a search for wholeness by virtue by sexual or reproductive desire by compassion or altruism or empathy or in one of today's dominant views by no qualities at all of the loved one. <p/>After arguing that such founding Western myths as the <em>Odyssey</em> and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty sex and goodness in the light of this conception offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting against Plato that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). <p/>Finally he proposes that in the Western world romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so he argues that the child is the first genuinely modern supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called the death of God. <p/>Readers will find <em>Love</em> Excitingly new yet immediately recognizable--that's the paradox at the very heart of love and it is what Simon May has achieved. --<em>Los Angeles Review of Books</em><br>