"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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You could even argue that depending on your view of sex, sex could as easily go with philia as eros The Greek god Eros (Cupid for Romans) was the one who shot you with arrows that made you go crazy with obsession, "love at first sight" But there was also the goddess Philotes
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Philotes, the goddess of philia, was the goddess of people "getting along", she's the good twin sister of Neikea, the goddess of quarrels And that explicitly *included* sex - she's the goddess of sex, as in the sex act (as opposed to more important things like marriage)
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There's plenty of people who would say that sex is something they do with friends to keep things friendly with each other, for fun, and not necessarily an expression that the other person is the most beautiful thing your soul has ever known Which would horrify Lewis, but hey
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Just like, as much as we might think the concept is hilarious and mockable today, there's plenty of people throughout history and now who'd say their overwhelming admiration of another person's "beauty" (in body or in spirit) is too perfect to ever soil with mere fucking
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