At Liberty and In Love

Abstract

In this dissertation, I present three essays that study the significance of erōs in Plato's political philosophy and explore its practical implication for the principle of democratic liberty. The love the word erōs refers to in Greek, compared to philia and agapē, has a distinctively physical and intensely visceral dimension: it evokes the irrational and embodied relational impulses of the human condition. When Plato in the Republic, Phaedrus, and Symposium situates the most rational and most liberating human endeavor, philosophy, within the condition of erōs, therefore, he presents us an account of human endeavor for happiness (eudaimonia) always-already embedded in the condition of plurality, embodied mortality, irreducible irrationality, and relation to supra-human reality. I argue that there emerges in Plato's account of philosophy-cum-erōs what we could call an erotic human ontology, which at once legitimizes democratic liberty as a constitutional principle and equips us with requisite ethical resources for democratic processes, cultivating moral humility and respect for differences and individuality.