I'm just finishing up All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks. In it, she talks about love as an action.
She frequently quotes Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, which seems good as well.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_Love:_New_Visions
She frequently quotes Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, which seems good as well.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_Love:_New_Visions
"It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. [...]"
love(x, y) = x has the active concern for the life and the growth of y
"Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love" only says that "if x has no active concern about y, love is zero".
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. This is the same fallacy which I have already mentioned above. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."