Oh, Love, Where Art Thou?

Listened to The Symposium last. Each of the three sections is just long enough for a six mile run, with five minutes or so left over to listen to Pandora. Given the topic of The Symposium, love, I thought something schmaltzy, like the Moody Blues channel, was appropriate.

I lost count of how many spoke, each in turn, in this account of a speaking contest that Plato apparently did not attend. Of course, it's all a set-up. Socrates speaks last, and outdoes everyone. Each participant gives a speech on love. (This is one of the few dialogues in which Socrates doesn't complain about speech-making, and doesn't interrupt other speakers to ask them unanswerable questions. For some reason, he's on his best behavior. The gadfly is silent until his turn to speak comes around.)

What I find interesting is how much time in this and other dialogues, most notably, Phaedrus, is devoted to the topic of love, and how little time modern philosophy seems to spend on the topic. We seem to have rewritten The Symposium so it isn't actually about love, but about "love of philosophy." And, of course, Weaver's well-known analysis of Phaedrus would have us believe that it's really about rhetoric. Thus, love is never a philosophical topic in the dialogues; it's merely a stepping stone to other, more important topics.

So, do we leave "love" to Nicholas Sparks and the Hallmark Channel? Is love so outside the realm of reason that it's not worth talking about?

I know, I'm overstating my complaint. If we are to trust the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is a philosophy of love. (However, look at the citations; almost all are from the Greeks. Not much in the Twentieth Century, and none in the Twenty-first, even though an internet encyclopedia is very Twenty-first Century.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/love/

More thorough citations in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/

And let's not forget Wikipedia. Lot's of links to online texts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_love

Interesting that they all refer to love as a noun. I've always thought of it as a verb.