Platonic love

Platonic love is a type of love which is friendly, affectionate, or even passionate, but sexual desire is nonexistent, suppressed or sublimated.: "Somewhere in history a misinterpretation arose by which 'Platonic love' came to mean sexless love, or at least love in which sexuality was thoroughly sublimated. Most dictionaries define Platonic love as 'devoid of sensual feeling,' which is certainly not what Plato had in mind. On the contrary, it was sensual feeling for the beautiful body of another person which first evoked an awareness of eros as the ancient Greeks understood it. Their culture was permeated with an appreciation of the beautiful in its human bodily form."

The term is derived from the name of the Greek philosopher Plato, although modern use of the term does not exactly refer to his idea of love. Plato's concept concerned spiritual growth, expressed using the metaphor of a ladder which the lover ascends. Physical attraction to a particular beautiful body is only at the bottom; as the lover ascends the ladder, a love for absolute beauty itself is the ultimate inspiration at the top.

In the 15th century, a Latin term for Plato's idea of love, amor platonicus, was coined by Marsilio Ficino; "platonic love" then entered the English language in the 1630s, when Neoplatonism was a fad among royalty. Later, by the time of the 18th century, the term came to be used more in the modern sense to mean a sexless relationship.

Platonic love is not always mutually exclusive with romance or passion, however. For example, a romantic friendship involves passionate feelings without sexual desire.

Plato's ideal where the lover achieves transcendence through nonsexual adoration has also been interpreted as a positive conception of passionate love—usually only between men in ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks thought of love and marriage as separate; they did have a concept of passionate, romantic love, but it was typically viewed as a madness and only depicted in literature.

Classical philosophical interpretation

Platonic love is examined in Plato's dialogue, the Symposium, which has as its topic the subject of love, or more generally the subject of Eros. It explains the possibilities of how the feeling of love began and how it has evolved, both sexually and non-sexually, and defines genuine platonic love as inspiring a person's mind and soul and directing their attention towards spiritual matters.

This is of particular importance to Socrates, who attributes platonic love as the means to an ascent, known as the "Ladder of Love", to the prophet Diotima. Generally for Diotima and Plato the most correct use of love of human beings is to direct one's mind to the love of divinity. Socrates defines love based on separate classifications of pregnancy (to bear offspring); pregnancy of the body, pregnancy of the soul, and direct connection to existence. Pregnancy of the body results in human children. Pregnancy of the soul, the next step in the process, produces "virtue"—which is the soul (truth) translating itself into material form.Rojcewicz, R. (1997). Platonic love: dasein's urge toward being. Research in Phenomenology, 27(1), 103.

In the following quote, the author simplifies the idea of virtue as simply what is "good".

Eros Pausanias, in Plato's Symposium (181b–182a), defines two types of the love known as "Eros": vulgar Eros, or earthly love, and divine Eros, or divine love. Pausanias defines vulgar Eros as material attraction towards a person's beauty for the purposes of physical pleasure and reproduction, and divine Eros as starting from physical attraction but transcending gradually to love for supreme beauty, placed on a similar level to the divine. This concept of divine Eros was later transformed into the term "platonic love".

Vulgar Eros and divine Eros were both considered to be connected, and part of the same continuous process of pursuing perfection of one's being, with the purpose of mending one's human nature and eventually reaching a point of unity where there is no longer an aspiration or need to change.

Ladder of Love The Ladder of Love is a metaphor that relates each step toward Being as consecutive rungs of a ladder. Each step closer to the truth further distances love from beauty of the body toward love that is more focused on wisdom and the essence of beauty.

The ladder starts with carnal attraction of body for body, progressing to a love for body and soul. Eventually, in time, with consequent steps up the ladder, the idea of beauty is eventually no longer connected with a body, but entirely united with Being itself.

Tragedy and comedy Plato's Symposium defines two extremes in the process of platonic love; the entirely carnal and the entirely ethereal. These two extremes of love are seen by the Greeks in terms of tragedy and comedy. According to Diotima in her discussion with Socrates, for anyone to achieve the final rung in the Ladder of Love, they would essentially transcend the body and rise to immortality—gaining direct access to Being. Such a form of love is impossible for a mortal to achieve.

What Plato describes as "pregnancy of the body" is entirely carnal and seeks pleasure and beauty in bodily form only. This is the type of love, that, according to Socrates, is practiced by animals.

Tragedy Diotima considers the carnal limitation of human beings to the pregnancy of the body to be a form of tragedy, as it separates someone from the pursuit of truth. One would be forever limited to beauty of the body, never being able to access the true essence of beauty.

Comedy Diotima considers the idea of a mortal having direct access to Being to be a comic situation simply because of the impossibility of it. The offspring of true virtue would essentially lead to a mortal achieving immortality.

Neoplatonism

In the Middle Ages, new interest in the works of Plato, his philosophy and his view of love became more popular, spurred on by Georgios Gemistos Plethon during the Councils of Ferrara and Firenze in 1438–1439. Later in 1469, Marsilio Ficino put forward a theory of neo-platonic love, in which he defined love as a personal ability of an individual, which guides their soul towards cosmic processes, lofty spiritual goals and heavenly ideas.De Amore, Les Belles Lettres, 2012 The first use of the modern sense of platonic love is considered to be by Ficino in one of his letters.

Though Plato's discussions of love originally centered on relationships which were sexual between members of the same sex, scholar Todd Reeser studies how the meaning of platonic love in Plato's original sense underwent a transformation during the Renaissance, leading to the contemporary sense of nonsexual heterosexual love.

Other modern interpretations

Queerplatonic love

Some in the aromantic and asexual communities, within the broader LGBT community, have coined the term "queerplatonic" to refer to formal intimate relationships between significant others that do not involve romance. Queerplatonic feelings are often described, like romance, as involving a deeper and more profound emotional connection than friendship.

Julie Sondra Decker writes that queerplatonic love often "looks indistinguishable from romance when outside the equation", but should not be "assigned a romantic status if participants say it is not romantic". She also notes that it can also be misread by observers as close friendship in circumstances where overtly romantic gestures are socially expected. For Decker, the essence of queerplatonic attraction is its ambiguous position in relation to normative categories: she writes that QPR "is a platonic relationship, but it is 'queered' in some way—not friends, not romantic partners, but something else".

Evolutionary theory

Platonic love

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