Love: The Most Important Types Of Love In Plato's Symposium

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When it comes to adultery, love is the most important factor in determining if it’s wrong or right. In Plato’s Symposium, love is discussed among Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes Agathon and Socrates. Pausanias is the most important when discussing adultery. Pausanias points out that there are two types of love, Common Aphrodite’s Love and Love of Heavenly Aphrodite. Common love is the root of adultery. It is the love that has plagued the whole world for the past hundreds of years. It is the love shared between two people only for their selfish sexual pleasures. While Heavenly love is the spiritual love between an elder and a boy that provides guidance, and I believe it is the cure for the devastating plague of common love. Most people share common love and have no real soulful love connection between them. In the Symposium, Pausanias refers to a love he calls the common love in which a person is more attached “to the body more than the soul, and to the least intelligent partners, since all they care about is completing the sexual act” (166). Which relates to adultery in that committing sexual acts with someone else’s body is ultimately meaningless if the person is not attached to the soul of the other person. I claim that adultery is morally permissible because having sexual intercores with someone else has little …show more content…

Love is often grouped with marriage but the majority of married people don’t know what love is. Everybody has a different opinion on what love is so when referring to adultery I don’t see adultery having anything to do with love either. I see marriage through a legal perspective and honestly, I could care less about a legal union between two people and if the union is broken. Adultery is like running a red light or speeding on the freeway, it doesn’t really matter unless you get caught. Is speeding on the freeway morally

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