Plato’s theory of love is one of the philosophical proposals that has generated the most interest of this thinker from Ancient Greece.
The world of love and personal relationships is already, in itself, something to which we pay a lot of importance, and when this area is combined with the approaches of one of the great figures of philosophy, the result is a theoretical legacy. that attracts all eyes. However, this philosopher conceived of love in a very characteristic way, since linked it to his theory about knowledge and ideas
We’ll see now What are the main characteristics of Plato’s theory of love and how it related to his philosophy.
What is dualism? Well, basically, and greatly simplifying, in the belief that reality is made up of at least two independent substances that can never be completely mixed: matter and spirit, also sometimes understood as the world of comings and goings. consciousness. These two substances are independent of each other, in the sense that although they can be “joined”, they do not mix, nor is one derived from the other.
Plato believed that the human being is essentially a soul trapped in a body , which in turn moves in an environment that is also solely material. That is, while the mind belongs to the realm of ideas, everything else, the matter to which the mind is anchored, is a kind of material prison.
But the mind has a natural tendency to want to be close to the rest of the ideas and that is why it is perfected every time it is able to see beyond the appearances of the material world of ideas to access the truth behind it, that which is universal and that cannot be located in time and space. .
Plato’s myth of the cave, for example, is a mythical story that expresses precisely this: the liberation of the human being through access to the truth, not being deceived by the appearances of the physical world.
Plato’s theory of love
And what does the above have to do with Plato’s theory of love? Well, it is very related, because For this philosopher, love can be understood as the state of ecstasy and at the same time of moderate frustration that is experienced by knowing that there is something beyond the physical that calls us but that, at the same time, will not be given to us completely, since no matter how much we do not want it, we remain chained to the material world, the place in which Enjoying things depends largely on our proximity to them in time and space, and it is almost impossible to stay away from the influence they exert on aesthetics and appearances.
The Platonic conception of love is, therefore, that of an impulse that leads us to want to go beyond the material in our experimentation of something, in accessing its beauty which for the thinker has to do with its closeness to the truth and not because of its aesthetics.
In the case of people, this beauty belongs to a spiritual plane that we sense but that we cannot make our own, since for some reason it is not something material. What characterizes love is, therefore, the search for what is true and pure, which has to do with the very essence of beauty and which belongs to a plane of existence totally separate from the physical.
Thus, in mortal life, platonic love is full of frustration, since although beauty is intuited, it is impossible to experience it directly due to material limitations.
Love as something unattainable
It is sometimes said that the essence of Plato’s theory of love is the impossibility of accessing that which is loved. However, the impossibility of directly accessing this idea of ​​beauty is only a consequence of the distinction that Plato makes between the ideal and the material.
This philosopher made his theory revolve entirely around the world of ideas and that is why it did not establish very strict rules about specific actions that must be followed to experience love in a correct way, as if our way of moving and acting in a physical space was something very important in itself.
That is why, among other things, he did not say that love had to be expressed through celibacy, since that would mean contradicting his principles by being based on the assumption that the experimentation of beauty has to be connected to the way in which that is experienced with the material world. That was rather a distortion of the dualistic philosophy used from the popularization of the Abrahamic religions especially Christianity.
Thus, brass left the door open to different ways of partially accessing the spiritual world, of transcending the borders between matter and what, according to him, existed beyond this.
