Neuroscientists link erotic desire with high dopamine levels in the brain, yet tell us relationships are more likely to be sustained by oxytocin, the commitment-inducing hormone. Are passion and commitment fundamentally so distinct? Is it futile to seek a love that’s both immediate, physical, particular and immutable, meaningful, ideal? If scientific findings have initiated a crisis of confidence, philosophy offers a different perspective. Let’s talk about the philosophy of love…

FLEETING MEANING

Plato described erotic love as the passion that connects the fleeting and physical with the eternal and meaningful. Eros mediated between a physical, sensory, response to a particular body and an intellectual apprehension of beauty or goodness itself. The lover wants the beloved in respect of fine, admirable, or beautiful features. By internal logic, his or her gaze ascends naturally to ‘that which is beautiful by itself alone’.

Beauty itself (the archetype of all beautifuls) turns out to be the ultimate object of desire. This is a strange and transformative account.

First, there’s the idea that the proper object of erotic desire is not a person at all, just the (collection of) repeatable qualities they exhibit.

This means you love a person for the qualities they fleetingly instantiate; not for who they are ‘in themselves’.

Second, there is Plato’s confidence in the absolute value of the objects of erotic desire. When we love someone, he seems to say, we’re in love with what is beautiful and fine about them.

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(So it doesn’t matter who or what you fall for! If your attention is clear, beauty and goodness will be revealed.)

Third, the account plays havoc with conventional notions of beauty and reality. We ordinarily think of our physical environment as a paradigm of the real, but he invites us to think it the opposite – as nothing in itself but a location for glimpses of qualities that are immutable and abstract. Beauty exists on the cusp between the sensuous and the intellectual. (‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ writes Keats.)

PURER QUALITIES

Fourth, the beloved is depicted as of only incidental value: a stage on the way to something purer and higher.

You thought you loved the angle of your lover’s cheek, the colour of her lips; but what you loved was – strictly – an angle, a colour! If the ultimate objects of love are immutable and abstract, each particular beloved is replaceable by one who exhibits valuable qualities to a higher degree.

Fifth, true love is always unfulfilled and unrequited. Beauty itself, what all the beautifuls have in common, cannot be known by a finite, physical, being. Plato sometimes wondered how we could recognise glimpses of beauty or goodness at all. We must have encountered them directly once, he speculated, outside space and time; so the glimpses we get in erotic desire must be a kind of ‘recollection’.

Perhaps this ancient story of erotic love is only interestingly wrong. Perhaps those who relate it to us – Socrates and Plato – intended it that way.

It reminds us, however, to think about romantic love as (in part) a passion towards meaning. That’s something unlikely to be found in dopamine or oxytocin alone.

LOVE BEYOND PLATO

Of course, Plato’s vision of love, though intriguing, is only one among many. Later philosophers took a different approach, questioning whether love should be so closely tied to beauty and transcendence at all. Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, were far more concerned with love as a project – one that involves choice, freedom, and responsibility rather than an inevitable ascent towards an ideal.

For Sartre, love was often fraught with contradiction. He suggested that love involves both the desire to possess another person completely and the simultaneous awareness that true possession is impossible. We want our beloved to choose us freely, yet we also want them to be entirely ours – an irreconcilable tension that, for Sartre, made love inherently unstable. Love, in his view, was not about uncovering eternal beauty but about navigating the messy and contingent nature of human relationships.

Beauvoir, on the other hand, saw love as an act of reciprocity rather than possession. She argued that love should not be about losing oneself in another but about growing alongside them, maintaining one’s own autonomy while nurturing the autonomy of the beloved. Unlike Plato, she saw love not as an abstract ideal but as a lived, evolving experience.

These existentialist perspectives suggest that love is not simply about discovering beauty in another but about constructing meaning together. Love, rather than being a mere response to pre-existing qualities, is something we actively shape.

MODERN REFLECTIONS ON LOVE

Today, discussions on love have taken on new dimensions, with psychological, sociological, and even economic insights enriching our understanding. Some theorists argue that love is best understood as a series of negotiations between individual needs and societal expectations. In an age where romantic relationships are often shaped by dating apps and social media, the ways in which we fall in love—and the qualities we value in a partner – are continuously evolving.

The neuroscientific perspective suggests that love is at least partly biochemical, with dopamine fuelling the excitement of new romance and oxytocin playing a role in deepening bonds over time. However, the notion that love can be reduced to mere chemistry seems deeply unsatisfactory. Love is not just a matter of neurotransmitters; it is also an experience shaped by personal history, cultural context, and philosophical outlook.

Perhaps what makes love so fascinating is its resistance to being pinned down. Is it a fleeting emotion or a lifelong commitment? A biological imperative or a philosophical pursuit? An accident of circumstance or a deliberate choice? Different traditions – philosophical, scientific, literary – offer different answers, and none of them feel entirely complete on their own.

Plato’s vision of love as an ascent towards eternal beauty still has its allure, but so does the existentialist idea of love as a project of mutual growth. Perhaps the most compelling perspective is one that allows for both: love as a passion for meaning, but also as an ongoing, uncertain, and deeply human endeavour.

Naomi Goulder is head of philosophy and senior lecturer in philosophy at New College of the Humanities.