Plato vs Albert Camus on Love
Plato and Albert Camus on love, side by side — 5 passages against 4, and what the disagreement is actually about.
Plato and Albert Camus both have a great deal to say about love — 5 passages and 4 respectively in thinkr's library — and they do not say the same thing. Setting them side by side is more useful than reading either alone, because the disagreement shows you what each position is actually giving up.
Plato on love
Student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, founder of the Academy. His dialogues — the Republic, Symposium, Phaedo — set the terms of Western metaphysics.
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
“Neither family, nor privilege, nor wealth, nor anything but Love can light that beacon which a man must steer by when he sets out to live the better life.”
“For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet”
“Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?”
“My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them.”
Albert Camus on love
French-Algerian novelist and philosopher of the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus asks how to live well in a universe without inherent meaning.
“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.”
“The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.”
“He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”
Where they part
Athens, c. 428–348 BCE and France/Algeria, 1913–1960 are not the same world, and the difference is not only historical. Plato treats love as something to be at the touch of love everyone… — a matter of practice. Albert Camus approaches it from another side entirely. Neither is refuting the other; they are answering slightly different questions, and noticing which question you are actually asking is most of the work.