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Lovesickness and Neoplatonism

Lesel Dawson

in Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

This chapter explores the ways in which the discourse of Platonic love and erotic melancholy advance different ideas about sexuality within amorous relationships and promote incompatible gender power ... More

This chapter explores the ways in which the discourse of Platonic love and erotic melancholy advance different ideas about sexuality within amorous relationships and promote incompatible gender power hierarchies. It begins with a discussion of the construction of love according to Neoplatonisms, before turning to an examination of two plays written during the Caroline period, when the cult of Platonic love was at its height. In ᾽Tis Pity She's a Whore, Ford depicts Giovanni's incestuous love for his sister as a type of Platonic mirroring which is also a form of narcissism. Alternatively, in The Platonic Lovers Davenant uses the hazardous physical symptoms of lovesickness to challenge the Neoplatonic construction of love, promoting a notion of heterosexual desire that is physiological and sexual, rather than abstract and spiritual.Less

Trying Greek Love: Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster's Maurice

Daniel Orrells

in Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity

Chapters one to three examined serious scholarly attempts to historicize ancient Greek pederasty. The historicisms of the German and British universities, however, produced graduates who developed ... More

Chapters one to three examined serious scholarly attempts to historicize ancient Greek pederasty. The historicisms of the German and British universities, however, produced graduates who developed altogether more self‐consciously rhetorical, metaphorical translations of ancient pederastic pedagogy. In the texts of Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster and Sigmund Freud, the Greek teaching scene becomes a far more flexible model for thinking about the formation of modern masculinity in relation to ancient counterparts. In chapter four, we consider the most infamous product of Oxford Hellenism, Oscar Wilde and his courtroom speech of 1895 in defence of male love and friendship, to ask what he thought he was doing: what did Wilde mean by “Platonic love”? Could a Platonic lesson be taught outside Oxford's cloisters in a public setting? The chapter continues by examining the reverberations and resonances of Wilde's speech in his later writing, De Profundis, and in E. M. Forster's Maurice.Less

Love and Friendship

Jeffrey Blustein

in Care and Commitment: Taking the Personal Point of View

This chapter discusses love and friendship. It provides explanation of love that is directly targeted on a particular person and sets aside the love of inanimate objects, of God, of humanity in ... More

This chapter discusses love and friendship. It provides explanation of love that is directly targeted on a particular person and sets aside the love of inanimate objects, of God, of humanity in general. There is the love of a parent for a child, of a sibling for a sibling, of a friend for a friend, of a lover for a lover. Friendship in particular is neither necessary nor sufficient for love, but in close friendships the depth of the concern and care amounts to love, and the love of friends, unlike parental love, is a love that insists on equality and does not preclude sexuality. It discusses in detail the different types of personal love namely: Platonic love, romantic love, sexual love, parental love, and love of friends which is regarded as the deepest kind of friendship.Less

From Amor hereos to Love-Melancholy: A Medico-Literary History

in The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance

In De amore, Marsilio Ficino's seventh and final speech, considers the kind of love that is the “opposite” of Socratic love, a form of insanity rather than the “divine madness” praised by Plato as a ... More

In De amore, Marsilio Ficino's seventh and final speech, considers the kind of love that is the “opposite” of Socratic love, a form of insanity rather than the “divine madness” praised by Plato as a means to knowledge. Ficino insists that this “insanity” is a form of love while delineating the features of what he also calls “vulgar love.” The opening stages of the seventh speech, which purports to interpret the poem Donna me prega by Guido Cavalcanti, show Ficino's unease with the implications of the medical treatment of love-melancholy. In his speech, Ficino is indebted to Dino del Garbo's commentary but nevertheless transforms Cavalcanti's poem into a vehicle for his own version of Platonic love. In his commentary, del Garbo names this form of love amor ereos (“lovesickness”). This chapter examines the complex medical history that makes possible Ficino's commentary on love-melancholy in De amore, and shows that the medical/philosophical tradition of love-melancholy engages in complex ways with a Platonic view of love.Less

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Platonic Love?

Daniel Boyarin

in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

In his celebrated study of Christian love, Anders Nygren identifies the emergence of heresy with the perversion of agape. In Plato's Symposium, the term “heavenly Eros” ... More

In his celebrated study of Christian love, Anders Nygren identifies the emergence of heresy with the perversion of agape. In Plato's Symposium, the term “heavenly Eros” occurs in the discourse of Pausanias, signifying a practice of desire that begins with physical love but ultimately transcends the physical. Yet Pausanias is not the only, or even the most privileged, speaker in the Symposium. The famous speech of Diotima, cited by Socrates, arguably lays greater claim to representing Plato's definitive views on love. Thus, in referring to “heavenly Eros” as that “of which Plato and his followers speak”, Nygren erases any difference between the Pausanian ideology of eros and that of Diotima/Socrates—the latter of which is purportedly Platonic love. This chapter argues that Nygren falsely conflates the concept of a “heavenly eros” continuous with physical sexuality, as described in Pausanius's speech, with the more strictly asceticized eroticism attributed to the prophetess Diotima and ultimately affirmed by Plato. This is a distinction overlooked by others as well, not least Michel Foucault.Less

Platonic Communion and ‘An Unfinished Romance’ in Gaston de Latour

Adam Lee

in The Platonism of Walter Pater: Embodied Equity

This chapter explores the Platonism in Pater’s Gaston de Latour, which began publication in monthly instalments in 1888. Like Marius, Gaston is set in a time of religious turmoil—the religious wars ... More

This chapter explores the Platonism in Pater’s Gaston de Latour, which began publication in monthly instalments in 1888. Like Marius, Gaston is set in a time of religious turmoil—the religious wars of sixteenth-century France—and follows a single character in search of spiritual transcendence. Along the way Gaston has critical encounters with historical authors, such as Michel de Montaigne and Giordano Bruno, who enrich his understanding of Platonism. The love that seeks wholeness in Plato’s Symposium is proposed as a model for Pater’s critical engendering with historical authors. Beyond Platonic love narratives, Pater incorporates the Odyssean homecoming, employed by Neoplatonists, and the Christian narrative of desire in Song of Solomon. Gaston’s later chapters seem to engage with Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ concerning what Pater means by the phrase ‘lover and philosopher at once’, inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus.Less

Untangling Eros: Toward an Ethic of Sensuality

in Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals

This chapter draws on recent reinterpretations of Plato's Symposium to argue for a contemporary critical reappropriation of Platonic erotic love of less powerful persons, minus its androcentrism and ... More

This chapter draws on recent reinterpretations of Plato's Symposium to argue for a contemporary critical reappropriation of Platonic erotic love of less powerful persons, minus its androcentrism and its era's sexualization of inequality and of eroticism. It theologically elaborates the reflections on desire, sin, and grace. Moreover, it addresses the contemporary recoveries of Plato's Symposium and the account of desire that has affected so much of Western thought, Christian and secular. The Symposium was nothing if not an illustration of the seduction that wise, self-possessed men work on younger men in pursuit of knowledge or pleasure. It formulated a vision of ideal erotic love from the point of view of the lover. Edward Vacek believed that hope in the genuine affirmation that comes from being loved back is normally a part of the motivation. Vacek overcame the Platonic dualism that produces a barrier between physical and spiritual eros.Less

The Revelation of Plato and Platonism and the Authority of Affinity

Adam Lee

in The Platonism of Walter Pater: Embodied Equity

This chapter traces the momentum of Platonic themes in essays leading up to Plato and Platonism (1893) and explores the book as a revelation of Pater’s lifelong philosophy informing his work. The ... More

This chapter traces the momentum of Platonic themes in essays leading up to Plato and Platonism (1893) and explores the book as a revelation of Pater’s lifelong philosophy informing his work. The structure of the book is explained as representative of Oxonian Platonism without losing sight of what makes it so characteristic of Pater. The central themes of Pater’s writing are elucidated through his understanding of Platonism, particularly through The Republic. Concerned with Plato as an author, Pater explains how he seeks organization in things, States as well as persons as well as artwork, for the sake of sanity, a conservative commitment that fights against decadence. The maintenance of sanity, the reason in beauty, is sought for the sake of one’s soul in Platonic education. It is Platonic love, explained as the affinity for persons like-to-like, that enables one to attain knowledge and express oneself with authority.Less

Introduction: Love, Sex, Politics

Andrew J. Counter

in The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France

The Introduction explores the idea of a supposed ‘unrationalized coexistence’ of competing sexual and political mores under the Restoration, some holdovers from the Ancien Régime, others peculiar to ... More

The Introduction explores the idea of a supposed ‘unrationalized coexistence’ of competing sexual and political mores under the Restoration, some holdovers from the Ancien Régime, others peculiar to the new; the phrase ‘unrationalized coexistence’ is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick, but the concept is drawn from Restoration writers’ own depictions of the confused, transitional character of their society. The Introduction also examines the crucial rhetorical figure of ellipsis, which became in this period an unmistakeable means of evoking either the sexual, or the political, or both. The Introduction concludes by considering the notion of ‘Platonic love’—relationships characterized by unconsummated erotic desire—that was the most influential, though also the most contested, model of love in Restoration high art.Less

The Imagery of Erôs in Plato’s Phaedrus

Douglas Cairns

in Erôs in Ancient Greece

This chapter explores the debts owed by the account of erôs in the speeches of Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus to earlier (chiefly poetic) models of the concept. Three main points are made: (i) the use ... More

This chapter explores the debts owed by the account of erôs in the speeches of Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus to earlier (chiefly poetic) models of the concept. Three main points are made: (i) the use of pre-existing models, metaphors, and metonymies of erôs highlights Plato's debt not only to erotic, but also to philosophical poetry (especially Parmenides and Empedocles); (ii) this furthers the speeches' project of creating a model of erôs that presents the erotic in terms of the metaphysical; (iii) the various poetic, religious, and philosophical models that the speeches invoke serve to present a conception of erôs that is at once highly revisionary and yet also in some respects paradoxically traditional.Less