Platonic love: discovering its meaning
Platonic love has been and continues to be at the center of various texts by writers, poets and philosophers. When one tries to describe it, the idea of a spiritual love immediately comes to mind, free from any physical attraction. A pure and unconditional feeling, but which sometimes becomes unattainable and impossible in reality. However, over the years, platonic love has taken on more than one meaning and has revealed itself in different situations. Let's find out more about what it is.
At the origins of platonic love
As you can guess from the name, the term "Platonic love" derives from Plato, a Greek philosopher who lived in Athens between 428 and 348 BC. In the course of his life, Plato wrote and spoke of love in most of his works, combining it with the treatment of the main aspects of his philosophy. According to him, in fact, reality would consist of two independent substances, the form - understood also as spirit and belonging to the world of ideas - and matter. In man we find both in the split between soul and body.
This theory meets the concept of love as early as Cratilo, where Plato defines eros "as something that flows inside from the outside", through the eyes. Subsequently, he delves into this topic in the Symposium where it dates back to the birth of the god Eros and explains the various degrees of love for human beings. According to the myth, Eros would have been born from the union of Poros, god of ingenuity, and of Penìa, that is Poverty, who forced himself on the male divinity. Already from this we understand how Eros is born from the need to possess what one does not have.
Therefore, according to his philosophy, Platonic love would have a first stage dictated simply by bodily beauty. This feeling develops in the presence of a particular beautiful body, which, however, leads to a later stage. Thus, following the appreciation aesthetic of a person, love contemplates the beauty of the soul, that is the inner world of that individual. Only afterwards, for Plato, does the impulse of eros rise further, detaching itself from any material form, concentrating on the elusive world and perfect of ideas, knowledge and wisdom.
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Therefore, to say a pure and spiritual love as "Platonic" can appear as an inaccurate definition if one carefully review the whole thought of the Greek philosopher, because for him this feeling always had an initial physical plane and led to total detachment from the figure of another human being, to contemplate without distraction the "high things of life", such as beauty itself.
From "love according to Plato to the definition of an unattainable love
Thus, it would be natural to ask why nowadays with Platonic love s "means a feeling completely disconnected from the body and that arises from a" mental attraction or that it is even the fruit of the imagination. All this can be traced back to the treatments in this sense of medieval literature. , where we find Dante as the first exponent. In fact, it represents the antecedent of today's Platonic love already the courteous one of the Florentine poet and of the circle of writers similar to him. In these poems the beloved woman, for Dante the famous Beatrice, is not exalted from a body and physical point of view, but from a spiritual point of view, she is almost always an unreachable woman with whom the poet can only exchange glances or at most a few words of greeting.
This meaning of Platonic love is emphasized even more by the Renaissance philosophy led by Marsilio Ficino. To tell the truth, the Italian philosopher was the first to use this expression literally and with it he indicated a love that focuses only on the interiority and character of a person. However, according to Ficino, this feeling could only be present in the world. of ideas, that is a perfect and incorruptible world. This reality is not accessible to men and it is thus that Platonic love assumes the meaning not only of chaste and pure, but also of impossible and unattainable.
Platonic love today
After retracing the evolution and success of the concept of Platonic love, it is natural to ask ourselves what it is today and how it manifests itself. It consists of a spiritual feeling that does not foresee physical relationships. long-distance love or even an unrequited one. Many believe that the infatuation that arises every day among thousands of people on the different dating apps can also be defined platonic. In fact, until there is an actual meeting, getting to know someone through a dating app will essentially be based on mental attraction and not physical desire.
However, just like unrequited love, a platonic love can have a decidedly negative side - that is, it can become too idealized.Having an "image completely detached from reality and excessively high of one's partner or of an ideal person who one would like to be at one's side means that anyone will move away without distinction, because no one will ever be able to meet the required requirements.
Platonic love or friendship?
Before concluding, let's clarify the distinction between Platonic love and friendship. The boundaries between these two feelings can be difficult to identify if you are in the so-called "friend zone": the friend we have had for a lifetime suddenly seems less and less a friend and we would like something more from this friendship. In this case we need intellectual honesty on the part of both: we need to understand if it is an infatuation due to a close connection and mental complicity that can be accepted within a friendship or if, to this platonic feeling, a physical aspect is also dictated by desire.
