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In Plato’s Symposium on Love, several characters discuss their definitions of love. However, I categorize love into two types: the physical love and psychological love. The numerous definitions of love may apply to both types of love, since the scope of the word is so broad. Both physical and psychological love may be the greatest wonder as Phaedrus says, or amoral, prone to both good and evil as Eryximachus claims. I also believe that all the various theories of love do have one common basis, that all love is founded upon man’s distaste of loneliness. Both the physical and psychological aspects of love support this idea. Love is the escape that men have found from loneliness. Humans are social creatures. Unlike some animals, most humans cannot live their whole life in solitude. They need to belong in a family, a cliché, or a community. People in love, people who belong in a group do not feel lonely as much because they have a bond with each other. Surprisingly, it is the lewd Aristophanes out of all the philosophers that first clearly points this out. He claims “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love”.
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