The concept of platonic love arises from the work of the Greek philosopher Plato.
Love is a feeling that a person experiences towards another when the latter causes happiness, pleasure and well-being. When a human being loves someone, they try to generate in the other those positive things that they feel inside.
Platonic , for its part, is an adjective that refers to what is linked to the doctrine of the Greek philosopher Plato and to what is sincere and disinterested.
What is platonic love
The idea of Platonic love, in this way, is associated with the concept of a love relationship raised by Plato in “Phaedrus” and “The Symposium.” For the philosopher, love arises from the desire to discover and admire beauty . The process begins when someone appreciates physical beauty and then progresses to spiritual beauty.
The maximum stage of platonic love involves pure, passionate and detached admiration of the essence of beauty . This essence is eternal, perfect and unalterable and does not include a sexual interest. Platonic love is not oriented towards the person, but towards beauty itself.
In its original sense, platonic love is linked to the admiration of beauty.
Idealization without sexual bond
On a simpler level, platonic love is understood to be love that is idealized and does not encompass sexual desire . By extension, in colloquial language , platonic love is mentioned as the romantic feeling one has for a person who, for some reason, is unattainable . Therefore, such love cannot include a sexual bond.
Platonic love is very common during adolescence , a stage in which people begin to know each other more from an emotional point of view, and very often we fall in love with famous artists, our teachers or an adult with whom it is not possible to be with. , for different social reasons.
It is very important to highlight that this idea of an impossible to achieve or unrequited love with which the concept of platonic love is defined in everyday speech is not correct, since it has no relationship with what is described in the Platonic dialogues mentioned above, which has a very different philosophical approach.
Beauty, origin of platonic love
According to Plato, when we encounter beauty, love arises in us, which can be defined as the impulse or determination that pushes us to know and contemplate it. It is a series of phases that occur gradually; In each of them, the human being appreciates a particular type of beauty, as we can see below:
* bodily beauty : this first phase can be divided into two steps, since first we feel love for a beautiful body in particular, and then we appreciate physical beauty in general;
* the beauty of souls : once we have gone through the appreciation of a person's physical appearance , we begin to focus on their interior, on the moral and cultural level, and thus love can transcend the flesh and point to the soul;
* the beauty of wisdom : the admiration of the spirit leads to a love of knowledge, something that goes beyond the concrete servitude of beings;
* beauty in itself : if we have been able to overcome each of the previous phases, then the love for beauty in itself is revealed to us, detached from any object or subject . It is the supreme level of love.
This last step is characterized by knowing beauty in a passionate, selfless and pure way, a feeling that is not corrupted or altered with the passage of time, and that also points to the cause and origin of said beauty, which is unique in itself. Therefore, it is not an impossible love, but one that is based on the appreciation of perfect , intelligible and eternal ideas and forms.