Diotima’s description of love as ascent, as a ladder leading from a lower form of individual love of a particular beloved to a higher form of love of the good and the beautiful in general. (This is in line with my idea that romantic love, though imperfect serves as a safe realm within which to practice and cultivate Pure Love. Diotima though is more optimistic of the possibility from what we will see below.)
Love of a physically beautiful particular other leads to appreciation of the physical beauty of many: then to the recognition of attractive minds and in turn to beauty in knowledge and wisdom and then to the “everlasting happiness”
When an end is posited, there is a failure of love because an end is put in the place of love (as a process-in-being) instead of allowing it its natural perpetual journey.
Levinas: all ethical relations are an expression of love
Does not mean that we are reliant on the other to give us existence
We do not approach the other with empty hands but instead offer her or him our plentitude.
Love as duty: Prioritizing the other involves accepting that I cannot impose upon the other
Recognizing the other’s difference an avoiding subsuming the other within my experiences, understanding and categories.
The other as the highest and yet the most destitute
To love is to fear for another, to come to the assistance of his frailty
Erotic experience returns us to materiality, absorbed by the sensations of the body (us and our partner’s), dissipating our constitution as a subjectivity or identity
Erotic relation should not be understood as fusion of as possession since this would destroy the alterity of the other
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