ABSTRACT
The evolution of the West is, inter alia, a synthesis of three main loves: love of wisdom, love of God, and romantic love. The moment human beings developed a method for their love of wisdom, philosophy was born. The earliest fully developed philosophical expositions on love that we have are, of course, from Plato. All of Plato's incursions into politics are an attempt to find the harmony that Athens has lacked under dictatorship and democracy. Along Girardian lines, one might add that Plato fathomed that the violence endemic to tyranny and democracy was due to their mimetic madness. Our human existence, for Plato, is frequently considered within a metaphysical framework where the soul is separate from the body and where it can survive the body and even enter into another body after death and take on another life. Typically Plato looks for love as a source of moral guidance.
