Plato and the Problem of Love: On the Nature of Eros in the Symposium‪.‬

I Is love essentially autoerotic? In his classic study published at the turn of the last century, Pierre Rousselot posed what he referred to as 'the problem of love,' namely, 'Is it possible for there to be a love that is not egoistic? And if it is possible, what is the relationship between this pure love of the other, and the love of self that seems to lie at the basis of all natural tendencies?' (1) Though the question is evidently a perennial one, Rousselot investigated it specifically within the context of the concern among medieval thinkers to honor the Christian demand that one love God more than oneself. According to Rousselot, there were two general notions of love in this period, each with its own solution to the problem: on the one hand, there was 'ecstatic love,' which interpreted love in its purest form as a violent ex-propriation in the unconditional gift of self to the beloved. (2) On the other hand, there was 'natural love' (l'amour physique), which insisted that love remains essentially self-referential even in its loftiest instances, but that the notion of self could ultimately (and somewhat paradoxically) be expanded to include what one would normally recognize as a readiness to make a sacrifice of one's own person. This latter notion of love, which Rousselot attributed to the 'Greco-Thomist' tradition, he deemed in the end to be the more satisfactory: for the radical selflessness implied in the ecstatic conception must surrender rationality to the extent that it denies what is clearly an undeniable principle, that it is impossible for me to affirm something as good unless I see it in some respect as good for me. (3)