C.D.C. Reeve - Love's Confusions [2007][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: November 29, 2007
Love's confusions are legion. We promise to love, but we cannot love at will. Love God, we're commanded, but we cannot love on command. And given the vicissitudes of self-love, even if we could love our neighbors as we love ourselves, would it be a good thing to do so? These are a few of the paradoxes that typically lead philosophers to oversimplify love--and that draw C. D. C. Reeve to explore it in all its complexity, searching for the lessons to be found within love's confusions.
Ranging from Plato, who wrote so eloquently on the subject, to writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Proust, Forster, Beckett, Huxley, Lawrence, and Larkin, Reeve brings the vast resources of Western literature and philosophy to bear on the question of love. As he explores the origins of Western thought on the subject, he also turns to the origins of individual experience--the relationship of mother and child, the template of all possible permutations of love--and to the views of such theorists as Freud, Melanie Klein, and Carol Gilligan. At the same time, he uses the story of the prototypical absent father, Odysseus, to demonstrate the importance of reconciling a desire for tenderness with a desire for strength if we are to make the most of love's potentials.
Looking at love in light of the classical world and Christianity, and in its complex relationship with pornography, violence, sadomasochism, fantasy, sentimentality, and jealousy, Reeve invites us to think more broadly about love, and to find the confusions that inevitably result to be creative rather than disturbing.

Editorial Review
From Publishers Weekly
Not a systematic treatise but a "commonplace book" of stories and ideas, this philosophical exploration of love focuses on its conflicts and paradoxes, rather than its joys and raptures. How can Christianity command love of God, when "love doesn't seem to be the sort of thing we can give on command"? How does adult love relate to the infantile desire for one's first love, mother? Reeve, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, also tries to shed light on the tensions between love and its troubled relatives—anxiety, jealousy, sentimentality, pornography and sadomasochism (all brilliantly covered in Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse). The book draws on numerous thinkers, including Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Gilligan, and analyzes examples of love from the works of such writers as Homer, Turgenev, Forster, Kundera and Murdoch. Relying heavily on fictional examples, it has a correspondingly hothouse feel. At times, the discussion is clear, as in assessing the alternation in married life between the humdrum and the romantic. But often the writing is obscure and convoluted (though sometimes beautifully so), as if written from within one of love's paradoxes: "Who I am is as much—and as little—under the authority of others as what love is, and what I must do if I am to love." (Mar.)

Reviews
Understanding the persistence of the past is only the first of the rewards of Love's Confusions. Reeve is also good--good enough to make an honest reader squirm, at times--on anxiety, envy, jealousy, sentimentality, narcissism, and pornography. And it's a pleasure watching him engage with great texts, not only of philosophy--Plato's Symposium, Augustine (there's a thrilling description of orgasm from The City of God), Kant, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch--but also literature: Homer (Reeve astutely explains why Odysseus gave up Calypso to return to Penelope, which many a shallow male, including this writer, has undoubtedly asked himself), Proust (of course), Junichiro Tanizaki, Philip Larkin, Milan Kundera, and Norman Rush's magnificent Mortals. (George Scialabba Boston Globe 2005-02-06)

Love's Confusions takes the reader on a meandering journey with no clear goal but with a lot of learning and discovery along the way. It teases, it entices, it turns your head inside out, and it's a hell of a ride. In that regard, it's a lot like love itself. (Clark Humphrey Seattle Times 2005-06-03)

Love's Confusions testifies to our capacity for learning from the pains and pleasures of love. (Tom D'Evelyn Providence Journal 2005-08-07)

Reeve's Love's Confusions is a courageous and vulnerable book. (Candace Vogler, author of Reasonably Vicious)

About the Author
C. D. C. Reeve is Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.