Content

1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 3
2. AIM .................................................................................................................................................. 3
3. THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ................................................................................................... 3
4. RESEARCH ........................................................................................................................................ 4
4.1. Language difficulties and understanding ................................................................................ 4
4.2. Way of life nowadays and understanding ............................................................................... 5
5. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 6
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................. 7

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 ABSTRACT
There is a song saying : What is love? Baby, don't hurt me no more? and, if the Greeks are
asked, what is meant by love differs from case to case. Considering the various definitions
how come Greeks have so many definitions while we have only one? In providing an account
of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive
attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes
as liking in terms of its depth, and the problem is to elucidate the kind of depth we
intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of
what liking amounts to.

In ancient Greek, there were three types of personal love recognised in language: eros, agape
and philia. Contemporary discussions typically blur these (sometimes intentionally so) or use
them for other purposes. Why is that so? Maintaining the distinctions among eros, agape,
and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love
(including romantic love) and friendship.

Besides personal love, there is also love as union, robust concern, valuing, appraisal of value,
bestowal of value and love as emotion complex. The types identified here overlap to some
extent. Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-
reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment,
etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly
reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such aspect of
love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to
classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be. The Greeks
themselves understood the complexity involved in a discourse about love.

Key words : love, Eros, Agape, Philia, aspects of love

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 1. INTRODUCTION

The subject of this seminar paper is, as stated in the abstract, the very question of Greek
meaning of love. Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort
of personal love and as such personal love will be the focus here. In order to explain Greeks
meaning of love the language concept and the way of life will also be explained since it is
affecting our understanding of Greeks meaning.

2. AIM

In this paper I will try to find the answer to how exactly Greeks define love.

3. THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Eros originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically
sexual passion (Liddell i dr., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b, p. 89) describes eros as the love of
desire, or acquisitive love and therefore as egocentric. Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly
describes eros as selfish and as a response to the merits of the belovedespecially the
beloved's goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble's description of eros is a shift away
from the sexual: to love something in the erosic sense is to love it in a way that, by being
responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged
by Plato's discussion in the Symposium, in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a
deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed
into a response to the beauty of a person's soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form,
Beauty.

Soble's intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a

sharp contrast with agape, a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object.
Agape has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has
for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each othera
kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God's love for us, agape is spontaneous and
unmotivated, revealing not that we merit that love but that God's nature is love (Nygren
1953b, p. 85). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as independent of

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the loved individual's fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is; and Soble
(1990, p. 5) infers that agape, in contrast to eros, is therefore not reason dependent but is
rationally incomprehensible, admitting at best of causal or historical explanations.

Finally, philia originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not
just one's friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one's
country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros, philia is generally (but not
universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one's beloved. This similarity
between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987.) to wonder whether the only difference
between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the formerand whether
that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience.

The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble's (1990.) attempt
to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros .

4. RESEARCH

4.1. Language difficulties and understanding

In modern English, we have ( roughly ) one word for love. There are related-concept-words,
like care, affection, desire, but still. In the article published on:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/sexualit1/a/LoveMagic.htm, is pointed out that the reason
English speakers are confused about meaning of love (in Greeks concept) is because they
don't have enough words for it. Thus, it is more common to distinguish loving from liking via
the intuition that the depth of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification:
to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of
identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum (1990, p. 328) puts it, The choice between
one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to
dedicate oneself to these values rather than these; liking clearly does not have this sort of
depth. Whether love involves some kind of identification is a central bone of contention
among the various analyses of love. Greeks, on the other hand, have three words just for
personal love and it is hard for us to understand and properly distinguish them.

Eros is a familiar one; most people recognize the name of the god (aka Cupid). So Eros refers
to romantic love and desire often in the context of those first stages of falling in love. Its

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interesting, then, that poly communities recognize this amazing and beautiful but potentially
destructive force as NRE new relationship energy. Giving it a label makes it something that
can be recognized and accounted for.

So, its incredibly valuable to have a vocabulary with which to talk about this. Orwell
recognized the power of words when he created Newspeak in 1984 if you dont have words
for something, you cant effectively acknowledge it, talk about it, criticize or debate it. But,
we have learnt one new term from Greeks: Platonic love.

While it is easy to understand agape as the love one feels towards friends, family, and
animals, we think of the mutual affection we feel towards our mates as different.
The agape (or philia) of the Greeks included affection, and also the sexual passion felt
towards our mates, according to the University of Chicago's Christopher A. Faraone. Eros,
however, was new, disorienting passion, conceived of as an attack of unwelcome lust, aptly
represented as inflicted by the arrow-wielding god of love

4.2. Way of life nowadays and understanding

Current mainstream thinking often holds up falling in love as a wonderful thing, a thing to be
greatly desired, and the phase of cant eat, cant sleep, missing you is seen as deeply
romantic and special. (And yes, I admit, the romantic in me agrees). But even the word
falling describes a dangerous thing to do, literally speaking, and the ancient Greeks
recognised this danger erotic love was seen not as a wonderful and essential state to be
desired, but as a kind of madness. And this kind of passionate love was recognised as
sometimes having terrible and destructive results this is the love that drives the great stories
of humanity, the love that inspires wars, suicides, murderous jealousy and it is called Eros.

I suppose the particular relevance for life is, looking at how Eros and agape apply to
specifically romantic/sexual relationships, how to balance those different forms of love
without making unfair comparisons. You may not have the depth of understanding and trust
with a new lover as you do with a long-established partner, but thats ok; you may not be
obsessively checking your phone for texts from your husband in the way you do with your
girlfriend, but thats ok too. Again, were back to this idea of the value of giving words to
something; if we can happily recognise these as two different kinds of love, then perhaps it

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helps us celebrate and value them for what they are, not look for what they arent. It also tells
us how the culture and time we are living in changed our view on this kind of love.

Philia is the most general kind of love; its often translated as friendship. Philia is
characterised by, again, wanting the best for someone for their own sake, and wanting to do
things for them as much as is possible/reasonable. Though in that qualifier is a big distinction
from agape, which is a self-sacrificing love. Another distinction is that not always, but often
philia is characterised by a sense of equality, of meeting as equals, in the very nature of the
love itself, not merely in the persons of those sharing the love. It refers to a much wider sense
of friendship-love, theres nothing to me that seems any more relevant to non-
monogamous people than everyone else. We all need friends, and that comfortable
companionable love of an old friendship is wonderful. I suppose the only thought here would
be, even if you are conducting twenty romantic relationships at once, dont neglect your
friendships.

5. CONCLUSION

There are three varieties of personal love found in ancient Greek philosophy: eros, or sexual
passion; phila, a more virtuous love often translated as friendship and agape, the selfless
love extended to all human beings, offered unconditionally and with no expectation of
reciprocity.

It is easy to understand them if you have the right words for it. If you dont have words for
something, you cant talk about it. Identifying different forms of love as genuinely different
feelings, different things, not just different stages of love, would help us talk about them
better. Since english has only one definition and word for love, it is very hard to do so.

Besides that there is also a change in way of life. The lesson from ancient Greece is that if we want to
understand love , we must first dispel the potent myth of romantic love which stands in the way.

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6. BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Badhwar, N. K.(2003) Love, u: H. LaFollette (ed.), Practical Ethics, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 4269.
2. Cooper, J. M. (1977.) Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, Review of Metaphysics,
30: 61948.
3. Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R. (1940.) A Greek
English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 9.izd.
4. Nygren, A. (1953a), Agape and Eros, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press.
5. Nygren, A. (1953b), Agape and Eros, u: Soble (1989a) : Eros, Agape, and Philia:
Readings in the Philosophy of Love, New York, NY: Paragon House., p. 8595.
6. Nussbaum, M. (1990) Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic
Aspiration, u : Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, p. 31434.
7. Soble, A. (1989a,b) Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love,
New York, NY: Paragon House.
8. Soble, A. (1990.) The Structure of Love, Yale University Press
9. Thomas, L. (1987) Friendship, Synthese, 72: 21736.