The Fool, the Ugly, and the Pervert (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
This paper defends an account of how erotic love works to develop virtue. It is argued that love drives moral development by holding the creation of virtue in the individual as the emotion's intentional object. After analyzing the distinction between passive and active accounts of the object of love, this paper demonstrates that a Platonic virtue-ethical understanding of erotic love—far from being consumed with ascetic contemplation—offers a positive treatment of emotion's role in the attainment and social practice of virtue.
In several of Plato's dialogues, Socrates claims to be an expert on only one topic, love. He can claim such expertise because love, unlike justice, piety, or courage, is not so much a theme to be delineated, but is the motivating force that defines the life of philosophy. To be a philosopher is, as the etymology of the word suggests, to be a lover. But what kind of love is it that characterizes the life of philosophy, and how does it relate to other kinds of love? Specifically, what are the implications of the philosopher's love of wisdom for the realization of the interpersonal forms of attachment that are necessary for ethics and politics to be possible? James McGuirk explores this question in the present study though a close reading of Plato's Symposium and through comparative readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas, in which several indictments and defences of philosophy are explored. According to McGuirk, the trial of philosophy hangs ultimately on the meaning of philosophical eros. He argues that while eros can involve impulses toward tyranny and the subjugation of otherness, it is finally understood by Plato in terms of a subtle balance, in which the acquisitiveness of eros is enframed by a more fundamental affective attunement to the Good in Being. According to this reading, eros is not only compatible with ethical and political forms of the interpersonal, it is their condition of possibility.
Love's Hidden Laugh: On Jest, Earnestness and Socratic Indirection in Kierkegaard's "Praising Love"
Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2013
Socrates is closer to Kierkegaard's sense of Christian life than we might suspect, especially in the duty to love the ugly elaborated in Works of Love. Socratic jest gives indirection to passion for the sake of loving the neighbor. This passage buttresses the thesis that comedy forms a confinium between the ethical and religious spheres, and advances ugly, laughing, yet lovable Socrates as a comic paragon.
Facets of Plato's Philosophy, 1976
It is not surprising that love, like other concepts that seem to have their first home in individual and personal contexts, should have assumed for Plato cosmic and mythic
"Can Beauty and Ugliness Coexist?" in Ugliness, ed. Pop/Widrich (Tauris, 2014)
in Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory, ed. Pop/Widrich, 165-79, 2014
I track the titular phenomenon (denied by most theoreticians but affirmed by others, e.g. William James), to the distinction between form and content, and then, more promisingly, to Plato's theory of ideas as presented by Alexander Nehamas, according to which all concrete things participate both in beauty and its opposite. I distinguish this from the flawed relational thesis of Denis Diderot, and end by affirming the value of logical work to history and criticism.