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Aristotle and Plato on Relationships

The eminent 20th-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is reported to have said, “All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato—and Aristotle wrote most of the footnote.” Indeed, the seminal contributions of Plato and Aristotle, writing in Athens 2,500 years ago, are foundational for nearly all Western scholarship, including the various social science approaches to understanding human relationships.

Plato's writings are in the form of dialogues centered around his teacher, Socrates, so that it is impossible today to sort out which ideas are Socrates' and which are Plato's. Aristotle was Plato's student. Plato's greatest direct influence relevant to relationships is his work on love, mainly in the Symposium. Aristotle's greatest directly relevant influence is on friendship, mainly in his systematic treatise, the Nicomachean Ethics.

This entry briefly summarizes Plato's work on love and Aristotle's on friendship, noting links of each with contemporary social science work on relationships.

Plato on Love

The Symposium (a drinking party) is a series of toasts or speeches praising love. The initial speeches describe various understandings of love, ranging from love as sexuality, love as the search for one's soul mate, to love as the highest virtue. Socrates, the honored guest, speaks last, supposedly quoting the mystic Diotima of Mantineia, “a woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge”:

Love may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good.All animals …, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost … the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal.[Then] think of the ambition of men, and … consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal….These are the lesser mysteries of love…. For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, … to love one such form only … and soon perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then … recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same … and become a lover of all beautiful forms. [I]n the next stage, consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form…until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions go on to the sciences, … create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until at last the vision is revealed of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere…toward the end he will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty—a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning….

Summarizing all this, Socrates' Diotima concludes with “the true order of

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