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Philosophy Then

All Your Love is Need

Peter Adamson ponders erotic philosophy in the Renaissance.

Pop music offers to philosophers a nearly limitless supply of ideas about love. Confining ourselves just to the lyrics of the Beatles, we find the theses that being loved can’t be bad; that love cannot be bought; and even that it might be possible to love someone for eight days a week. The same song that proposes that unlikely scenario (‘Eight Days a Week’, 1964) includes the pleading line, “Hope you need my love, just like I need you.” This suggests that Lennon and McCartney were singing from the same hymn sheet as an earlier source of ideas about the erotic life: Plato.

In Plato’s Symposium, he has the philosopher Diotima argue that Eros, the Greek god of love, is poor and needy, without shoes or a home.

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