Ask most people what platonic love means and they will say a close relationship without romance or sex. Plato himself wrote about something larger and stranger. His account of love is a ladder of desire that begins with beauty in a single person and climbs toward the beautiful itself. Understanding the gap between the everyday phrase and Plato’s actual philosophy explains why the term is still debated.
What does platonic love mean today?
In everyday speech, platonic describes a close, affectionate bond that does not involve sexual or romantic involvement, as in a platonic friendship. Philosophers who study friendship note a real difference between friendship and romantic love. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, romantic love normally has a kind of sexual involvement that friendship lacks, although the entry leaves open whether sexuality alone explains the difference.
What did Plato write about love?
Plato treats love (eros) and friendship (philia) mainly in three dialogues: the Lysis, the Symposium and the Phaedrus. The Stanford entry on Plato describes Socrates as both a lover of wisdom and a disrupter of ordinary erotic norms. In the Lysis, Socrates can stir desire for wisdom in others but cannot satisfy it, and the dialogue ends in aporia, a state of puzzlement with no firm conclusion, which is how Socrates often leaves hard questions open. In the Symposium and Phaedrus, love becomes a path toward truth.
What is Diotima’s ladder of love?
In the Symposium, Socrates reports a teaching from a priestess named Diotima. Her account moves in stages, which later readers call the ladder of love, or scala amoris:
- From love of one beautiful body
- To love of all beautiful bodies
- To love of beautiful souls
- To love of beautiful laws and institutions
- To love of the sciences
- Finally, to love of the beautiful itself
The aim of this ascent is described as giving birth in beauty. The Stanford entry notes that the speeches in the Symposium reflect each speaker’s own loves, so some are partly love’s delusions, and that Diotima’s story concerns correct or successful love, not every kind of love. That explains why Alcibiades, whose attempted seduction of Socrates fails, does not fit her pattern.
What does the Phaedrus add?
In the Phaedrus, the soul is a charioteer driving two horses, and love is a divine madness that can lead the soul toward the forms. This picture treats love as a powerful, even disruptive, force that can be directed toward wisdom. The dialogue also discusses rhetoric as a craft tied to knowing souls.
Is the ladder of love about using people?
Many readers have found the ladder distasteful, because it seems to treat beautiful individuals as disposable rungs. The Stanford entry notes this objection and argues that it is not Diotima’s message, since she describes a love that comes to include a richer, more enduring attachment to the beloved. Other critics, including Nietzsche and some feminists, doubt whether the ascent is a distorting fantasy. The entry frames the larger story of platonic love as, in one phrase, the Platonizing of Socrates: the move from Socratic questioning to love grounded in the forms.
How is love different from friendship?
The Stanford entry on friendship offers a clear contrast:
- Love: an evaluative attitude directed at particular persons as such, which can go unreturned
- Friendship: a relationship built on mutual special concern, which requires significant interaction between the friends
Because friendship is a relationship, unrequited friendship is, in the entry’s word, senseless. Love can be one-sided in a way friendship cannot.
What are Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship?
The entry draws mainly on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It notes that philosophers since the ancient Greeks have distinguished three kinds of love: agape, eros and philia, with philia the one most relevant to friendship. Aristotle describes three bases for friendship:
- Pleasure: enjoying the other person
- Utility: finding the other person useful
- Virtue: admiring the other person’s good character
The entry says friendships of pleasure and utility seem deficient because the friend is loved partly for one’s own benefit, while friendships of virtue are treated as the genuine form. Originally philia meant affectionate regard that could extend to family, business partners and even one’s country. The ideas developed in Athens and across Greece remain central to ethics today.
Platonic love vs. platonic friendship
The two phrases overlap but are not the same. Platonic friendship is the modern sense of a close bond without romance. Platonic love in Plato’s sense is a philosophy of desire in which attraction to beauty gradually turns toward wisdom and the good. The sources consulted here do not trace exactly when the everyday meaning took hold, so we do not claim a date. In practice, people use the word platonic for relationships that philosophers would simply call friendships. That makes the Aristotelian categories a useful test: ask whether a bond rests on pleasure, usefulness or admiration for the other person’s character.
Frequently asked questions
Did Plato say love should be non-sexual?
Not in the everyday sense. Diotima’s ladder begins with love of one beautiful body and moves upward from there.
Why is the ladder controversial?
Some readers worry that it treats people as stepping stones toward an abstract ideal. Others argue that Diotima describes a love that grows to include a deeper attachment to the beloved.
Who was Diotima?
A priestess whose teaching on love Socrates reports in the Symposium.
What is philia?
An ancient Greek word for affectionate regard, the kind of love most relevant to friendship.
Can friendship be one-sided?
According to the Stanford entry, no. Friendship requires reciprocity, while love can be unrequited.