All You Need Is Love -- and a Good Prose Style

I have just finished reading a profound and elegantly written little book by Harry G. Frankfurt, a philosopher and author of the best-selling and even smaller On Bullshit. I read that volume, with dimensions only slightly larger than a commemorative postage stamp, last September in Virginia, where my family and I fled a hurricane that never arrived (at least not here in Houston). I enjoyed On Bullshit for its clarity, lack of pretension, common sense and good humor – qualities rare in the writing of almost every philosopher since David Hume, and certainly necessary qualities for a productive examination of bullshit.

Frankfurt’s earlier book, The Reasons of Love, is even deeper and wiser, and reads like a lifetime’s distillation of learning and living. Each of its 100 pages is worthy of quotation, but when did you last read a footnote you wanted to copy and save in your commonplace book? This, from page 21:

“The inner lives of human beings are obscure, not only to others but to themselves as well. People are elusive. We tend to be poorly informed about our own attitudes and desires, and about where our commitments truly lie. It is useful to keep in mind, then, that a person may care about something a great deal without realizing that he cares about it. It is also possible that someone really does not care in the slightest about certain things, even though he sincerely believes that he considers those things to be extremely important to him.”

To encounter such clarity on the subject of obscurity is a rare blessing. I accept that final sentence as a personal reproach, especially to my younger self, though my middle-aged self is hardly blameless. The effort I exerted to be knowledgeably and enthusiastically hip about various things I thought I should admire and enjoy – say, the music of Cecil Taylor or the poetry of Charles Olson – was exhausting but effective. I thought I liked them and convinced myself I did. I certainly wanted to like them, and I suspect that’s the way many people, who have internalized post-modern peer pressure, feel about much of the avant-garde in general.

But that’s a digression, and Frankfurt has more significant issues to explore, though it’s a measure of his book’s richness that even seemingly casual asides never end in cul-de-sacs but rather open broadly on vast landscapes of thought and feeling. His real focus is an examination of self-love as the basis of true human existence, the species of love in which all other expressions of love are rooted. Summarized thus, you might mistake Frankfurt for a pudding-headed preacher of self-esteem, but his insights, if assessed with open eyes, will never be mistaken for the bromides of pop psychology.

On the subject of our love for our children, Frankfurt’s words moistened my eyes: “I can declare with unequivocal confidence that I do not love my children because I am aware of some value that inheres in them independent of my love of them. The fact is that I loved them even before they were born – before I had any especially relevant information about their personal characteristics or their particular merits and virtues.”

Frankfurter philosophizes with his entire being, not merely with the part that is forever whispering, “Doubt! Question!”

The philosophers Frankfurt – himself an emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton -- cites most often are Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and Kierkegaard. The absence of Heidegger, Derrida and their fashionable ilk is bracing. I detected no hot air in his pages – no bullshit, to return to that other object of Frankfurt’s attention – nor is a technical knowledge of Western philosophy necessary for appreciating his text, which started as lectures he delivered at Princeton and University College London. His words embody clarity of thought and expression, which are themselves, I think, a form of love.