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The Telos Of Love In Homer's Odyssey

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As a conceptual object, there is no real physical form for love. You can’t touch or sense love directly, but you may feel it through an indicator or cognition. Before we have an acute definition for love, intelligent philosophers, thinker, and writers have separate explanations on love itself based on different situations. Socrates, one of the significant philosophers who emphasizes rationalism, uses deductive reasoning to explain that the telos of love is one’s desire. The purpose of loving is to produce good or beauty, the ideal objects that highly promote one’s morality. Comparing to other famous writers, such as Homer’s illustrations (Odyssey) on heroic figures’ love, Socrates’s opinion is more universal and able to give new definitions on some actions based on his opinion because his thought on love not only covers the majority of people instead of specific heroes but also reveals the specificity about the actual physical intimacy and the ideological form of love.
In Symposium, Plato mainly refers his …show more content…

In Homer’s opinion, the reason that Odysseus hesitates to home probably is a home-sick and a representation of the value of morality that husband should not betray their wives, which it narrows the significance of Odysseus’s behavior. With the Platonic love as the supplement, we may now discover that Odysseus is not just a deputy of a heroic figure, more likely he is someone who truly describes the fantasy of love and the beauty that are hidden behind Homer’s illustration on man’s manner. As the result of Odysseus, he succeeds in going back to his house and finishes the rest of his life with his family. Probably it may be an award to his faithful love besides the beauty he gained through the relationship with

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