The Art of Loving

The author has a nice view of nature, but I am not sure what he sees in it and where the love resides in it. Animals eat each other, they hunt, they can barely communicate and among them we are sort of the exception, except we have so many problems of our own.

The author uses concepts like sameness and differentiation, pitting them against each other, not realising that they are all the same, they contain the same problems. Not seeing the limitations of his own created archetypes he gets conclusions like viewing gay love as the lesser love, as if a man contains no femininity of his own. He writes at the end how we have to define love, but at the begining he had no problem setting up some rules. He has some unanalyzed problems concerning women, he sees it reasonable how their life is about giving birth and how man of course just gets to do everything else.

Even though he wants you to not label God as something he also sees no problem as you becoming a part of God.

A lot of what he borrows from psychoanalysis doesn't seem useful as he takes difficult processes and simplifies them to the point they lose their meaning.

I took one positive note:

“I enjoy his thoughts on selfishness. I feel like it's important to define selfishness as “the act which does not benefit you or others in the long term even though you might not realise its consequences shortly after the act.” That way we would all talk about something useful and have a good idea of what is a selfish act. When lay people discuss it they get all sorts of ideas of what it is and it becomes very unproductive and accusatory, confused. The author did not suggest doing this, but I think I am completing his intention here. “

Some parts were too idealistic. “If I love my child, I love all my children; no, beyond that, I love all children, all that are in need of my help.” That's a nice affirmation, but not really how that works. There are a ton of children in need of help and you won't get to them by helping your own child. I feel like in general the author relied on emotion a lot, but did not develop his logic as much.

Overall I think he was trying to do good and all, but good is a part of evil and when you examine yourself you realise that life is more complicated than just trying to do good. Gonna go back to my mothers evil womb like a vegan, homosexual, feminine, little gremlin that I am (insert more labels please).