“the name of our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete”
Augustine.
1. comedy and tragedy
Aristophanes’ hiccups
- Love rebels against reason
Love lacks beauty and so seeks it; “he is in love with what is beautiful and wisdom is extremely beautiful”
Socrates.
1. The pursuit of wisdom is motivated by love.
“we desire to posses the good forever; we seek immortality through ‘giving birth in beauty,” be it through the reproduction of children, great deeds, or literature, art, or philosophy”
Diotima
1. the goal is to produce beauty
the ladder of love
- physical to non physical
2. forms are perfect
“He is unique–he is like no one else in the past and no one in the present–this is by far the most amazing thing about him.”
Speech of Alcibiades
1. longing for a particular person who is unique
“the lover does not lack beauty altogether; she lacks the specific beautiful loved one.”
Nussbaum
1. not all beauty is uniform
Ovid
- seduction manual
2. love is heightened by adultery and insecurity
“in the world of knowledge, the good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort, and when seen is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right…and this is the power upon which he who act rationally….must have his eye fixed.”
Plato on the form of Good
1. In relation to Aristotle
“Other Greeks [than Plato]…were materialists; Plato saw that God was not corporeal, that perception is not the source of truth, that God is the source of existence. The sensible world is inferior to the eternal”
Augustine
“love draws a soul to God as weight draws a body to earth.”
Augustine
1. the soul strives for God
“abstinence from all sexual union is better even than marital intercourse performed for the sake of procreating”
Augustine
“happiness…the union of two persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a secret inclination, and satisfied with each other’s merit.”
Heloise
“though I knew that the name of wife was honorable in the world, and holy in religion, yet the name of your mistress had greater charms, because it was more free.”
Heloise
“The name of wife may seems more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.”
Heloise
“prostitute herself to a richer man, if she could”
Heloise
“I am no longer ashamed… Nothing but virtue, joined to a love perfectly disengaged from the commerce of the senses, could have produced such effects.”
Heloise
“Consider that I still love you, and yet strive to avoid loving you.”
Abelard
“What a troublesome employment love is! What abhorrence can I be said to have my sins, if the objects of them are always amiable to me? How can I separate from the person I love, the passion I must detest”
Abelard
incompatibility reason for divorce for those who have entered “unwarily in a thing they never practiz’d before, and made themselves bondsmen of a luckless and helpless matrimony
Milton
“solace and peace…the solace and satisfaction of the mind…a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage….conjugal fellowship with a fit conversing soul…is stronger than death.”
Milton
“he who thinks it better to part then to live sadly and injuriously to that cheerful covnant (for not be belov’d and yet retain’d is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit) he I say who therefore seeks to part, is one who highly honours the married life and would not stain it…the reasons which now move him to divorce, are equal to the best of those that could first warrant him to marry.”
Milton
“Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and the other with me”
Hegel
“a mutual giving and taking…the lover who takes is not thereby made richer than the other; he is enriched indeed, by only so much as the other is. So too the giver does not make himself more poorer; by giving to the other he has at the same time and to the same extent enhanced his own treasure.”
Hegel
“marriage marks a full identification with that we.”
Nozick
“As egg and sperm come together, two biographies have become one. The couple’s first chid is their union-their earlier history was prenatal”
Nozick
Man is inclined to inconstancy, woman to constancy
Schopenhauer
Love reduces to sexual instinct, which is merely the will to live
Schopenhauer
Love inspired not by our ‘other half,’ or beauty or character…but a good breeding partner
Schopenhauer
love is suffering
Schopenhauer
love makes a laughable spectacle as lovers try to be like another”
Nietzche
love is a desire for absolute, exclusive, possesion
Nietzche
‘modern marriage-with equality between husband and wife, divorce, and “indulgence in love matches” ahs lost its rationale
Nietzche
“One is not born, but becomes, a woman.”
de Beauvoir
“In virtue of that glory with which she has haloed the brow of her beloved, the woman in love forbids him any weakness; she is disappointed and vexed if he does not live up to the image she has put in his place.”
de Beauvoir