Episode #093 ... Nietzsche Pt. 4 - Love - Philosophize This!  ## Metadata - Author: **Philosophize This!** - Full Title: Episode #093 ... Nietzsche Pt. 4 - Love - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ffa87042-5506-45e4-b3c1-5f2bc110cc6f ## Highlights - Love Is a Progression Summary: The most famous account of love ever written has to be plato in his work the symposium. Everybody takes turns getting up front of the group giving their thoughts on love. diotema told socrates about how she sees love as sort of a progression. It's a progression ascending up rungs of a ladder, where you go through a number of phases. Transcript: Speaker 1 And when it comes to philosophers writing about love, by far, the most famous account of love ever written has to be plato in his work the symposium. Now, we talk a litle bit about this on the ato episode, but a, let mean, come on, tho'se three years ago, people. I was horrible at doing this back then. Oh, make it quick, right? The symposium was a fictional book written by the greek philosopher plato about a dinner party. It's a dinner party where various noteworthy figures from athens at the time all made up to talk about a particular subject. Apparently they did that kind of stuff back then. Nd, the subject of this particular night's dinner party is love. Everybody takes turns getting up front of the group giving their thoughts on love. Now, barring the funny, pretty ridiculous theory given by aristophanes, which is really probably just plato getting back at him for slandering socrates in one of his plays, besides That, in terms of philosophy, the book's pretty slow up until we start hearing what socrates has to say about what he heard about love from a philosopher named diotema. Now diothema, nobody knows for sure whether she actually existed, but it's one of those things like everyone else in the symposium existed, why wouldn't this be a real person? But diotema told socrates about how she sees love as sort of a progression. It's a progression ascending up rungs of a ladder, where, throughout your various experiences with love and your life, you go through a number of phases. Each one of these phases is a rung on the ladder where you become more and more aware of what love truly is. ([Time 0:05:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dd2cc159-f642-4a86-847f-6d9b1536ff9a)) - Tags: #humans - The Most Famous Account of Love Ever Written Summary: Now, bodily love is exactly what you'd expect it to be, a love of someone's body, an infatuation with another person. Transcript: Speaker 1 The first type of love that you'regoing to experience, the first wrung on this ladder, is what she calls bodily love. Now, bodily love is exactly what you'd expect it to be, a love of someone's body, an infatuation with another person. ([Time 0:07:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb6683b6-da7a-4422-a34d-136ccdee22d5)) - Tags: #humans - Love Is a Good Thing Summary: "To truly understand love is to understand that love is not this interpersonal exchange between two people," says diotima. "What you love about this other person really has nothing to do with them as a human being." Transcript: Speaker 1 Because what happens once you love this collection of personality traits that somebody has, is it, just like in the case of the bodily love, what you realize is that these characteristics That you love about someone aren't somehow exclusive to them. You realize there are thousands of other people out there that embody these very same characteristics. Now, the greater n of realizing this, to diotima, is that it removes this visage that's been clouding your ability to move on to the third rung of the ladder, that to truly understand Love is to understand that love is not this interpersonal exchange between two people that can only exist between two people. What you realize is that what you love about this other person really has nothing to do with them as a human being. ([Time 0:10:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aae0f1e5-85a7-475d-abd6-b062496d7fb8)) - Tags: #humans - He thinks that love, just like everything else, is a will to power. And in this case, love is sort of a mutually beneficial will to power. When two people are in love, yes, to Nietzsche, they are just both greedily desiring to change something new into themselves. ([Time 0:24:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f70dcb52-8060-4c94-9aff-a38ff0af3e5f)) - Tags: #humans