Professor Peter Lowentrout
RST Department Office Phone: 562-985-5341 (Department Office open 8 A.M. to 5 P.M.)
RST Department Office: MHB 619
VOICE MAIL: 562-985-4906 FAX: 562/985-8999
WEB SITE: http://www.csulb.edu/~plowentr EMAIL: Plowen2@AOL.com
Office Hours held in Academic Services 127: MWF 10 AM -12 PM  and by appointment anytime

Required Texts:

    Ackerman, Diane.  1995. A Natural History of Love.  New York: Vintage Books.  (Ackerman 1)

    Ackerman, Diane and Jeanne Mackin.  1998.  The Book of Love.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company.  (Ackerman 2)

    hooks, bell. 2000. all about love: new visions. New York: HarperCollins.

    Tolstoy, Leo.  2001 (reprint of the 1948 edition, originally published 1908). The Law of Love and the Law of Violence.  Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific.

    King, Jr., Martin Luther.  1963.  The Strength to Love.  Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

    Needleman, Jacob.  1996. A Little Book on Love. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group.

Course Requirements:

    Take-home midterm examination
    Field Project
    Final examination

Final exams will be available in my office for one semester after the end of the class. Preliminary drafts of all written assignments in this class may be emailed to me for comment and for my help – final drafts must be turned in as hardcopies, except in cases of unusual hardship.

Each of the three course assignments (including the in-class final) will have a “Bible” – an organizational and writing guide that you will follow in completing the assignment.  Each “Bible” will also have a grading rubric so you can see in advance how the assignment will be evaluated.

Each assignment will count as 1/3 of the final grade; extra credit projects may be undertaken with my prior approval.

UNIVERSITY WITHDRAWAL POLICIES:  Please abide by the University policies on withdrawing from a class as published in the Schedule of Classes.  It’s your responsibility to submit the appropriate forms by the listed deadlines.  If you must be absent for official participation in a university sponsored event, let me know in advance.  If you are ill, let me know as soon as you reasonably can and we’ll get you caught up on what you missed.

PLAGIARISM:  Using the ideas or words of another person as if they were your own is plagiarism.  The University has a strict policy on plagiarism (see the Schedule of Classes).  If you have used words or ideas that are not yours, you must document the source appropriately.  Use any standard  format with which you are familiar for all documented work.

The Structure of the Course:

I.  Love’s Past (6 weeks)

A Short History of Love:  teasing out the varying assumptions concerning human nature that are part and parcel of our past theories, experiences and cultural embodiments of love.  READ: Ackerman 1, pps. 3-122

Love's Champions:  the lives, thoughts and experiences of the great proponents of love. As Meister Eckhart had it, "love - stronger than Death and harder than Hell."  READ: Tolstoy, King.

The Evolution of Love: the biological determinants of love.  The body has evolved as the physical instrument of our love (agape).  Some find discouraging the unsurprising fact that there are biological determinants of, and sometimes serious constraints upon, our love.  What is overlooked is the surprising fact that we have evolved to love in the first place - what does this say about the world in which we find ourselves? READ: Ackerman 1, pps. 146-169

II. Love's Present (6 weeks)

The present must learn from but need not be bound by the past in its approach to love.  The question today is: does what we know most clearly about ourselves and the world around us support our species’ deep intuition of love's centrality?  What are we that we love?

Theories of Love: What do our philosophers say?  READ: Ackerman 2, selections from Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Bacon, Voltaire and Camus.

Love and the Social Sciences: Are our lives, individual and corporate, best and most fully lived on a loving moral axis?

The Psychologists and the Sociologists  READ: Ackerman 1, 123-131, Ackerman 2, selections from William James and Sigmund Freud

The Processes of Secularization: secularization, with its attendant loss of reasoned access to the sacred and to a deeper grounding for love, has been shown recently to be self-limiting. What does this portend for our understanding of human nature and the nature of love?

Love and the Natural Sciences:  Mysticism and the new physics: a few very (very) loose, but interesting, parallels. READ: Davies

Love and the Sexual Revolution: sex, a natural physical analog of love, is not love.  But what is it, and what is its relationship to love? READ:  Ackerman 1, pps. 177-255, Ackerman 2, selection from Havelock Ellis

Challenges to Love: what can we learn about love from love's opposites?  A lack of love always entails a limitation on our freedom; it signals an unhealthy compulsion, whether biological, psychological, or socio-cultural. Always, we find our true freedom in the direction of love.  READ: Ackerman, pps. 139-145

        Serial killers and sociopaths – a biologically mediated impairment of love?
        "Immorality" across time and culture: sin as a compulsive denial of love
        Demagogues and false prophets -- the loveless heart of the ideologue
        The roots of war and violence – is violence more “natural” than love?
        The Ik -- a love-impaired culture?

Love in the world: Love requires that we do more than think about and feel love -- it impels us to carry love into the world in loving action.  We will examine the lives of current practitioners of a social ethic of love: Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter.  READ AGAIN: Tolstoy, King

III. Love's Future (3 weeks)

An Economics of Love

Personal: the simplicity movement
    Social: the idea of economic democracy
    The economic effects of injustice and oppression: is there greater wealth in love?
    READ: Maslow, “Notes on Eupsychian Economics and Management”

A Loving Politics

Where Have All the Utopias Gone -- might we be growing beyond ideology?
Can a plain speaking politics arise that is informed by a concern for the greater good and longer-term goals rather than the divisiveness and appeals to self-interest and instant gratification that have until now characterized human politics?

A Mature Science?

Might we see the development of sciences anchored in a theoretical and mathematical modeling of love's analogs in the natural world?  READ:  Rolston

Speculations on The Possibility of a Loving Culture

The future effects of the psychological revolution
A mature sexual ethic
Love in institutional life

Will our future and further evolution as a species be in the direction of a greater love?

READ: bell hooks