Philosophy of Love: From Plato's Symposium to Eros, Philia, and Agape

English uses a single word, “love,” for erotic desire, affection between friends, family tenderness, religious devotion, and benevolence toward strangers. Ancient Greek had several terms, and Western philosophy inherited three of them as central categories: eros (the desire that reaches for what it lacks), philia (friendship, reciprocal affection), and agape (disinterested love, made central by Christianity). C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves (1960), added storgē, family affection, but the triad eros–philia–agape remains the classical axis of the discussion. This article traces the philosophical history of these ideas: it begins with Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, passes through Aristotle and the Christian tradition, and arrives at Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and twentieth-century and current philosophy. The concepts can be consulted in the glossary: Eros, Philia, and Agape.

The Symposium: seven speeches on Eros

The Symposium (Symposion) was probably written in the mid-380s BCE (estimates usually range c. 385–370 BCE), and its dramatic date is 416 BCE, when the tragic poet Agathon celebrates his first victory in the dramatic competitions. The dialogue is narrated at second hand: Apollodorus tells what he heard from Aristodemus, who attended the dinner at Agathon’s house (172a–174a). Since the company is hungover from the previous night’s celebration, they decide that each guest will deliver a praise of Eros, the god of love (176e–178a). Seven speeches follow.

Phaedrus (178a–180b) opens the series. Eros is the oldest of the gods, and his function is to inspire shame at what is ugly and emulation of what is beautiful; an army of lovers would be invincible, and love leads one to die for another, as Alcestis did for Admetus (179b–180b).

Pausanias (180c–185c) distinguishes two Aphrodites, and therefore two Erotes: Pandemos (common), aimed at the body and immediate pleasure, and Ourania (heavenly), aimed at the soul and virtue (180d–181c). Noble love is that directed to intelligence and character. Pausanias presents this distinction in the context of the Athenian institution of pederasty and its customs.

Eryximachus (185e–188e), the physician, who speaks after Aristophanes is seized by hiccups (185c–e), widens Eros into a cosmic force: it operates in bodies, in medicine, in music, and in the seasons, as a harmony of opposites (186a–188d).

Aristophanes (189c–193e) tells the famous myth of the primordial beings. Humans were spherical, with four arms, four legs, and two faces, and there were three genders: male, female, and androgynous (189d–190b). For their arrogance, Zeus cut them in half (190c–191a); ever since, each half seeks the other. Love, he says, is the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole (192e–193a).

Agathon (194e–197e) gives a rhetorical eulogy: Eros is the youngest, most delicate, and most beautiful of the gods, endowed with every virtue (195a–197e). His speech is applauded, but it is a speech about the qualities of the object, and this is what Socrates will undo.

Socrates (199c–212c) questions Agathon and leads him to admit that Eros is always love of something, and that whoever desires something does not possess it (199c–201c). Eros, therefore, is neither beautiful nor good: he is lack. Socrates then reports what he learned from the priestess Diotima of Mantinea (201d ff.). According to her, Eros is not a god but a great daimon, intermediary between the mortal and the immortal (202d–203a). He is the son of Poros (Resource) and Penia (Poverty), conceived at the feast celebrating Aphrodite’s birth (203b–e): from his mother he inherits neediness, from his father the cunning to obtain what he desires. For this reason he is a philosopher, located between wisdom and ignorance (203e–204b). Love is the desire to possess the good forever (206a), and it is exercised as “begetting in beauty,” according to the body and according to the soul (206b–209e).

At this point the famous ladder of love (scala amoris, 210a–212a) appears. One who is rightly guided begins with the love of one beautiful body, passes to the love of all beautiful bodies, then to the beauty of souls, of laws and institutions, and of the sciences, until he suddenly beholds Beauty itself, eternal, unchanging, unmixed with anything bodily (210a–211b). The passage founds the tradition of erotic “ascent” that reappears in Neoplatonism (see Plotinus) and in the theme of Beauty discussed in Beauty and philosophical aesthetics.

Alcibiades (212c–222c) bursts in drunk and, instead of praising Eros, praises Socrates (the speech proper begins at 214e). He compares him to the silenus figures, ugly on the outside, which conceal images of gods (215a–b), and recounts his failed attempt to seduce him (217a–219d). The scene is often read as a living counterpoint to Diotima’s theory: love for a concrete individual, which the ladder discourse seems to surpass. Gregory Vlastos, in “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato” (1973), argued that in Plato’s theory a person is loved only as a bearer of qualities that participate in Beauty, not for himself; Martha Nussbaum, in The Fragility of Goodness (1986, ch. 6), reads Alcibiades’ speech as the resistance of particularity to the project of ascent. Both are starting points of a long scholarly discussion, and some readings reject these criticisms.

The Phaedrus: love as divine “madness”

In the Phaedrus, usually placed around 370 BCE, love reappears in a different key. After a speech by Lysias, read by Phaedrus, which argues that it is better to yield to one who does not love than to one who does (230e–234c), and a first speech by Socrates in the same direction (237b–241d), Socrates retracts in a palinode (243e–257b), asserting that madness (mania) is not always an evil: there are madnesses that come from the gods and are sources of the greatest goods (244a–245c). He distinguishes four forms of divine madness (244a–245c; 265a–b): prophetic (inspired by Apollo), ritual or initiatory (Dionysus), poetic (the Muses), and erotic (Aphrodite and Eros).

Erotic madness is described through the myth of the soul as a winged chariot, with a charioteer (reason) and two horses, one noble and one unruly (246a–254e). Souls, when they followed the procession of the gods, contemplated true realities; on incarnation they forgot. Beauty is the only Form that appears in a sensible and radiant way (250d–e), and seeing it awakens recollection (anamnēsis, 249d–250e) and makes the soul’s wings grow again. Each lover seeks in his beloved the image of the god he followed (252c–253c). Compared with the Symposium, the Phaedrus emphasizes the overwhelming and almost involuntary character of love and integrates it with the theory of the tripartite soul and of recollection.

Aristotle and philia

The Nicomachean Ethics devotes two entire books, VIII and IX (1155a–1172a), to philia, which indicates the importance of the subject. In Greek, philia is broader than “friendship”: it covers ties among relatives, fellow citizens, partners, and friends in the strict sense. Aristotle considers it “a virtue or something that involves virtue” and a necessity of life: no one would choose to live without friends, even with all other goods (VIII.1, 1155a).

The central classification distinguishes three kinds of friendship according to the object loved: that based on utility, that based on pleasure, and perfect friendship, between good people alike in virtue (VIII.3–4, 1156a–b). The first two are incidental and dissolve when advantage or pleasure ceases; the third is lasting because one who loves a friend loves what he is, not what can be got from him. It is this that exemplifies Aristotle’s expression for the friend as “another self” (allos autos, IX.4, 1166a31; IX.9, 1170b6). Aristotle also discusses friendship between unequals (VIII.7, 1158b–1159a), the relation between philia and justice (VIII.9, 1159b–1160a), self-love (philautia, IX.8, 1168a–1169b), concord (homonoia) among citizens (IX.6, 1167a–b), and the question whether the happy man needs friends (IX.9, 1169b–1170b). His answer is affirmative: to live well is to live in common, and the friend is a way of perceiving and sharing one’s own existence.

A contrast with Plato is in order. In Aristotle philia belongs to the domain of ethics and politics, not metaphysics: its objects are concrete persons, not the Form of Beauty. Erotic love is treated only in passing (for example, VIII.4, 1157a). For the broader picture of Aristotelian ethics, see Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics and the profile of Aristotle.

Christian agape: Augustine and Nygren

The term agape is rare in classical Greek and gains centrality in the Greek Bible (the Septuagint) and the New Testament, where it designates God’s love for human beings, human love for God, and love of neighbor: the double commandment (Matthew 22:37–40, which draws on Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18), Paul’s “hymn to love” (1 Corinthians 13), and the Johannine formula that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) is the one who integrates this biblical heritage into Platonic vocabulary. In Latin he uses caritas for love ordered to God and to neighbor for God’s sake, as opposed to cupiditas, disordered love of temporal things (De doctrina christiana III.10.16). Every human being is moved by love: in the Confessions, the famous phrase pondus meum amor meus (“my weight is my love,” XIII.9.10) expresses the idea that love is what carries each thing to its natural place. In the City of God (XIV.28) he declares: fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, “two loves have made two cities,” the earthly one by love of self to the point of contempt for God, and the heavenly one by love of God to the point of contempt for self. Virtue, in this key, is the “order of love” (ordo amoris, De civitate Dei XV.22; cf. De doctrina christiana I.27.28). The desire for happiness, of Platonic inheritance, is retained, but its object is God. See the profile of Saint Augustine and the article Augustine: Confessions, Time, Free Will, and City of God. In scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas understands charity as a friendship (amicitia) between man and God (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 23, a. 1), which brings the Aristotelian idea of philia close to agape.

It was the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren (1890–1978) who, in Eros and Agape (Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderna: Eros och Agape, 2 parts, 1930–1936; English translation Agape and Eros), systematized the opposition between the two concepts. For Nygren, eros is an ascending love, motivated by the value of its object, acquisitive and centered on the lover, whereas agape is a descending love, spontaneous, not motivated by the value of its object, and creative of value in what it loves; it is God’s initiative. On Nygren’s reading, the history of Christian thought is the history of a mixture of the two motifs, and Augustinian caritas would be a “synthesis” of agape and eros, which he criticizes, seeing in Luther’s Reformation a return to pure agape. The thesis had enormous impact and was widely criticized, in particular for separating the two concepts too rigidly; Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus caritas est (2005) takes up the theme to argue that eros and agape, although distinct, are not absolutely opposed.

Courtly love

In the Middle Ages, the poetry of the troubadours of southern France, from the late eleventh century (William IX of Aquitaine, 1071–1126, is the first known troubadour), elaborated a conception of love (fin’amor) that became one of the great themes of European literature. The lover, of lower or equal rank, serves the lady, usually married and of higher station, with devotion, humility, and self-mastery; love is a source of moral improvement and often remains unsatisfied. Central texts include the romances of Chrétien de Troyes (Lancelot, c. 1176–1182) and Andreas Capellanus’s treatise De amore (late twelfth century).

The expression “courtly love” (amour courtois) was coined by the medievalist Gaston Paris in 1883, in an article on Lancelot, and popularized by C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love (1936). Denis de Rougemont, in L’Amour et l’Occident (1939), interpreted Western passionate love as derived from this tradition and from alleged heretical influences, a thesis that scholarship received with reservations. It is still debated whether “courtly love” designates a coherent doctrine, a literary convention, or a social game, and some scholars consider the term anachronistic or too vague (D. W. Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer, 1962), while others defend it as a useful category (Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 1977). What the courtly tradition bequeathed to the philosophy of love is above all the idea of love as a discipline of desire and an idealization of the beloved, later taken up and criticized by the moderns.

Schopenhauer: love as the species’ ruse

In the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), sexual love has a peculiar metaphysical status. In chapter 44 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (1844), titled “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” (Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe), he maintains that every amorous passion, however sublime it may seem, serves an end that transcends the individual: the preservation of the species and the “composition of the next generation.” The individual believes he is pursuing his own happiness but is led by the “genius of the species” (Genius der Gattung), an expression of the will to live, which deludes him with the promise of an unattainable happiness. The choice of partner, in this register, is determined by unconscious criteria aimed at the constitution of the offspring. The conclusion is pessimistic: romantic love is a necessary illusion of the Will, which exacts its price in suffering.

Schopenhauer distinguishes disinterested love from this sexual love. In § 67 of the first volume of the same work, he maintains that pure love, agape or caritas, is by nature compassion (Mitleid), that is, the recognition of another’s suffering as one’s own, a thesis that underpins his ethics. Compassion represents for him the overcoming of individuation and the only authentic basis of morality. For the ontology of the Will, see Schopenhauer: Will, Representation, and Pessimism and the profile of Schopenhauer.

Kierkegaard: Works of Love

In Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, 1847), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) presents a series of “Christian deliberations” that contrast Christian love with natural love. The starting point is the commandment “you shall love your neighbor” (Matthew 22:39): love, in Christianity, is a duty, and it is because it is a duty that it can be eternal and immune to changes of mood and inclination. The “neighbor” (Næsten) is the one who is nearest, anyone at all, not the one chosen by preference.

Kierkegaard contrasts this love with preferential love, in its two forms: erotic love (Elskov) and friendship (Venskab). These loves, which pagan poetry and philosophy exalt, choose their object according to inclination and similarity, and for that reason, in the author’s analysis, retain a root of self-love: the beloved is an extension of the lover. Christian love, by contrast, does not depend on the other’s particular qualities and obliges one to love even those one would not choose. The book is structured around the idea of “works,” that is, that love shows itself in deeds, and includes reflections on duties such as the “debt of love” that human beings owe one another. Kierkegaard published it under his own name on 29 September 1847. For the author’s context, see Kierkegaard: Stages of Existence, Anxiety, and the Leap of Faith and the profile of Kierkegaard.

Contemporary perspectives: Ortega, Scheler, and Frankfurt

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) gathered in Studies on Love (Estudios sobre el amor, 1939; earlier published in German, 1933) essays written mostly in the 1920s, among them “Facciones del amor,” “Amor en Stendhal,” and “La elección en amor.” He discusses Stendhal’s theory of “crystallization” (De l’amour, 1822), according to which the lover attributes ever new perfections to the beloved, and distinguishes falling in love (enamoramiento), which he describes as a state of narrowed attention fixed on one object, from love proper, a spiritual act of affirming another person. See the profile of José Ortega y Gasset.

Max Scheler (1874–1928), in The Nature of Sympathy (Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 1923, a considerably expanded second edition of the 1913 book Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass), proposes that love is neither a feeling nor a reaction to already given values, but an act and a movement in which higher values are disclosed in the beloved object. Hence his idea of the ordo amoris, the order of loves, of Augustinian and Pascalian inspiration, the subject of a posthumous essay, according to which a person’s moral structure is determined by the ordering of his loves and preferences. See Max Scheler.

Harry Frankfurt (1929–2023), in The Reasons of Love (Princeton University Press, 2004), offers a theory that dispenses with metaphysics. For him, love is a particular form of caring: a disinterested concern for the good of the beloved, which implies identifying with the beloved’s interests. Love has a volitional necessity: what we love limits what our will is able to choose, and this limitation comes from the will itself, not from anything external. The beloved is irreplaceable for the lover, even if another individual possesses equivalent qualities. Frankfurt reverses the usual order: instead of loving because the object has value, love creates reasons and values for the one who loves. The thesis contrasts with the Platonism of the ladder, in which love responds to Beauty, and with Scheler’s, in which it discovers values. See Harry Frankfurt.

Comparative overview

Conclusion

The history of the philosophy of love can be read as a dispute around three questions. Is love lack or fullness? Is it a response to the beloved’s value or what confers value on the beloved? Is it preference for someone or openness to anyone? Plato tends to answer that love is lack and ascent to Beauty; Aristotle, that it is reciprocity between equals in virtue; the Christian tradition, that true love is gift and does not depend on the other’s merit; Schopenhauer, that sexual love is an illusion of the Will and only compassion is genuine love; Frankfurt, that love creates the reasons that sustain it. Each answer illuminates one face of the phenomenon, and none has exhausted the discussion. Readers who wish to deepen the Platonic starting point will find the metaphysical basis in The Allegory of the Cave and the Theory of Forms and the political and psychological context in Plato’s Republic. On the author, see the profile of Plato and the founding triad of Greek philosophy.

References

• PLATO. Symposium; Phaedrus. Ed. J. Burnet. Oxford Classical Texts.
• PLATO. Symposium. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989.
• ARISTOTLE. Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII–IX.
• AUGUSTINE. Confessions; On Christian Doctrine; City of God.
• NYGREN, Anders. Agape and Eros. Trans. Philip S. Watson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 (original English edition, 1932–1939; rev. 1953).
• LEWIS, C. S. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960.
• SCHOPENHAUER, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I, § 67; vol. II, ch. 44.
• KIERKEGAARD, Søren. Works of Love. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton University Press, 1995.
• ORTEGA Y GASSET, José. Estudios sobre el amor. Madrid: Alianza.
• SCHELER, Max. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Bonn: Cohen, 1923.
• FRANKFURT, Harry G. The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press, 2004.
• VLASTOS, Gregory. “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato”. In: Platonic Studies. Princeton University Press, 1973.
• NUSSBAUM, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• BOASE, Roger. The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love. Manchester University Press, 1977.

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