Many philosophers have attempted to come to terms with the meaning of love or to at least identify the ways in which different types of love shape and influence human behavior. This essay will consider two philosophical approaches to love, that of Plato and that of Nietzsche. It will be argued that both Plato and Nietzsche distinguished between love as eros which includes sexual love or romantic love and friendship or philia. However, Nietzsche (65) suggested that with the advent of Christianity, manÆs search for love became simplified in that what he did not obtain from his fellows he could obtain from religion.
In The Republic, Plato (252-253) distinguished between the two primary types of love: the erotic, romanticized love felt by individuals, and friendship or love which was caring but devoid of any sexual desire or connotation. Plato (252) recognized that ôsurely some terrible, savage, and lawless form of desire is in every man.ö Because this was the case, love can be ôcalled a tyrant (Plato, 253).ö Love acquires the profile of a tyrant when it becomes the or at least a dominant force in shaping manÆs life.
Plato (255) asserted that man needed to eliminate any tyranny established by love because when he was subject to the grip of love and its impulses, ôlove lives like a tyrant within him in all anarchy and lawlessness; and, being a monarch, will lead the man whom it controls, as though he were a city, to every kind of daring.ö While differentiating between the desirable love to be found in friendship, Plato (291) emphasized the primacy of filial love and maintained that non-erotic love had the capacity to unite men in society and ultimately to improve society. This is not to suggest that Plato (137) rejected erotic love, but rather that he put it in a position subordinate to that of friendship.
Nietzsche (65) found something ôambiguous and suggestive about the word love, som
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