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

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

What do we understand by platonic love today?

Plato was not so self-centered as to put his name to one of his contributions to philosophy. The term “Platonic love” was first coined by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino , and it is very difficult to use this concept with the same accuracy as Plato did, since both our context and our way of thinking are very different from what was usual in Athens more than 2000 years ago.

However, this concept is usually used to refer to an impossible love for different reasons. It can be a corresponded love, in which the person in love sees his or her attempts to approach someone frustrated, or it can also serve to refer to those cases in which at the moment in which someone is conquered this person ceases to seem perfect to us, so that what attracted us to him or her in the beginning is never reached.

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

Keys to Understanding Platonic Love

What exactly do we mean when we refer to this kind of love?Through these four points we will try to explain it.

1.Platonic love is “true love”

For Plato, the types of love that are based on the pleasures provided by our senses 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 because, in addition to being disinterested, it never allows us access to what we love.

More about 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 essence , and therefore can never be achieved by human beings. So, how come Plato talks about love in such positive and optimistic terms? The answer is that, for the philosopher, love drives us to improve ourselves in order to be closer to the beauty we long for , 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 drive us towards self-perfection . There is a paradox: we struggle 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 sign of what it means to seek an unapproachable beauty . Wise people are also those who, like Socrates, seek knowledge while accepting their own ignorance. In that harmony is the ennoblement of the soul and the virtue of which Plato speaks.

3. Platonic love is universal

Platonic love does not consist of attraction to a particular person whom we have idealized. It is, rather, a force that seeks to find the essence of beauty in its different expressions . What is important 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 traces 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 everything that is perceived directly through the senses is found, and an ideal one, in which the essence of beauty is found. This explains why we can find the essence of beauty in every place and person imaginable, 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 is in him exclusively . Every time we see perfection in something or someone, we are glimpsing the same thing.

4. Expresses itself 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 norm of behavior on how to treat the loved one, but has to do with the same conception of what beauty is for Plato. The beautiful is indivisible from the good and the authentic, and the authentic can only be recognized through the intellect .

In the same way, 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 to spiritually access his object of desire.

Guide to Love in Modern Times

In practically every case in which we speak of platonic love there is a very important factor to take into account: the idealization . For Plato, love is found in a balance between what is known and what is ignored, and this rule can also be applied to our relationship with people. This is because, when we idealize a person, we are perceiving him/her as a practically perfect being precisely because we do not know him/her well enough to see that he/she is not.

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

To idealize… or to live love in spite of its bad things

Actually, I don’t. For Plato, the attraction we feel for a person always goes beyond the physical, and therefore spending more time with him and discovering his different facets does not have to mean that we “tame” the essence of the beauty we find in him . 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 kind of persistent idealization is not the most common today.

Is your love platonic or simply inaccessible to you?

Beyond what in ancient Greece was understood as platonic love, idealizing someone usually consists in ignoring that person not because of his or her capacity to continue to be attractive no matter what , but because of our difficulties in connecting with him or her , either because we have only recently met him or because he or she only lets us see one of his or her facets.

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

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