The Stages on the Way to Life and Love: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Plato's Symposium Öffentlichkeit

Xu, Wen (2017)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/3197xn03g?locale=de
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Abstract

This paper explores the nature of love using Plato's Symposium and Kierkegaard's writing on love to find out the moral growth people achieve through love and the philosophical and existential values of love beyond ethics. I examine each of the speeches in the Symposium and relate them to Kierkegaard's view of love that has arisen in his discussion on the three stages of human existence. I have chosen to use these two authors to evaluate the significance of love because Plato, while attempting to relate love to morality, more or less crosses the boundaries of aesthetics, ethics, and religion, which corresponds to the Kierkegaadian three stages and thus it is interesting to analyze and compare love interpreted by these two authors. My argument is that the aesthetic and the ethical aspects of love are inseparable and both merging together help people to realize human growth; as for the irrational or religious element of love, although it cannot be understood with moral sense or in an intellectual manner, we should appreciate its value for human existence. In Part 1, I go through each of the speeches in the Symposium, explaining the reason why the significance of love cannot be fully grasped in its ethical aspect. In Part 2, I introduce Kierkegaard's view of love in terms of the aesthetic, ethical and religious stages respectively. In Part 3, I relate love in the Symposium to Kierkegaard's three stages, by means of which I offer an analysis of the significance of love manifested in all three aspects.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Is It Possible to Understand Love in the Symposium in a Completely Rational Sense?.......1

Part 2: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic, Ethical and Religious Love....................................................18

Part 3: A Kierkegaardian Reading of the Symposium.............................................................33

Bibliography....................................................................................................................51

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