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Love is not a cold buffet
Martinovská, Tereza ; Švec, Ondřej (advisor) ; Jirsa, Jakub (referee)
One of the speakers of Plato's dialogue Symposium is a comic playwright Aristophanes, who joins the other speakers in praising Eros and tells a myth about the origin of love. He says that originally four-legged and four-armed humans were cut into two parts by infuriated Zeus, and since then they roam the world, until they find their lost half and unite with her in sexual act. Aristophanes formulates his account of love as a desire to merge with one's other half. This bachelor thesis deals with two modern philosophical interpretations of Aristophanes' myth, written by Emmanuel Lévinas and Robert Solomon. Whereas Lévinas criticises Aristophanes' myth as an egoistic and incestuous form of love, in which a person looks only for herself and forgets the infinite otherness of the Other, Solomon interprets the myth about love as merging of two halves positively, as a form of love that is conditioned by equality of its partners and that does not omit the importance of corporeality. The account of both authors opens many interesting questions. Lévinas' critique and his subsequent positive formulation of an asymmetrical erotic relationship allows him to maintain the alterity of the Other, however this alterity is based on sexual difference and formulated in a language that consists of extensively...
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