Poets have written more about love than about anything else, and philosophers, surprisingly, have not been far behind. They ask questions dating apps never do: what are we actually looking for in another person, and can love be learned?
At a dinner party in Athens, the comic poet Aristophanes tells a wild myth: humans were once round, double creatures, until Zeus split them in two, and ever since each half has searched for the other.
“… human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”Plato, Symposium 192e–193a (tr. Benjamin Jowett)
Socrates then reports the teaching of the wise woman Diotima: love is a ladder. We begin by loving one beautiful person, then see beauty in all people, then in good ways of living and in ideas, and finally glimpse beauty itself.
Aristotle sorted friendships into three kinds: for usefulness, for pleasure, and for goodness. The first two fade when the use or pleasure does. The third lasts.
“That then is perfect Friendship which subsists between those who are good and whose similarity consists in their goodness: for these men wish one another’s good in similar ways.”Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VIII.3 (tr. D. P. Chase)
“For love is strong as death … Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”Song of Songs 8:6–7 (King James Version)
Paul’s famous passage, read at countless weddings, begins “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not” (1 Corinthians 13:4, KJV). “Charity” translates the Greek agape, the self-giving love the Christian tradition put at its centre.
For the Sufi and bhakti mystics, human longing is a reflection of the soul’s longing for the divine. Mirabai sang of Krishna as her only husband; Kabir said that whoever reads the two and a half letters of the word love (prem) is wiser than any scholar.
“Whether love be from this side or from that side, in the end it leads us yonder.”Rumi, Masnavi I.111 (tr. R. A. Nicholson)
In The Art of Loving (1956), the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that we treat love as something we fall into, a matter of finding the right person, when it is really a skill that must be practised, like music or painting. Love, for Fromm, is an activity rather than a feeling, made up of care, responsibility, respect and knowledge of the other.
Illustration: two lights, each still its own
Greek did have several words, among them eros (desire), philia (friendship), storge (family affection) and agape (selfless love). But the tidy scheme of exactly four kinds owes most to C. S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves (1960); ancient writers used the words more loosely, and their meanings overlapped.
Go deeper: Heartbreak and Letting Go, Loneliness, or Rumi.
Plato, Symposium (Project Gutenberg) · Stanford Encyclopedia: Love · The Art of Loving · Mirabai
