Dr Tom Kerns
North Seattle Community College

 

A Very Few
Valuable and Interesting Books
on Love and Eros

The mystery of what love is and/or is not has been a persistent theme among writers, poets, thinkers and pretty much everyone else in the western world (and elsewhere too).

Here are a few of the more intriguing writings representing different ideas about love.

• C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. A description and analysis of the four different kinds of love designated by the Greek terms philia (friendship), eros (passionate love), storgé (easy comfortableness together), and agapé (selflessly willing good for another)
  
• Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. Fromm argues that love is not something that one falls passively into, but that real love is an art form, a skill that can be learned
  
• Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde. Denis de Rougemont, in his study of erotic love titled Love in the Western World, says that this story forms the basis of all other love stories in the West, from Romeo and Juliet to AM Rock love songs
  
• Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice, a theology of the relationship between these three fundamental principles
  
• Plato, The Phaedrus,The Symposium, Plato's two Dialogues on the nature of erotic love
  
• The Bible: Song of Solomon,The Gospel of John, treatments of the power of love in both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian New Testament
  
• Schopenhauer, The Metaphysics of the Love Between the Sexes. This is Schopenhauer's analysis of the what erotic love really is

 

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