eros

…in the Platonic concept of eros, was opposed in the Christian community by the biblical understanding of love, agape. Although erotic love has frequently been understood primarily as sexual desire and passion, its classical religious and philosophical meaning was the idealistic desire to acquire the highest spiritual and intellectual good.…

…to postulate two opposing instincts: Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct (a desire to return to an inorganic state). Because Eros opposes the taking of one’s own life, which Thanatos would urge, the destructive energy of the death instinct is turned outward and expressed as aggression toward…

…Plato’s doctrine of love, or eros. At its deepest level, each life is driven by a passionate desire for what is at once beautiful and less time-bound than itself. For most people, eros takes the form of sexual love and the extension of a finite life through progeny. There is,…

Ideally, one’s eros (erotic love) should progress from ordinary love objects to Beauty itself. Alcibiades concludes the dialogue by bursting in and giving a drunken encomium of Socrates.

…as in the Symposium, is eros, here graphically described. The soul is portrayed as made of a white horse (noble), a black horse (base), and a charioteer; Socrates provides an elaborate description of the soul’s discarnate career as a spectator of the vision of the forms, which it may recall…

…argument may be summarized thus: eros, desirous love in all its forms, is a reaching out of the soul to a good to which it aspires but does not yet possess. The desirous soul is not yet in fruition of the good. It is on the way to fruition, just…