I have made promises to those I love. Help me to keep them. Lend me you most powerful ear to those whom I love. Lend your most powerful ear to me. Love, as one of the most powerful of human impulses, was early seen to be much in need of control, especially if man as a rational animal was to be able to use his rational capacities. The pleasures and other values of loving may be preserved without entailing the supposed evils of intemperate sexuality. In the Platonic tradition love has a unique metaphysical status, for it existed in both material and the ideal Worlds. Love can take on money forms, from gross sexual passion to a devotion to learning, but, it was argued, the ultimate object of love is the beautiful. Until the eighteenth century, beauty was the single most important idea in this history of aesthetic. Some see beauty as the property ingredient in things. It is nonrelational twice over, for its existence is not dependent upon, or affected by, perceiving it; and whereas relative beauty exists only by virtue of comparisons with things that are of a lesser degree of beauty or simply ugly, intrinsic beauty does not.  

The Goodness that God sees in his creation is its beauty and to feel the beauty of the World is to love it and its Creator. The struggles with man’s psyche between a rational, controllable, prudent, and wise agent an irrational, uncontrollable, man, and foolish agent. When the former is in control, man will behave in praiseworthy fashion, but when the latter gains the upper hand, he will act like a wild beast breeding somewhere, breeding like fire, spreading in all directions, hiding in the valleys and the hills, in the mountains and on the plains, traveling over land and sea, and then coming out ringing of a loud bell, and walking out all over the World at the same time and shooting one human being apiece, and taking over the entire planet. He will abandon all reason, that according to most of the ancients, alone distinguished him from the beast. Although man also has an animal nature, to yield to its demands is to betray his essential nature. So some choose the roaming winds for human sake, dissolved now and then in the poetry of love, and envision bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where one and the one can convert and dwell.

Love is believed to be a power capable of uniting people in a common bond. And since not only people but also animals and the elements were thus united, it is appropriate to conceive of this power as lodged in a single agent that governed the whole cosmos. Love was created by the goddess Necessity, and love emerge as one of the two Universal forces (the other being strife) that explains the course of cosmic history. These two agents—the one union, the other decomposition—are not simply names for the fact that composition and decomposition occur; on the contrary, love and strife are not resident in things but are external to them and act upon them. The cosmos, so to speak, is held in tension between the forces of harmony and disunion. Were the two forces to be synchronously presented, the World would clearly be in a state of disorder. When love is in control, the elements form compounds out of which arise more complex units and, eventually, animate beings.

Because of the wide availability of sexual material and opportunities for variedl expeiences with pleasures of the flesh, most people nowadays consider themselves rather sexually liberated. This liberation is primarily intellectual and behavioral; there still exists a great deal of emotion and experiential limitation, as well as sensory restrictions. All experience takes place within the consciousness itself; therefore, sexual experience, like any other, is determined by our overall level of awareness and inner freedom. The degree to which our sexual experience has been restricted becomes apparent the more we relinquish our feeling about it. When we are totally surrendered on sexuality, it is like adding a third dimension to what was before a two-dimensional experience. Besides the increased emotional pleasure of freedom of expression, letting go brings change in the sensory experience itself. Sexuality loses its compulsiveness. Freedom means not just freedom not to have pleasures of the flesh nor a climax. When we are surrendered, we are not run by desire for the climax.  

Love based on pleasures of the flesh itself, although lowest on the scale of love, is nevertheless the seed of ideal love, since what attracts a man to the beloved is beauty. Love, insofar as it concerns friendship, has the attractive power towards life where there can be a return of affection. It is love of the soul and love of the body. In this speech, honorable love is the source of harmony and the preserver of the good. Love is in essence the love of beauty and that beauty is nothing material; it is an ideal. However, no man desires the ideal until he has been educated through philosophic training. There is a scale of beauty, progressing from that of bodies through that of forms, thoughts, minds, institutions and laws, the sciences, to absolute ideal beauty. Beauty is the bridge between the two realms of the material and the ideal, particulars and the Universal. Power draws men to beauty in its many modes. The two realms present not simply a duality of kind but also of value for the ideal and Universal, which are perfect and eternal, are always to be preferred to the material and the particular.