15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary!, March 14, 2006
This review is from: Love: Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor (Paperback)
This is the most extraordinary book on the most extraordinary feature of human life: Romantic Love. Its encyclopeadic scope and content are beyond redaction. Finally, an analytic philosopher undertakes the most underanalyzed emotion of love and expounds on it from every possible vantage. Most of the myths, fantasies, and illusions are swept away, and in their stead is a heady analysis of what love actually is, how it is manifested, and why it may be desired.
The book is fifteen years old, so why am I the first reader to review it on Amazon? If this book is as extraordinary as I claim, why aren't there thousands of previous reviews? I've been stumped by this question for weeks, and I think I have an answer.
Solomon's work is truly encyclopeadic. Perspectives from philosophy, psychology, behavioralism, theology, sociology, literature, history, anthropology, and nearly every conceivable discipline are included. I found this fact to be its strength, but it could also be a liability. If one is not acquainted with major concepts from each of these disciplines, not to mention their seminal writers and works, many of Solomon's observations may appear obscure and opaque. Singular cases of insight might be reduced to "huh," and just passed over.
Perhaps another problem may be involved. Many of us may not want to know what "love really is," and when stripped of all its illusions, myths, and fantasies, maybe what is "really" left does not fit one's idealizations. Instead of clarity and substance, many may prefer their own distortions, hopes, and dreams. Perhaps "love," especially romantic love, is so over-romanticized that peeling away the nonsense leaves one bereft.
Ironically, these two possible objections are the book's biggest strengths. Romantic love is one of many emotions, even several emotions rolled into one, that is simultaneously a cause for joy and a source of friction. Fundamentally, it is a visceral response to an over-intellectualized feeling. As often as it is comforting, it can be a source of angst; as often as we extol it, we frequently berate our "beloveds." So, what gives? How and why can romantic love tie us in knots, and then have us repudiate its very influence? Obviously, many of us have not come to terms with romantic love, and for someone to present it in such clear, stark, and "unromantic" a manner may undermine our confidence in, and our anger over, romantic love.
For me, all these "conflicting" attitudes are necessarily entailed. Maybe, all these seeming contrarieties are at the core of what we mean when we say we're "in love." Romantic love is a constant "tug of war," and for me, that is its singular strength. That's how we "grow" in love. Romantic love is what makes "the other" a part of one's self, and the self often rebels at becoming or identifying with "the other." Perpetual tension is what give romantic love its vitality, its transformative qualities, even its reidentification of ourselves. But facing that reality is sometimes difficult. Perhaps Solomon reaches too close to its truth.
For those strong enough to endure the tension, and those whose knowledge is more encyclopeadic, this book will add insight and clarity to one of the most challenging of human emotions. And the next time you say, "I love you," you might actually "know" what you mean. Not that we ever do, but at least we'll feel closer to what we think we mean.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
LOVE, PHILOSOPHICALLY SPEAKING, September 24, 2010
This review is from: Love: Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor (Paperback)
Robert C. Solomon
Love: Emotion, Myth, & Metaphor
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981) 347 pages
An entertaining book by a philosopher familiar with the history
of love and contemporary attempts to understand it scientifically.
Solomon takes some of the same points of view as found in
New Ways of Loving by James Park,
but he does not work them out as systematically.
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