Bedroom In Arles

Plato believed in the highest form of love. When we encounter such thoughts and ideas regarding love nowadays we get astonished, because the way plato saw love was different than any of our visions or experiences. 

For a long period of time, I believed that what’s meant by platonic love is to love someone without being attracted to them physically, but that is not actually true. Plato believed that the highest most eloquent form of love is to find someone we admire and let them change us

He thought that falling in love happens when we encounter someone who we admire, respect and think highly of. Meaning we want to become more like this person. The idea of being closer to them means that we can have more of them and hence feel more evolved. Being with them is exciting because we share common interests, and therefore we can educate each other to be the highest version of ourselves.

Plato believes that love is when we are ready to accept the other person changing us and we changing them, therefore if we like someone or allegedly “love” but we wouldn’t like to be more like them, that means that we don’t really love them. To fall in love is to love becoming the highest version of yourself and personally I think that’s why deep down we know that we can’t love someone if we don’t love ourselves first.

In his Nicomachean ethics book, Aristotle solved one of our dilemmas that stands till today. Aristotle wanted to answer the question “How to be happy?”. Thinking through it to answer this he needed to know what makes a person good or bad in his life, not in the ill sense but in manner, which was highly intriguing to think that there is some sort of a text book to asses how we should be in life. Aristotle found out that every virtue falls between two vices the too much and the too little. For example people who have no capacity for sense of humor, never take a joke, always make things personal and are easily offended they fall in the too little of that virtue. Others who make jokes about everything and are a laugh stock, a clown they created just to gain some laughter, they fall in the too much of that virtue. Aristotle believed that if we were to achieve some sort of balance, if we were to find our authentic self within the lines of each of our virtues we would truly attain the concept of being a “good” person to find the lines to be Just Right.