Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche
eBook - PDF

Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche

The Politics of Infinity

  1. 376 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche

The Politics of Infinity

About this book

Human beings are restless souls, ever driven by an insistent inner force not only to have more but to be more—to be infinitely more. Various philosophers have emphasized this type of ceaseless striving in their accounts of humanity, as in Spinoza's notion of conatus and Hobbes's identification of "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power." In this book, Laurence Cooper focuses his attention on three giants of the philosophic tradition for whom this inner force was a major preoccupation and something separate from and greater than the desire for self-preservation. Cooper's overarching purpose is to illuminate the nature of this source of existential longing and discontent and its implications for political life. He concentrates especially on what these thinkers share in their understanding of this psychic power and how they view it ambivalently as the root not only of ambition, vigorous virtue, patriotism, and philosophy, but also of tyranny, imperialism, and varieties of fanaticism. But he is not neglectful of the differences among their interpretations of the phenomenon, either, and especially highlights these in the concluding chapter.

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Yes, you can access Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche by Laurence D. Cooper in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Philosophy History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Copyright
  3. Contents
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. List of Abbreviations
  6. Introduction: The Oneness of Desire—But Which One?
  7. 1 The Republic as Prologue
  8. Part I: Platonic Eros—The Effectual Truth
  9. Part II: Rousseau and the Expansiveness of Being
  10. Part III: Nietzsche’s New Eternity
  11. Epilogue: One or Many?
  12. References
  13. Index
  14. Back Cover