Is love still a part of the good life?
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Keywords
Good life, Plato, Symposium love, Modern Age, Capitalism
Abstract
Aristotle has thought about love as an important part of Eudaimonia, the good life, but surprisingly enough it was Plato who provided us with the most significant elaboration for why love would be a part of the good life. This chapter talks only about love in modernity, and begins with Plato's symposium to emphasise the fact that love has been connected to the discourse of virtues. The most striking difference between modern and pre-modern love was the dis-entanglement of love from traditional moral virtues, from moral conceptions of the self and from a social cosmology. At the end of the 19th century, and even more clearly in the 20th century, love underwent an additional change which is that it became associated and even central to a cardinal value of modern people, namely happiness, conceived as a utilitarian project to maximise one's pleasure. The sexualisation of relationships means also that it creates its own autonomous social fields.
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Article Details
Eva Illouz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Sociologist, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.
Mateo Jaramillo Amaya, Universidad EAFIT
Psicólogo y magíster en Estudios Humanísticos de la Universidad EAFIT
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