Recommendations of the Editorial team
Of course, the great literature tells a lot about love, from Shakespeare to Murakami. Anyone who buries themselves in it does not necessarily become an incorrigible romantic, because many of the greatest love stories end up unhappily for a protagonist.
Perhaps it is therefore more a good thing in search of great love to take a look at one or the other theoretical arguments. Here you will find some textbooks that are more and less likely to be felt after this life topic. As a “L’Education sentimental”, so to speak (to say it with an author who understood love like no other). However, they all unite that they can initially hardly be understood as a guide. And yet these books keep some tips ready for life.
Five books that you have to read to understand love
1. The art of love (Erich Fromm)
The great psychoanalyst Erich Fromm actually wanted to write only a small booklet in which he tried to condense the most important theses of his previous work (“The Fear of Freedom”, “Paths from a sick society”). From this one of the largest bestsellers on the subject, devoured by several generations, was praised as clairvoyant in university seminars and dismissed esoterically.
Fromm assumes that one has to learn the ability to love, that she has self -love as a condition and finally urgently needs the development of the whole personality as a prerequisite for success. In other words, if you haven’t found yourself, you will not find anyone else. For him, the basic pillars for the art of loving are discipline, patience, concentration and productive being active. In addition, the humanist, who died in 1980, believed that a sick, destructive society full of narcissists could do nothing but to create unable to love.
2. Fragments of a language of love (Roland Barthes)
One of these unlikely bestsellers. “Fragments of a language of love” appeared in 1977 and immediately became the most popular book by the fun -loving semiologist after his famous “myths of everyday life”. With alphabetically arranged terms and firmly bound to “the suffering of the young Werther” by Goethe, Barthes created a kind of lexicon of love and feeling in which the sacrifices of human coexistence and come together are severely outlined.
Of course, as it should be for an drawing veterinarian, almost every linguistic formula is taken apart who sushes the lovers in the ears every day. The starting point for the book is “fragments of various origins”, as the Frenchman writes in the foreword: personal experiences and conversations with friends, philosophical and psychoanalytic texts and art, music and literature. The resulting assembly results in an adorable, although not always easy to read theoretical puzzle.
3. Love as a passion: to coding intimacy (Niklas Luhmann)
Of course you can’t just read Niklas Luhmann on the train journey to the lover in the distance. The sentences of the sociologist and system theoretics are far too bulky. But just as Fromm explores the social psychological dimension of love and Barthes as a discourse, Luhmann illustrates love as a communicative code. Luhmann also assumes unromantically that love does not come on its own – and he asks how to know what love is and what it demands from you.
It is crucial that love as a code contributes to the fact that the individual is not lost in a structure from politics, economy, culture and education, but gains a right to exist in the first place. Of course, this does not take place in the air empty; Luhmann analyzes literary works from past centuries and is preferably interested in instructions for loving. So his scientific novel itself has become a kind of love guide.
4. The consumption of romance (Eva Illouz)
The Israeli sociologist wrote something like the cult book of the love -hungry, enlightened Generation Y with “love” – because even with the title, the confusion of love is painfully brought to the point at a time at which the theory could be romantic love and the practice, as can be dealt with with the problems that occurred in many years of relationships.
However, her basic work is “the consumption of romance: love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism”, in which multifaceted and with the help of extensive statistical survey is illustrated how love and economy have long since influenced each other. Accordingly, there is no longer any romance without having to invest anything. The American practice of the (supposedly innocent) data, in which a café or bar is first drunk in a café and later a jaunt in your own car, before going down to business, it is exemplary for this dynamic, which has long been retracted and largely questionable. Love has become the preferred place of consumption.
5. Love: why it is so difficult and how she still succeeds (Wilhelm Schmid)
Wilhelm Schmid is probably the best -known representative of life advisory philosophy who pairs her practical tips for a successful life with a passionate investigation of social and psychological abuses. Of course, his advisor is also a kind of “art of loving”, but it attaches great importance to the problems that inevitably occur in a couple relationship, sufficiently and, above all, very practical.
In the series of works listed here, Schmid’s booklet may be the most accessible, which is also due to the fact that the author tries with a lot of humor and foresight to attribute the great issues of philosophy and social theory (Schmid received his doctorate on Michel Foucault). Schmid is aware that it is above all the intensive, prejudice -free view of the other who keeps love going.
Follow the author if you like Twitter And on his Blog (Melancholy Symphony).