Platonic love

Sexless, safe philosophers ~ Amy Levy

Platonic love is a type of love in which sexual desire or romantic features are nonexistent or have been suppressed, sublimated, or purgated, but it means more than simple friendship.

The term is derived from the name of Greek philosopher Plato, although he never used the term. Platonic love, as devised by Plato, concerns rising through levels of closeness to wisdom and true beauty, from carnal attraction to individual bodies to attraction to souls, and eventually, union with the truth.

Quotes

• And then there are such things as love divine,
    Bright and immaculate, unmix’d and pure,
  Such as the angels think so very fine,
    And matrons who would be no less secure,
  Platonic, perfect, ‘just such love as mine;’
    Thus Julia said—and thought so, to be sure;
  And so I’d have her think, were I the man
  On whom her reveries celestial ran.
• The hand which still held Juan’s, by degrees
    Gently, but palpably confirm’d its grasp,
  As if it said, ‘Detain me, if you please;’
    Yet there’s no doubt she only meant to clasp
  His fingers with a pure Platonic squeeze:
    She would have shrunk as from a toad, or asp,
  Had she imagined such a thing could rouse
  A feeling dangerous to a prudent spouse.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I

• To hold the pure delights of brain
  Above light loves and sweet champagne.
  For, you and I, we did eschew
  The egoistic "I" and "you;"
  And all our observations ran
  On Art and Letters, Life and Man.
  Proudly we sat, we two, on high,
  Throned in our Objectivity;
  Scarce friends, not lovers (each avers),
  But sexless, safe Philosophers.
  • Amy Levy, "Philosophy"
  • A London Plane-Tree, and Other Verse (1889)

• a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
  • Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1956)

• Marriage [...] is opposed and only in this way – in the fate of the name, not in that of the body – is Platonic love truly allowed to be determined in its only genuine and relevant sense: as a love that in the name does not satisfy its pleasure, but in the name loves the beloved, in the name possesses her and in the name holds her in the palm of his hand. The true expression of that tension, that inclination towards distance that is defined as Platonic love, is the fact that it preserves and inviolates the name, the baptismal name of the beloved. For this love the being of the beloved comes from her name like the rays of a flame, indeed the work of the lover also comes from him. Thus the Divine Comedy is but the aura around the name Beatrice, the most powerful representation of the fact that all the forces and figures of the cosmos come from the name that emerged from love.

• Walter Benjamin, Amore platonico' ', pp. 81-82.