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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2013

Challenging Platonic Erôs

Olivier Renaut

Résumé

Plato's Dialogues continue to challenge our common definition of love. Whereas we commonly understand the primary meaning of love as an intense feeling addressed to an individual and attachment to his uniqueness-what we may call " personal love " hereafter-, Plato famously defines erôs as a force that drives each individual towards an object that appears to be rather abstract: Beauty (kalon). Platonic love provides the individual with happiness and leads him to virtue by knowledge of the Good. This intellectualized form of love goes together with a condemnation of sexual attachment and greediness, starting with the Symposium and the Phaedrus through to the Laws. It is therefore commonly argued that, for Plato, " personal love " cannot be an end in itself. As Vlastos has shown, love for an individual is a mere symptom of human deficiency, for the only thing truly worth loving is the Good, in a rather egoistic way. It is then a small step from the condemnation of inferior love whose paradigm is sexual attachment to an overall rejection of " personal love " , insofar as the lovers have not fulfilled the process of ascending the so-called " ladder of love " depicted in the Symposium (210a-212a).
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Dates et versions

hal-01322948 , version 1 (29-05-2016)

Identifiants

Citer

Olivier Renaut. Challenging Platonic Erôs: The Role of Thumos and Philotimia in Love. Ed Sanders; Chiara Thumiger; Christopher Carrey; Nick Lowe. Erôs in Ancient Greece, Oxford University Press, pp.95-110, 2013, 9780199605507. ⟨10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199605507.003.0007⟩. ⟨hal-01322948⟩
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