Love Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler frames Freud with the clean severity of a logician, but the real edge is political: if Freud is right, the culture’s favorite alibis collapse. Friendship, patriotism, religious devotion, the soft glow of “pure” affection - none of it gets to stand outside the body. By calling these loves “sublimations,” Adler spotlights Freud’s most provocative move: he doesn’t merely sexualize romance; he sexualizes the entire moral vocabulary we use to launder desire into something respectable.

The phrasing is doing careful work. “Origin or basis” sounds almost charitable, as if Freud is offering a neutral genealogy. Then Adler tightens the vice: “Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual.” That “appear” is the tell. Freud’s claim depends on suspicion as a method - the surface is not just incomplete, it’s deceptive. The self’s testimony about itself is downgraded to a cover story.

Context matters: Adler, a mid-century public philosopher and champion of “Great Books” humanism, is translating psychoanalytic dynamite into accessible terms for an audience invested in reason, ethics, and civic virtue. He’s not endorsing Freud so much as isolating the thesis with prosecutorial clarity: if love is reducible to libido in disguise, then culture is a vast rerouting system for the sex drive. That’s why the line still irritates and fascinates. It threatens romantic idealism, but it also flatters modern cynicism by promising an all-purpose key: beneath every lofty attachment, a hidden engine hums.