10 Philosophy Books For Your Perusal (Part 4)

Finally....in case you were wondering...someone who is still alive!

Harry G. Frankfurt 

The Reasons of Love 

I follow up Kierkegaard’s work with this one.  Similar to SK, Frankfurt argues 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.

(Note: This is actually one of the themes SK talks about in another book called Works of Love wherein he argues that we do not do what the Bible says when it tells us to “Love our neighbor as ourselves,” because too many of us do NOT love ourselves.)

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. Harry Frankfurt writes it is through care (Heidegger would have use the word Sorge) that we infuse the world with meaning. This is based upon Frankfurt’s argument in his essay The Importance of What We Care About, found in the collection The Importance of What We Care About, which also contains his most popular work On Bullshit.

"When a person makes something important to himself, accordingly, the situation resembles an instance of divine agape at least in a certain respect."

Caring presents 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. 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.

Love. Philosophy. Wisdom.