This last week, in a text thread between myself and three friends, I used the phrase “that’s the Platonic version of you.” My friend replied with “??”. I shot back, “Like, the ideal version of you.” He said: “I’m gunna be honest, I’ve never heard platonic used in that way.”
When I was in graduate school, I was, by nature, surrounded by classicists. Now my life is different: my work is different, my communities have changed. Many of my friends love to discuss or learn about etymology, but the points of reference are different.
Platonic as a term has been rattling around in my brain for years–one of those words whose roots I understand better than its common, 21st century usage. These days, ‘platonic’ is mostly used to refer to non-romantic/erotic relationships. Platonic = friends, in modern parlance.
As a term in the philosophical tradition, ‘platonic’ has a much broader application. It’s not inherently attached to friendship–rather, friendship is just one of many things it can be used to qualify or define. In a very simple, watered down explanation of Plato, the term essentially is used to refer to the ideal form or blueprint of terrestrial manifestations. What we have on earth are iterations that attempt to imitate or point at the ideal. This applies to concepts: we experience and have opinions about many variations of truth, justice, or goodness, but each of these point to their Platonic ideal, namely Truth with a capital T, Justice, and the Good. It also applies to physical objects: the chair you are sitting on is an imitation of the Platonic form of chair.
You may chortle at this last line, but think about it–what defines a chair? (I once spent a very fun class in which I was supposed to be teaching introductory English to incoming freshmen prodding them to come up with a unified definition of chairs). You start confidently with a few qualifiers: “it has four legs. You sit on it.” But then you realise that not all chairs have four legs, and that we sit on many things, not just chairs. “They are often in living rooms, or around tables. Sometimes they have cushions.” The harder you try, the more you realize that none of the things you say truly encapsulates what makes a chair a chair. And yet, you can recognize a chair anywhere in the world, in essentially any form. How is that possible?
According to Plato, these Platonic forms are what make our earthly iterations recognizable. It’s also what puts us in a kind of middle position, striving towards the ideal: we can sense the contours, recognize at least partially the form of truth or justice or the good, but are stuck in imperfect imitation. In more classical terms, we are neither animals (unaware of these forms), nor gods (in possession of them). We are human. We recognize. We imitate. We iteratively fall short.
So what does this have to do with friendship?
In the Renaissance, the notion of Platonic love as “pure spiritual affection mixed with no sexual desire” was derived from Plato’s Symposium, in which Socrates describes the form of love he has towards his compatriots in intellectual pursuit. In Plato/Socrates’ time, this was a form of love between two men. By the time Renaissance scholars were using the term, it had expanded to include (and indeed preference) a form of non-sexual friendship between men and women, and that is essentially where the term sits today. (We don’t qualify friendship between two men as Platonic very often, because in a default heterosexual context, it is presumed to be Platonic until proven otherwise). This modern acceptance of the term as a negation, as the non-presence of one kind of relationship, doesn’t raise intellectual red flags. But not so long ago (19th century), scholars like George Henry Lewes expressed great resistance to what they felt was this ‘watering down’ of the term.
The argument against its current usage could be put like this. Now, when we use Platonic, there’s an undercurrent of absence to the term. “They’re not in love, it’s purely Platonic.” Modern translation: they’re just friends. Used with this tonality, our cultural values become obvious: we place romantic love at the top of the totem pole. But if we think about the term and its broader usage, we realize the definition is inverted. Platonic love is an attempt at imitating the ideal form of love. It has something spiritual about it, something heavenly. As Lewes put it, “Platonic love meant ideal sympathy.” (No doubt using sympathy intentionally, with its etymological roots meaning “to feel together.”).
Now, I’m not interested in making any personal claims to what form of love is better or more ‘ideal.’ What I think is interesting is to flip our position and see where it leads. Most of us (if not all of us) have spent plenty of time thinking about what is so unique or extraordinary in romantic love. Why finding your partner has ‘completed’ you, why that love is such a bedrock to your life, or, if you haven’t found it, you’ve likely spent a lot of time looking for that kind of love, holding the belief either consciously or subconsciously that it is one of, if not the key component to a meaningful and well-lived life.
But have you spent much time considering what is so ideal or otherworldly about the love in friendship? Have you ever considered that if there were a blueprint of love in its clearest, most harmonious form, it would be closer to what we recognize as friendship? And if that were the case, what would that mean for your life, for your decision making, for your value judgements?