内容发布更新时间 : 2024/5/2 12:29:01星期一 下面是文章的全部内容请认真阅读。
Why “Love Is a Fallacy”?
There can be a thousand of definitions of love. Each of them can be correct but not absolutely. In fact love is what cannot be made clear. So at least to this degree it is sensible for Max Shulman to state the idea that love is a fallacy and in this short essay I will try to illustrate why he says so.
Literally, “love is a fallacy” means that there is a deceptive or delusive quality about love. When one falls in love with someone else, his heart may control his brain, thinking his lover the most beautiful around world, seeing only his lover without anything else and desiring to sacrifice everything he has to win his lover. Thus, deceived by love, one may easily indulge oneself in the imaginary feeling and make wrong decisions or mistakes. But that is also the glamour of love: it makes you do the wrong thing but still consider it right.
Moreover, the author wants to express that love cannot be deduced from a set of given premises. That is to say, love cannot be explained by correct logic. One doesn’t need any reason to love somebody or he claims his love for a ridiculous reason. Therefore, in Love Is a Fallacy, “I” cannot depend on Polly to love “me” just because of my intelligence, five evenings spent with her, my sweet words and my helpful logic lessons, etc. Love is not to be demonstrated and made a correct conclusion. For instance, Polly used different fallacies in logic like Hasty Generalization, False Analogy, Dicto Simpliciter and Poisoning the Well to make “me” swallow the fact that love cannot be taken for granted under some given conditions. One can definitely love the other without any reason so one will not change her original love no matter how excellent or wealthy another pursuer is. Love is totally unique and cannot be applied to any logical frame.
From the essay on the textbook the author also tells us that love is a fallacy because it may even have nothing to do with real emotions between lovers when it seems to closely related with material things. One may still say he loves someone and wants to be with someone even when he doesn’t deep in his heart. The raccoon coat is just a representative of materials things like money, houses, cars, etc. in today’s society. People nowadays are accustomed of abuse of the word of love when they are eager to obtain wealth and power, ignoring true feelings in their heart. Whereas those true feelings comprise the essence of love.
In conclusion, I think that author use the process of trying to prove love but failing in the end to show that love itself is deceptive, not consistent with common sense thus cannot be demonstrated with logical reasons. People can love someone for various reasons or even when they don’t love him/her at all. It sounds very much contradictory and that’s why love is a fallacy that out of range of logic!