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Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche:

The Politics of Infinity

ISBN-13: 9780271033310
Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Laurence D. Cooper
Price: AUD $67.99
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Local release date: 01/02/2010
Format: Paperback 376 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Political ideologies [JPF]

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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.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: The Oneness of Desire—But Which One?

1. The Republic as Prologue

Part One: Platonic Eros—The Effectual Truth

2. First Truths

3. What Does Eros Want?

4. Love of Wisdom versus Love of the Wise: Eros in Action

Part Two: Rousseau and the Expansiveness of Being

5. Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and “The Desire to Extend Our Being”

6. Emile, or On Philosophy?

Part Three: Nietzsche’s New Eternity

7. Nietzsche’s Politeia, I

8. Nietzsche’s Politeia, II

9. Will to Power versus Eros, or a Battle of Eternities

Epilogue: One or Many?

References

Index

“Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche is a well-written work for Straussians by a Straussian, reviewed for Pennsylvania State by Straussians, and praised by the same Straussians on the back cover.”

—Edward Andrew, Review of Politics

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Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche:

The Politics of Infinity