Love Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler’s question looks innocent, almost dinner-party mild, then quietly yanks the tablecloth. By framing the point as a double “I wonder,” he refuses the preacher’s posture and adopts the philosopher’s scalpel: not asserting, not denouncing, just inviting you to notice what you’ve been trained not to notice. The first wonder lands on the taboo link itself - that love, in modern self-description, wants to be pure feeling, chosen freely, floating above biology. “Connected with reproduction” is the phrase that punctures the romantic balloon. It drags the body, the species, and the unglamorous machinery of continuation back into a conversation people prefer to keep in candlelight.

The second wonder is the real trap. If people do ask, what answer do they give? Adler is less interested in “the truth” than in the rationalizations: the way cultures launder an animal imperative into an elevated ideal, or flip it, insisting love is spiritual while treating reproduction as incidental. The subtext is that our explanations reveal our metaphysics. Are we materialists who call love an evolutionary strategy? Personalists who insist love is an end in itself and children are a byproduct? Or modern consumers who want the pleasures of sex and the prestige of love without the consequence?

Context matters: Adler spent a career trying to rescue “first questions” from the fog of habit and ideology. Here he’s doing that classic Adler move - forcing the reader to confront how little of their most cherished vocabulary (“love”) they’ve actually examined, and how quickly they outsource the answer to sentiment, religion, or convenience.