From Sappho's fire and Plato's ladder to Christian charity, Sufi longing, and the modern art of loving — Eros, philia, and agape in one view.
What is love — a lack that seeks completion, a form of willing the good of another, or an illusion of the will?
Love may be the most universal of experiences and the most disputed of concepts. The Greeks already distinguished eros, philia, and agape; the Christian tradition made self-giving love the highest virtue and the name of God; the Sufis turned longing itself into a path to the divine. Philosophers ask whether love is a lack that seeks what it does not have, or a generous willing of another's good; whether it is a metaphysical force, a biological drive, or a demanding practice we must learn. Set side by side, these views map the distance between desire, friendship, and unconditional care.
Archaic Greek lyric
Sappho renders love as an overwhelming bodily and psychic force — 'limb-loosening Eros' that shakes the body like wind in the oaks, at once bitter and sweet. Her poems trace desire's physical symptoms with unmatched precision, treating longing and jealousy as truths of experience rather than moral problems, and setting the terms in which the West would speak of erotic love.
Fragments, incl. 'He seems to me equal to the gods' (fr. 31).
Ancient Greek (Academy)
In the Symposium, Eros is the child of Poverty and Resource — a lack that reaches for the beautiful and the good it does not possess. Rightly guided, it ascends a 'ladder': from one beautiful body to all bodies, to beautiful souls, laws, and knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Love is thus the soul's engine toward the eternal and the birth of virtue in beauty.
Symposium; Phaedrus.
Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)
Aristotle analyzes love mainly as philia — friendship and affection — wishing good to another for that other's own sake. The highest form binds the virtuous, who love each other for their character; a friend is 'another self,' and mutual, recognized goodwill is essential to the good life. Such love, unlike friendships of pleasure or utility, is stable because its ground does not decay.
Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII–IX.
Early Christianity
Paul makes agape — self-giving, other-directed love — the greatest of the virtues, surpassing faith and hope and outlasting all gifts. 'Love is patient, love is kind... it does not seek its own.' Without it every eloquence and sacrifice is empty; it is the fulfillment of the law and the very shape of the Christian life.
First Letter to the Corinthians, ch. 13.
Christian (Patristic)
For Augustine love is the weight of the soul that moves it toward what it desires: 'my love is my weight; by it I am carried wherever I am carried.' Rightly ordered love (caritas) loves God above all and all else in God; disordered love (cupiditas) rests in creatures as if they were the end. The restless heart finds peace only in the eternal object of its love.
Confessions; On Christian Doctrine.
Sufism (Islamic mysticism)
Love is the cosmic longing by which the soul, separated from its divine source, yearns to return — the reed torn from the reed-bed crying to be reunited. Human love, rightly understood, is a bridge to divine love; the beloved becomes a mirror of God, and annihilation of the self in love (fana) is the path to union. Reason must finally give way to the intoxication of the heart.
Masnavi; Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi.
Scholasticism
To love is to will the good of another; Aquinas defines charity as a friendship between the human being and God, made possible by grace. Love is the first of the passions and the root of all the others, and rightly ordered charity is the form of every virtue. He distinguishes the love of desire (wanting a good for oneself) from the love of friendship (willing good to another for their sake).
Summa Theologiae, I-II qq. 26–28; II-II qq. 23–27.
Rationalism
Love is 'joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause' — a movement toward greater perfection tied to what produces it. The highest and most enduring love is the intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis): understanding nature under the aspect of eternity, in which the mind's love for God is part of God's infinite love for itself. This love, grounded in reason, cannot turn to hatred or loss.
Ethics (1677), Parts III and V.
Post-Kantian idealism / pessimism
Romantic love is a metaphysical illusion staged by the will-to-live to secure the next generation. What lovers take for a unique bond is the species using them to compose a particular child; the intensity of passion is proportional to the reproductive stakes, not to any real harmony of souls. Sexual love is thus the deceptive mask of nature's blind, self-perpetuating will.
The World as Will and Representation, 'Metaphysics of Sexual Love'.
Christian existentialism
Kierkegaard contrasts preferential love — erotic love and friendship, which favor the special one — with Christian neighbor-love, commanded of all toward all. Because it is a duty ('you shall love'), Christian love is freed from the caprice of feeling and cannot be lost through change or betrayal; it loves the person one actually sees, and its hidden source is love itself, God.
Works of Love (1847).
Psychoanalysis
Love is at root libido — sexual energy that can be aimed, sublimated, or redirected. Adult love repeats infantile patterns: we seek in others the images of our first caregivers, and 'being in love' overvalues the object while depleting the ego. Freud was skeptical of the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself, holding that love cannot be simply willed toward everyone without cheapening it.
Civilization and Its Discontents; 'On Narcissism'.
Humanistic psychoanalysis
Love is not a feeling one falls into but an art one must practice, an active power that answers the human need to overcome separateness. Mature love unites care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge, and preserves the integrity of both persons: 'love is a union under the condition of preserving one's integrity.' It is an orientation of character toward the world, not merely a relation to one special object.
The Art of Loving (1956).
Existentialism / feminism
Beauvoir criticizes the romantic ideal that asks a woman to lose herself in a man, making him her whole world while he keeps his own projects. Authentic love must instead be a relation of two free subjects who recognize one another's transcendence, neither dominating nor dissolving into the other. Love becomes liberating only between equals.
The Second Sex (1949), 'The Woman in Love'.
Feminist theory / cultural criticism
Love is best understood as an action rather than a feeling: 'the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.' Because it is a practice combining care, commitment, trust, respect, and honesty, love is incompatible with domination and abuse. A culture that confuses love with control cannot love well; learning to love is therefore also a political and ethical task.
All About Love: New Visions (2000).