Chapter I. Love: essence and manifestation
Ancient Greeks on love
Plato. Plato’s reasoning about love is presented in his famous work Symposium, but let us first address Albinus, a philosopher from the 2nd century AD, who presented Plato’s views in a systemized fashion. In the time of the great Greek, love was analyzed in interconnection with friendship. Moreover, love was regarded as one of the “kinds of friendship.” That is, friendship was a broader concept than love. Note that friendship was the name for “none other than the feeling emerging from mutual liking”[1] and only possible on the condition that the two are equally well-off. However, this equality only comes to pass in that case when both have a “similar disposition,” which Plato defines through “commensurability.” This is a very important clarification, evidencing that in those times moral qualities were accorded a great importance in friendship. Putting it crudely, a scoundrel could not merit the friendship of an honest, moral man, “since non-commensurate objects cannot be in accord either one with the other or with commensurate objects.” (Ibid.) – This conclusion is very important to my subsequent reasoning.
Love, as mentioned already, is a kind of friendship, and it comes in “three categories” depending on its direction: low, noble and middle. “Low love is only directed at the body and subject to the feeling of pleasure, therefore it contains something animal; the object of noble love is the pure soul, in which its inclination toward virtue is valued; middle love is directed toward both body and soul, since it is attracted by both the body and the beauty of the soul.”(471-2) In Albinus’ presentation, the first version of love, directed only at the “body,” is not welcome; therefore the deity Eros is not the god of love, as many thought, but rather some sort of demon. Accordingly, love for virtue, for the good of the beloved, is the highest peak of love, and its achievement requires “a certain art.” The development of the noble version of love makes perfect both the lover and “the object of love.” The ending is very significant: “the purpose of their contact is to move on from being person in love and person loved and become friends” (473), i.e. to move on to the higher level – friendship.
This does not mean that the role of Eros in love is belittled; it is just that it serves a different purpose, which is discussed in detail in Plato’s already-mentioned Symposium. Let me remind you that it is precisely in this famous dialogue that the wise Diotima enlightened Socrates about love. She proved through logical reasoning that love is the name for man’s desire for eternal possession of good, which includes beauty and wisdom. The highest good for man, however, is immortality, which a mortal being can only achieve through procreation. Therefore, love is of immortality (491).[2]
I want to draw your attention to the fact that Plato/Socrates inserted three interconnected qualities in their concept of love: beauty, wisdom (knowledge) and immortality. The dialectic of interrelations between these phenomena is such that one does not exist without the other.
Empedocles and Aristotle. As mentioned already, Aristotle devoted more attention to love in the form of philia in his Nicomachean Ethics, which has been analyzed in detail in many works. In this work Aristotle examined love as a social, ethical phenomenon. However, no one paid attention to his approach toward love from the perspective of ontology, which he presented through the prism of his criticism of Empedocles in his work Physics. The matter is, Empedocles interpreted love as a category on the ontological level – an extremely unusual endeavor for any philosopher. Let me remind you the Empedocles saw two main driving forces in nature – two opposite forces: love and strife. These two are of themselves a certain thin material layer that facilitates the constant joining and disjoining of the tiniest particles of the principal elements. However, these two opposing driving forces cannot be simply identified with gravitation and repulsion. In Empedocles’ conception, love separates the homogenous and joins together the heterogeneous, thus “making one of many.” Strife, on the other hand, separates the heterogeneous and joins together the homogenous, thus “making many of one.” Empedocles made this view the foundation of his theory of the Cosmos. It is important to note here that Empedocles identified the categories of love and strife with categories of opposite-sign forces. This did not mean that plus is better than minus, or vice versa. To Empedocles, both one force and the other were important in the motion of matter - precisely as “opposites.”
Aristotle disagreed with these categories. From his perspective, applying them to motion in nature is “contrary to nature,” for the cause of motion is not them.[3] Within the framework of his idea of nature Aristotle was correct, just as contemporary physicists are correct, for they agree with him, naturally: love has nothing to do with physical forces. In actual fact, the connection between love and force exists not only in the form “force of love,” but also in the form “love for force”, which will be discussed in the appropriate section.
As for love as a social phenomenon, Aristotle did not differ on this point from Plato as he tied love to friendship. Accordingly: “Love then aims at affection rather than at intercourse.” As a result, “if it aims most at affection, then this is its end.”[4]
Thus, in the ancient Greeks’ hierarchy of moral values love occupied a spot subordinate to friendship, tied to which was the good of the two individuals involved and the society as a whole. In their views (with the exception of Empedocles), love as such was a feeling inherent only to man and his gods.
[1] Plato. Dialogues, 472.
[2] Plato. Complete Works, 477-94.
[3] Aristotle. The Complete works of Aristotle, 421.
[4] Ibid., 109.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)