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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5 page overview of the philosophy of love and friendship as clarified in Plato’s Symposium and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Plato views the concept of love as a progression from earthly love and the attractions of the flesh, the transitory physical beauties of the intellect, to a state in which an individual contemplates such concepts a beauty, goodness, and spirituality, concepts grouped by Plato as the eternal beauty. Aristotle equates love with friendship in which the interests of a friend take paramount importance even to one’s own interest. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: AM2_PPlovePh.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
true nature of love is a topic which has been explored by philosophers since ancient times. Platos "Symposium" and Aristotles "Nicomachean Ethics", in particular, offer relevant insight into this
topic. In the "Symposium", Socrates reveals what he has been told of love by the wise woman Diotima. In "Nicomachean Ethics" Aristotle associates the concept of love with
friendship. In the Symposium love is compared with our primal nature to copulate, or to "begat in the beautiful" as Plato
more beautifully terms the act. Diotima points out that at a certain age: "human
nature is desirous of procreation - procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine
thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature" Diotima maintains
that such a union can never be inharmonious. Plato proclaims, however, that the "deformed is always inharmonious with the divine".
Plato emphasizes the importance of maintaining self control in the face of eros, the importance of purging the passions of the flesh and devoting ones energies to intellectual matters.
Plato acknowledges the power of physical attraction, however, as formidable enemy, an enemy which can overwhelm our better judgment and even our reason. Plato equates pleasures of the flesh
with the associated degradations of love of money, drunkenness, insanity, and even political tyranny. In his conversation with the wise woman Diotima he distinguishes between desire and true love:
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