Platonic love: a guide to love in modern times

From Plato to the present day, love is constantly evolving.

The platonic love is a concept widely used today when we want to refer to a romantic longing to remain united to an unattainable romantic longing to remain united with an unattainable person.. However, the term has its origins in a very old philosophical theory that is difficult to cover in a single sentence.

Rescuing some of the key ideas of what love was for Plato can serve to remind us of a rather useful lesson.

What do we understand today by Platonic love?

Plato was not so self-centered as to name one of his contributions to philosophy after himself. The term "platonic love" was was first coined by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio FicinoIt is very difficult when we refer to this concept to use it with the same accuracy with which Plato used it, since both our context and our way of thinking are very different from what was common in the Athens of more than 2000 years ago.

Nevertheless, this concept is commonly used to refer to an impossible love for different reasons. for different reasons. It can be a requited love, in which the person in love is frustrated in his or her attempts to get closer to someone, or it can also refer to those cases in which at the moment in which someone is conquered this person no longer seems perfect to us, so that what attracted us to him or her in the beginning is never achieved.

In any case, to learn to reflect on what we experience when we fall in this type of love, it does not hurt to remember some of the main aspects of what platonic love really means.

Keys to understanding platonic love

What exactly are we talking about when we refer to this type of love? Through these four points we are going to try to explain it.

1. Platonic love is "true love".

For Plato the kinds of love that are based on the pleasures that our senses provide us with are rather banal forms of affection.. Platonic love is the purest form of love because it is not based on an exchange of physical or material qualities. It is also so because, besides being disinterested, it never lets us have access to what we love.

More on the different ways we humans express this feeling:

• "Types of love: what different kinds of love are there?"

2. Platonic love is never achieved

According to the concept of platonic love, beauty has a divine essenceSo how is it that Plato speaks about love in such positive and optimistic terms? The answer is that, for the philosopher, love impels us to improve ourselves in order to be closer to the beauty we long for, and this is a good thing in itself.and this is a good thing in itself.

In short, the existence of what we know today as Platonic love means that there is something in us that can propel us towards self-perfection. There is a paradox: we strive to get closer to something that, by definition is inaccessible and infinitely distant from us.

For Plato, asking questions about the nature of things through philosophy is a clear example of what it means to search for an unfathomable beauty.. Wise people are also those who, like Socrates, seek knowledge while accepting their own ignorance. In this harmony is the ennoblement of the soul and the virtue of which Plato speaks.

3. Platonic love is universal

Platonic love does not consist in attraction to a specific person whom we have idealized. It is, rather, a force that seeks us to find the essence of beauty in its different expressions.. What matters is the divinization of beauty and goodness, concepts that for Plato are linked to each other. For this philosopher, we do not fall in love with people, but with the glimpses of beauty that we can find in them.

This explains why, paradoxically, beauty is unattainable but also omnipresent. Plato believed that the world we experience through the senses expresses two realities: a material one, in which we find everything that is directly perceived through the senses, and an ideal one, in which we find the essence of beauty. That explains why we can find the essence of beauty in all imaginable places and people, depending on the degree to which our virtue allows us to glimpse the ideal world in the materiality that surrounds us.

Therefore, if we obey what is platonic love, to believe that a person is perfect is, in reality, to find in that person forms of expression of a beauty that does not belong directly to him or her, nor is it in him or her exclusively..... Every time we see perfection in something or someone, we are glimpsing the same thing.

4. It is expressed intellectually

Platonic love is a type of love that, for the Greek philosopher, manifests itself in a way that is not exclusively physical, since it refers to an object of desire that is beyond the material. This is not limited to being an ethical standard of behavior on how to treat the loved one, but has to do with the very conception of what beauty is for Plato. The beautiful is inseparable from the good and the authentic, and the authentic can only be recognized through the intellect..

Similarly, the beauty we find in a body is actually beauty that belongs to the spiritual plane. For Plato, someone who experiences this kind of love longs for spiritual access to his or her object of desire.

A guide to love in modern times

In practically all cases where we speak of platonic love, there is one factor that is very important to take into account: the idealization. For Plato, love lies in a balance between what is known and what is unknown, and this rule can also be applied to our relationship with people. This is so because, when we idealize a person, we are perceiving him or her as practically perfect precisely because we do not know him or her well enough to see that he or she is not. enough to see that they are not.

Now then: if the essence of what is beautiful is unattainable, concrete people are not so much. Impossible love can cease to be impossible when, for one reason or another, there comes a point where we can "conquer" that person... and that allows us to get to know him or her better. A question then arises: Is the end of impossible love the end of platonic love?

Idealizing... or living love in spite of its bad things

Actually, it is not. For Plato, the attraction we feel for a person always goes beyond the physical, and therefore spending more time with him and discovering its different facets does not have to mean that we "tame" the essence of the beauty that we find in this. There will be something in this person that will remain unattainable, although we will not know why, since we still do not understand and intellectually conquer that which attracts us.

But this type of idealization so persistent is not the most common in our days.

Is it your platonic love or just someone inaccessible to you?

Beyond what was understood in ancient Greece as platonic love, idealizing someone usually consists of ignoring that person not because of his or her ability to remain attractive no matter what, but because of our difficulties in connecting with them, either because we have only recently met themeither because we have only known them for a short time or because they only let us see one of their facets.

The latter is evident, for example, in the phenomenon of the fanboy phenomenon o fangirl that world-famous people have originated. Celebrities have behind them such a massive marketing machine and such efficient image consultants that we only know the most graceful and admirable part of their person. To a lesser extent, The same is true of people who, despite attracting us by their appearance, never quite connect with us..

Curiously, it is aesthetics and the material, that which was of less importance to Plato, that leads us to idealize our neighbor: almost never an intellectual approach. Perhaps it would be useful for us to think more often about this fact.