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Love & Romance

The Unlovable Parts of a Loving Society

Matei Tanasă asks if we should love the unlovable.

Do all people deserve to be loved? To be able to answer such a question, we must first understand its meaning. So first, what is love? The common view regarding love meets Plato’s view on it quite nicely. His view as elaborated in his dialogues Phaedo and Symposium is that love for someone or something is a type of desire. Specifically it is a desire for beauty. Yet by desiring a certain person or thing, we must also desire its conservation, its protection, and its general wellbeing – by which I simply mean, lack of pain or its non-destruction.

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