The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love

"It’s The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, which includes lots of excerpts from ancient philosophers including Plato and Sappho, right up to contemporary philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum . This book is a really great overview of philosophies of love, because it shows different methods of philosophising, not only through abstract, armchair classic philosophers like Hegel , but also through extracts from Shakespeare’s plays , D H Lawrence ’s novels, Rilke’s poems, letters between Héloïse and Abelard, and others. And it also shows how hugely divergent thinking about love is. There are psychological ideas from Freud and Jung, and feminist ideas from Shulamith Firestone, who believed that romantic love was a conspiracy to keep women in their place because it calls for them to sacrifice so much of themselves. We can see seeds for ideas like this in an earlier section on Simone de Beauvoir who thought that patriarchal social structures limit possibilities for authentic loving because it robs women of the chance to be agents in their own lives and create their own futures. Yes, and it’s so strange because Plato’s Symposium is one of the most famous philosophy books of all time, and it’s all about love. It was written almost two and a half thousand years ago and it’s about a group of men at a dinner party who were all hungover from the night before. To pace themselves so that they don’t get too drunk too quickly, they decide that each of them will give a speech about love. Socrates is the last to speak and towards the end, Alcibiades crashes the party. He is so drunk that a flute-girl has to help him walk. He’s heartbroken and frustrated because he’s in love with Socrates , but Socrates isn’t interested. In Martha Nussbaum’s terrific critique of Symposium in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love , she says that Socrates is weird; he’s like a statue because he’s emotionally stone cold, he is ultra-rational, and he views passion and lust as something quite inferior. She calls Symposium a “cruel and terrifying book” because it finishes with these two men – Socrates and Alcibiades – competing with our souls pitting reason against passion, and the philosophical against our humanity. This is one of the central dichotomies of love, the tension between thinking and feeling, that we see repeated throughout history. Right. He presents passion as a necessary first step, but also something that ultimately needs to be overcome. What’s interesting is that Socrates, when he explains this, is recounting what a woman, Diotima, has taught him about love. She describes a ladder on which the first step is appreciating one beautiful body, the second is appreciating two beautiful bodies, the next is appreciating all beautiful bodies, beautiful acts, knowing beauty, and so on until the top of the ladder where we can come to appreciate the Beautiful with a capital B, a pure Form. “Martha Nussbaum says that Socrates is weird; he’s emotionally stone cold, he’s ultra-rational, he views passion and lust as inferior” This anthology is like a gateway book to other philosophies of love because, for example, Diotima’s full speech isn’t in it and it’s missing one of my favourite stories about the birth of Love. Diotima explains how at a dinner party of the gods, the God of Resource drank too much nectar and passed out in the garden. The Goddess of Poverty saw him, lay with him, and thus Love was conceived of Resource and Poverty. I love this metaphor, because it’s another way of illustrating the tensions of love. Love can be super intense and overflowing, but it’s also a lack. It’s needy, but also creative. We have this idea that love is beautiful and wonderful, the other side of it is that it can also can be really harsh. The book doesn’t give a definitive answer, but it’s my top pick because it opens up a myriad of possibilities for thinking about love. However, in the conclusion, Robert Solomon suggests that rather than thinking about love as a force or a mystery, we ought to be thinking about it as virtue. In his view, love is an expansion of the self, but not in a narcissistic way. It’s a dialectical and creative process – involving loving and being loved, and defining ourselves as individuals as well as with one another."