The nicely printed and well presented book is composed of five parts and 36 chapters, preceded by an Introduction and followed by Notes, Bibliography, and an Index. To the still developing literature on love it adds a new approach which is to see love as “our joyful response to a promise of ontological rootedness” (xiii). May devotes a great deal of research to identify the meaning and the sense of love in the existence of human beings. In the last paragraph of the study he concludes modestly that discussing the issue is only auxiliary to experiencing it and that “[o]nly by approaching such questioning afresh might love, honored for its specifically human qualities, rather than for divine powers that we hubristically arrogate to it, enchant – in new, privately constituted ways – our now long-disenchanted world.” (237) And in this lies May’s book’s greatest merit: to see it as intrinsically human.

In the Part I (Dead Ends: Why We Need a New Understanding of Love, 1-35) May first argues that the very nature of love is neglected as topic, even if, as he says, there is more interest in love than ever before. May complains that no existing theory gives a sufficient answer to the question why one loves one person rather than another and he constructs his theory in order to fill this lacuna. His recurring claim is that the modern view of love is a secularized version of agape. This is so because the former inherits the latter’s four features: unconditionality, disinterestedness, being everlasting and all-affirming. May presents next the six major conceptions of love in Western world (love as responsibility for one’s neighbour, as desire for ultimate goodness or beauty, as yearning for the wholeness, as friendship, as sexual drive towards satisfaction and reproduction, as agape or caritas). Since all six conceptions do not explain the very nature of love he dismisses them all and thereby sets up the need for a new conception of love.

The Part II (Love: Towards a New Understanding, 37-140) presents, so to speak, a register of 21 issues, questions, and terms May uses to concretize the new conception of love. First a definition: “[…] love – all love – is joy inspired by whomever or whatever we experience as promising us a home in the world” (39; see also 41: “[…] “love” names our joyful response to a promise we glimpse in another to meet this need for rootedness or groundedness or home in a world that we supremely value […]”). In what follows May develops his approach. Notice that some sections are significantly longer than other (e.g. the issue of ethical home is settled as quickly as on less than 2 pages, love and the call to existence on less than 3 pages, and the issue of love and death is solved on 2 pages). This part is a terrain of many claims, few arguments, odd statements (e.g. 113: “the intense friendships that were still common in the nineteenth century”), and surprising confusions (after having told that the love’s true opposite is disgust (see 65) we are informed about love being admixed with disgust (see 110)). Love is generally understood as a promise of ontological rootedness but then we are told that “such promise is the ground of all our great loves” (see 110, compare “all love” above). What about not that great loves and adulation (see below)?

The main problem is, however, that May speaks vaguely and allusively. We are told that a human condition is that of feeling “ontologically ungrounded, unanchored, detached” (40) but this claim is not proved nor is it explained why the only remedy to this condition is love. May speaks about “our ontological fragility” (127) which recalls existentialism. But May is very strict in claiming that his conception is a new one. What ontological rootedness means is explained on less than 5 pages (see ch. 6). In its description May resorts to other vague or metaphorical terms such as “a source of life”, “an ethical home”, and “our sense of existing”, with little or no explanation of what they signify. May is content with stating several facts, some obvious and others questionable. But what is even worse is that he makes the notion of love as capacious as to include various sociological phenomena. For instance, he speaks about “the adulatory love – genuine, I think – of millions for Hitler, Stalin, and other murderous dictators” (47). At this juncture I lose sight of what May’s book is about: whether he intends to construct a theory of genuine love or explains how various phenomena are labelled as love and the likes of it. If it is the former, his new conception of love flies in the face of what many take to be genuine love since they may have trouble in understanding what adulation has to do with ontological rootedness. If the latter, this makes his analysis interesting sociologically but then he should explain “why passion that we were certain was love can evaporate like smoke in the night” (7).

More generally, there are two problems with May’s proposition. First we are not told why is it one person and not another that offers a promise of ontological rootedness. If I am right that he does not make this clear, it means that he replaces one concept by another but the reason he looks for is still missing. I would like to know what is the necessary and sufficient condition of the ontological rootedness. Second, it is not clear what is the kernel of the new theory, since initially May focuses on “ontological rootedness” tout court, but then on “the promise of ontological rootedness”, and finally on “offering a promise of ontological rootedness” (not to mention the lover’s very seeing of the beloved as offering a promise of ontological rootedness). What is it important to love then? Ontological rootedness itself, a promise of it or an offer of its promise? Are they simultaneous or consecutive? If it is an offer of a promise, may the promise not be kept and still love be in progress? It is true that often love is an epistemic affair and that love depends on the way of viewing the other in a particular light. However, a relationship in which the epistemic capacity is deficient and the recognition of the value of the beloved is erroneous, is not what we consider as paradigmatic love. May offers little room for inference about this when he says that “[l]ove can die, I am suggesting, only if we come to see (sic!) the loved one as no longer offering, or as somehow refusing, a promise of ontological rootedness […]” (94). But if so, more should be said about the epistemic factors in founding love and on what exactly are its foundations. A promise and an offer are a business of both the lover and the beloved and both may commit an epistemic error here. More felicitous is May’s claim that “we can count ourselves fortunate if, throughout our life, we meet just one or a few people in whom we glimpse a powerful promise of ontological rootedness.” (48), since it suggests that it may be that one never in her life meets her beloved. But this, again, stands in obvious contradiction with what is claimed in last part (see below). For if any parent is offered a promise of ontological rootedness from his child, love is not particularly a matter of fortune.

The Part III (Narratives of Love as Rootedness, 141-161) is devoted to two narratives, the Bible and the Odyssey. In May’s view, the former is about love as a discovery of home and the latter is about love as a recovery of home. According to him, the two covenants between God and Abraham and between God and Moses articulate precisely the promise of ontological rootedness, and therefore, of love for God. This may sound odd to some given that May is clear about human beings’ obedience to the law that structures this promise (see 143, 147, also 148: “obedience is fundamental to autonomy”) which makes think more about the language of transactional analysis or contract than that of love (see 145). As for the Odyssey May arranges, I am afraid, the text to his purpose: it is true that he speaks about ten years of return of Odysseus but he does not explain satisfactorily how does Odysseus’ seven years passed with Calypso (see 156: “seven years in her erotic magic”), and one year with Circe square with his new conception of love. It looks as fidelity is not an issue within May’s conception (there is no such entry in his Index either). Neither is there an explanation of Odysseus’ immediate departure from Ithaca (according to some sources, after one night), even if May remarks the fact (see 159 & 161). And he also commits patent errors as when saying that “before he [i.e. Odysseus] is confronted by the suitors, there are the tests of recognition – and of loyalty – of those close to him […] his wife; and his father.” (160). Finally, he concludes with a truism: “Odysseus […] has returned to the same country but, inwardly, to a new world.” (161) Nonetheless, this part is significant in showing how much the Hebrew and the Greek accounts differ (for more see T. Zielinski, Our Debt to Antiquity, 1909).

The Part IV (How is Love Related to Beauty, Sex, and Goodness?, 163-189) is a discussion, contrary to what the title suggests, of the relation of love to beauty and sex, then to the ugly and the evil. This is, I think, philosophically the most questionable part of the book. Beauty is not the basis for love because, so claims May, we do not love people and things in proportion to their beauty. Rather seeing the beloved person or thing as beautiful is the consequence of love: those loved appear in a special light and are easily idealized, both for their beauty and for their goodness to the extent that one may, when in love, find beautiful what was ugly for him before he fell in love with this person or object. Yet beauty facilitates love (see 168: “it opens a door to the other”). Same for sex. It may bring a promise of ontological rootedness but it does not have to do so. If it does, it “rivets us so intensely to another person that we are able to see their promise of ontological rootedness, and so to fall genuinely in love with them.” (169) But May fails to say when sex expresses love. Instead he muddles things further with a new label: “erotic love” (170). And even more amazing is May’s claim that one may love someone for her ugliness. But since May does not provide any argument why it may be so, nor is he precise enough as to clarify whether he means ugly qua ugly or ugly qua beautiful it is difficult to speculate. Since he maintains that beauty opens a door to love, it is natural to think that the ugly closes it. But this does not mean that it would be impossible to love the ugly, especially if it constitutes a third- or fourth-order feature of the person or thing loved (think about Aristotle’s useful friendship: supposedly the physical aspect is then indifferent). This is rather, as May says himself, a love despite finding the object ugly and not because it is ugly.

Yet puzzling is May’s claim that we can love evil (I suppose he means evil qua evil and not despite being evil or evil qua good in which case it would be a purely verbal distinction). In arguing so, May is again vague. He starts with Augustine’s enjoyment of stealing. But to enjoy stealing is – it seems – not identical to loving it, let alone viewing stealing as offering a promise of ontological rootedness. Consequently it looks as for this purpose May inflates the meaning of love to anything which one does. If, however, loving evil is doing evil and, also, if doing evil is being destructive or being a mass murder, one may then ask why doesn’t the doer destroy himself in the first place in order to realize his ““death instinct” […] will to nothingness” (187) and his “will to nonbeing” (189). May does not consider such objections and instead he goes on saying that experiencing (not loving?) evil offers a home in the world insofar as it is a part of life as a whole. But this is a trifle, since if so, then anything or everything which is part of life as a whole should be experienced (or loved?) because it is part of the life. Yet it is even not evident if our home in the world equals to life as a whole. Only for those who answer in the affirmative May’s claim makes sense though even then it should be clarified that experience stands for love.

The last part (The Child as the New Supreme Object of Love, 191-237) opens with restating the gist of this book. May then elaborates on his final thesis which is that the model of parental love is replacing in a historically unprecedented and revolutionary way the model of romantic way. May claims that “the child has never been the archetypal object of love” (197) and he expands on the place of children in the society in the past. Next he illustrates how “the child is becoming the archetypal object of love” (199). According to May parental love reaches the autonomy of the lover and distinctness of the beloved party to a higher degree than it is the case in romantic love. Unclear to me is why the fact that having children is increasingly a decision (because of “moral and technical developments”, 205) should have an impact on the quality of parental love. May makes several valid observations. The problem is, however, that a lot of what he says here (and also in his conclusion: 233-237) has been already noted by others, even if in different words. These are some names that May omits: Françoise Dolto (La cause des enfants, 1985), Saint-Exupéry but also Korczak (How to Love a Child, 1919), Rudolf Steiner, not to mention Kochanowski’s Laments. May ignores also the passage from Plato’s Phaedrus (249a) about the exceptional status of those who love children in a philosophical way (see 218; he is so critical of Plato throughout his book that he does not realize that sometimes he subscribes to Plato’s thesis, e.g. “[l]ove for the particular is in every sense prior to love for the general” (132)). Similarly his remark that “for parental love hearing and sight are co-dominant with touch” (219) has been known to haptonomists.

The next two chapters of this part recap the reasons against romantic love’s and friendship’s being good candidate for archetypal love. Romantic love “is no longer in tune with the deepest needs and sensibility of the age” (227) and “friendship is not committed […] to maintaining the distinctness between lover and loved one” (229). I think it is doubtful if all conceptions of friendship posits such kind of “sacred principle”. And please note yet another of May’s infelicitous shortcuts: “Achilles died to (sic!) avenge the honor of his friend […]” (224). The last chapter is a conclusion which reveals what should have been probably said from the beginning: that the perspective of the author is sociological. From this angle it may be accepted that the ideals we are interested in are to be judged from the point of view of modernity (and not sub specie æternitatis). Having adopted such view one will agree more easily that “the priority of the child is arguably a natural correlate of the feminist revolution” (230) and will endorse the idea of “the overwhelming value that each of us […] as a creature of our times, already recognizes as inhering in any child of our own, even if it is yet to be born.” (232). Finally, in his conclusion May makes an Orwelian claim: “[…] a good parent will foster the flourishing and protect the lives of all her children equally; but she will most love those who inspire in her the deepest sense of groundedness […]” (235).

To sum up. May does not say what ontological rootedness exactly is, why does one person rather than another offer a promise of ontological rootedness, nor what exactly does the promise and the offer consist in. May’s approach is not clearly determined: sometimes it is descriptive and includes observations made by May, sometimes it is normative and is about what love ideally could or should be. A discussion whether love is an emotion at all is glossed over. As it happens, there is no agreement on that in current literature. For some it is a sentiment and others assume that love is a disposition or – another claim – that it is an attitude. There are also certain oddities of style. For instance André Comte-Sponville is introduced without further ado but Max Scheler is a “Catholic philosopher” (12, why not a phenomenologist is another question). Arguments are often replaced by ex cathedra statements, e.g. “[…] we increasingly rely on human love to supply the consolations of the God in whom so many no longer believe […]” (p. xii – who is we?). May almost permanently refers to his previous book and sometimes recurs to second hand quotes. His omissions are numerous and various, not only in relation to the topic of love (e.g. de Sousa, Brogaard, Ben Ze’ev, also Wojtyla, and, first and foremost, Plato’s analysis of friendship in the Lysis) but also when he digresses, e.g. on violence in christianity (see 86), important works are absent. From what precedes it is manifest that the book under review has relatively little philosophical value. It would probably be better read as a collection of essays for a large audience interested in history of religion and cultural studies. Unless I am mistaken and May’s book does indeed pave the way for what academic books are about to become in the near future.

Ⓒ 2020 Robert Zaborowski

Robert Zaborowski, thymos2001@yahoo.fr

University of Warmia and Mazury

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: love, philosophy