platonic love

platonic love, a phrase used in two senses, with allusion in both cases to Plato’s account of love in his Symposium.

The immediate object of the Symposium—which professes to record the discourses made in eulogy of Eros by a group of eminent speakers at a banquet in honour of the tragic poet Agathon—is to find the highest manifestation of the love which controls the world in the mystic aspiration after union with the eternal and supercosmic beauty. The Symposium depicts Socrates as the type of the aspirant who has reached the goal of union and sets in sharp opposition to him the figure of Alcibiades, who has sold his spiritual birthright for the pleasures and ambitions of the world. The centre of philosophical interest lies in the discourse of Socrates, which he professes to have learned from the priestess Diotima of Mantinea.

The main argument may be summarized thus: eros, desirous love in all its forms, is a reaching out of the soul to a good to which it aspires but does not yet possess. The desirous soul is not yet in fruition of the good. It is on the way to fruition, just as the philosopher is not yet in possession of wisdom but is reaching out after it. The object which awakens this desirous love in all its forms is beauty, and beauty is eternal. In its crudest form, love for a beautiful person is really a passion to beget offspring by that person and so to attain, by the perpetuation of one’s stock, the substitute for immortality which is all the body can achieve. A more spiritual form of the same craving for eternity is the aspiration to win immortal fame by combining with a kindred soul to give birth to sound institutions and rules of life. Still more spiritual is the endeavour, in association with chosen minds, to enrich philosophy and science with noble discourses and thoughts.

Thus, in common speech, platonic love means a supremely affectionate relationship between human beings in which sexual intercourse is neither desired nor practiced. In this sense, it most often refers to a heterosexual relationship. By extension, it may be used to cover that stage of chivalrous or courtly love in which sexual intercourse is indefinitely postponed.

From the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century, the term platonic love was also used as an occasional euphemism for homosexual love, in view of the comparatively tolerant attitude to such love discernible in Plato as well as in other Greek authors.