PHILOSOPHY

摘要

May (Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; Nietzsche's Ethics and His War on "Morality") finds the key to love in "ontologi-cal rootedness." People want to feel at home in the world, and intense rapture for a particular person can help us achieve this. Though love is thus of vital significance, May warns against exalting love to quasidivine status, a process he argues has taken place since the 18th century, as belief in God has declined in Western societies. Placing love in God's stead has led to distortions about it. Love, contrary to common opinion, is not in essence unconditional, selfless, and eternal. May traces the idea of love as ontological rootedness to its beginning in the Hebrew scriptures. He goes on to consider transformations of the idea through Plato, Aristotle, New Testament Christianity, the Middle Ages, Rousseau and the romantics, Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust.