How did philosophers define love?
The idea of romantic love initially stems from the Platonic tradition that love is a desire for beauty-a value that transcends the particularities of the physical body. For Plato, the love of beauty culminates in the love of philosophy, the subject that pursues the highest capacity of thinking.
How did Plato explain love?
Plato believed that love is the motivation that leads one to try to know and contemplate beauty in itself. This happens through a gradual process that begins with an appreciation of the appearance of physical beauty and then moves on to an appreciation of spiritual beauty.
Do philosophers believe in love?
Philosophers aren’t particularly renowned for having successful love lives, but some have become hopeless romantics — and others misanthropes. Here we have 10 philosophers who have written on or been heavily influenced by love in both their work and their personal lives.
What does Agathon say about love?
Agathon suggests that Love is the happiest of the gods because he is most beautiful and best. He is beautiful because, contrary to Phaedrus’ claim, he is the youngest of the gods. He always avoids old age, and only associates with the young.
How does Diotima define love?
Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a spirit, which falls somewhere between being a god and being human. Spirits, Diotima explains, serve as intermediaries between gods and humans. They convey prayers and sacrifices from humans to gods, and send gifts and commands from gods to humans.
What is Socrates view on love in the symposium?
Diotima points out that, in spite of himself, Socrates has denied that Love is a god altogether. They have concluded that Love is not good and beautiful because he is in need of good and beautiful things. No one would deny that a god is both happy and beautiful, and yet Love seems to be neither of these things.
What is Plato’s view of Eros?
In Plato, eros is a spiritual energy initially, which then “falls” downward; whereas in Freud eros is a physical energy which is “sublimated” upward. The philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse appropriated the Freudian concept of eros for his highly influential 1955 work Eros and Civilization.
How does Sartre define love?
Sartre’s analysis of love is of “eros” or romantic love. Sartre conceives that this form of love has as its ideal an absolute unity between lovers; a merging together of two free conscious- nesses in which each grounds the other’s being to form one consciousness.
What did Sartre say about love?
For Sartre, the joy of love is when we feel secure in our possession of one another and find the meaning of our lives in and through the other person. The problem is that this is just an illusion. There is nothing at all secure about romantic love.
What do Socrates and Diotima say about love?
What does Plato say about Love in the symposium?
In the Symposium, Plato presents the love of wisdom as the highest form of love and philosophy as a refinement of our sexual urges that leads us to desire wisdom over sex.
What does Socrates say about Love in the symposium?
Socrates then recalls what Agathon said that Love is of: for one thing, Agathon suggested that the gods are organized through a love of beautiful things. From this, Socrates has Agathon agree that Love must be love of beauty, which in turn implies that Love itself must be wholly without beauty.
What does Socrates say about love in the symposium?
What does Alcibiades say about love?
First, he must love a body. Then he must realize that beauty is a characteristics of all bodies, and love bodies in general, and then move on to loving the souls/ the minds. But he must not love a specific mind, rather a set of patterns that exist in many minds, which should lead him to love beautiful pursuit and laws.
What is the philosophy of the Enlightenment?
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. The 18th century is the main philosophical century, the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Indeed, all over Europe, philosophers have laid down old principles and reinventing a new paradigm of philosophy and political philosophy.
What is Love in general?
Love in a general sense, can be defined as an expansion of the heart toward another human being. General Definitions: Latin: amor: love, intense desire; Philosophy, Psychology: inclination toward one person or even an object considered good; Love is the Moral opposite tendency to selfishness; Specific definitions:
What is the relationship between aesthetics and enlightenment?
The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment in general re-discovers the value of the senses, not only in cognition, but in human lives in general, and so, given the intimate connection between beauty and human sensibility, the Enlightenment is naturally particularly interested in aesthetics.
How did John Locke influence the Enlightenment?
Though Locke’s liberalism has been tremendously influential, his political theory is founded on doctrines of natural law and religion that are not nearly as evident as Locke assumes. Locke’s reliance on the natural law tradition is typical of Enlightenment political and moral theory.