People like to use "erotic" in the modern sense as an antonym of "platonic", their word for a pure, nonsexual friendship The problem is that "platonic" is named for Plato, and THE WORD PLATO HIMSELF USED FOR THAT KIND OF LOVE WAS "EROS"
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The ancient Greeks were ALL ABOUT the idea that eros and sex could be separated from each other! This is why there's so much debate over whether or not they had a concept of being "gay" in the modern sense! They were very willing to describe people as "lovers" without fucking!
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Replying to @arthur_affect
INFO: I thought eros was sex love and agape was non-sex love? (disclaimer I know nothing about Greek or classic. This is based entirely on being raised Catholic and the pope had a whole thing about the importance of agape once)
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Replying to @aneas_anois
No, not really In actual ancient Greece they were just two words for "love", with "agape" more commonly used in the context of family love and "eros" in the context of what we'd call romance
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Replying to @arthur_affect @aneas_anois
What about philadelphia, brotherly love?
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Replying to @lawless523 @aneas_anois
Right, CS Lewis popularized divvying up the concept of "love" among the four Greek words "eros", "philia", "agape" and "storge", although the actual ancient Greeks probably didn't view it nearly so rigidly
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"Philia" gets its highfalutin sense of "brotherly love" from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, where he says philia itself is a necessary virtue to be a complete human being, to have "true friends" Although one example of philia he gives is, in fact, lovers courting
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A better translation for "philia" in English might be "loyalty" The idea that you can't be a complete person without deciding that you're going to be on your friends' side, that you'll stick up for them, that these are your people
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Which is why the Greeks also saw "philautia" ("self-love") as possibly being a virtue and not a vice "Selfishness" isn't always bad "Loving yourself" in the sense of saying "I have to always be on my side, I have to swear to be my own friend and not my enemy" (basic therapy)
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Anyway because of this obviously philia is a person-to-person thing and eros doesn't have to be Plato was the one who wrote about eros and he said that its lowest form was sexual attraction to another person but in its highest form it's a pure reaction to "beauty"
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CS Lewis said he thought of philia as "side-by-side love" and eros as "face-to-face" Philia is when you see someone else in your life as your teammate, as someone playing the same game as you Eros is when another person is the goalpost, or the ball
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(Which is why he, as a good Christian, thought of eros as much more likely to be toxic and sinful, why men can desire women without even really liking or respecting them)
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But in any case - In real life obviously these definitions weren't so clear cut, and people openly stole the word "philia" to use in place of "eros" as a euphemism ("pederasts" renamed themselves "pedophiles" to make the way they "love children" sound less bad)
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