ἀγάπη, حب غير مشروط, munay: Love
A wonder with a thousand faces
The most beautiful thing is to love.
I’m biased— I’ve been loved more than anyone I’ve ever met—but regardless, I’ll plant my flag here, and I’ll defend it.
English is ill-equipped to describe love. We have one word. One word for a thing beyond words. Like… really? This is the best we can do? Day to day, it’s mostly fine. But Orwell made a damn good point when he described Newspeak— language boxes in thought. So did Lovecraft, when he called his Eldritch abominations “indescribable by any human tongue” to explain that he couldn’t even conceptualize them. How can we truly understand a thing we don’t even have words for?
We’re in luck. There’ve been a lot of us. More than a hundred billion humans have lived and died, thought and spoken. Where our words fall short, theirs can fill the gaps1.
The platonic ideal of love is a divine thing. But we aren’t. We’re monkeys with higher brain function. Capable of aspiring to it, but incapable of reaching it.
So, we make do with lesser loves, guided by that ideal. Here’s how I subdivide them:
The ideal love: Agape (ἀγάπη).
The biological loves: Eros. Storge. Philautia. Fraternus.
The intellectual loves: Xenia. Philia. Pragma.
The broken love: Mania.
Agape
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means."
- Immanuel Kant
Agape is simple, really: It is uncompromising, unconditional, absolute love. The treatment of the loved as an end unto themself, regardless of how much better you know or how much power you could exert over them.
Practically speaking: Desire and support the very best for the one loved, but accept their right to self-determination as axiomatic. In the Christian mythology2, Adam was permitted to fall, to die—Not because it was best for him, but because a Divine being, practicing Agape, knew that to be perfectly loving demands that one be perfectly restrained by respect for the loved’s own agency.
Agape is always there, always reaching out. But it never seizes, never demands. It simply remains. It accepts rejection (without reaction) and carries on holding out a hand.
Eros, Storge, Philautia, Fraternus
The biological loves are simple, so I won’t waste words on them:
Eros— Mating love. Derived from sexuality: the innate urge to reproduce.
Storge— Parental love. Derived from empathy: the innate drive to safeguard the vulnerable.
Philautia— Self-love. Derived from self-preservation: the innate will to live.
Fraternus— Sibling love. Derived from sociality: the innate desire for companionship.
In an age of “biological realists” (read: neofascists), it bears noting that these loves aren’t limited to archetypal relationships— A man can feel eros for another man. We all feel fraternus for our friends, a healthy adult feels storge for every child. Like I said, we have higher brain function: We can recognize where our behavioral traits come from without demanding that everyone return to monkey.
Xenia, Philia, Pragma
The intellectual loves are more complicated. They come from our minds, not just our bodies, so they take longer to describe (sorry about that).
Xenia— The love of the stranger. Derived from practicality: it’s better not to try and kill people when you first meet them, because they might have a bigger stick than you, and then you’re fucked. In practice, Xenia looks like smiling at a stranger. Like hospitality: small talk and a plate of cookies for visitors.
Philia— Reciprocal love. The love of those who stand by your side— companions, countrymen, friends. Derived from reciprocity: the acknowledgement that we’re going to see one another again eventually. In practice, philia looks like saving a seat for your buddy. Like getting in there when he’s getting jumped.
Pragma— Longstanding love. Derived from constancy, familiarity, trust. The love between pairs who know that one another will be there tomorrow, no matter what tomorrow brings.
Did you catch that? The way each one leads into the next. That’s not an rhetorical accident: because it’s not a coincidence. Xenia is a one-sided offer of philia, an outstretched hand. If accepted (and carefully maintained over time on both ends), philia grows into pragma.
The intellectual loves are the ways we build on the biological loves. They’re an example of the greatest gift of higher reasoning— the ability to transcend what’s hard-wired. To overcome the animals we are and become more.
Every burgeoning romance is xeno-eros. Every lifelong friendship, pragma-fraternus. I defy you to think up a type of love that doesn’t fit under this umbrella. Sometimes blended (Protectiveness towards one’s friends, for example, would be fraternus/storge-philia), reality is messy—theory can’t cover every edge case. But each of them, colored by a mix of biological drives, strives towards Agape. All fall short, of course, but that’s okay. We’re only human, after all.
But…
The most dangerous thing is to love.
Mania— Dysfunctional love. Derived from the pursuit of the biological and intellectual loves, at the expense of Agape.
Pragma-eros-mania is the love of a longtime stalker
Xeno-storge-mania is the love of an parent who checks on their newborn so often that it cannot sleep
Philautia-mania is the self-love of a narcissist
Fraternus-philia-mania is the love of that one friend who smothers you (We’ve all got at least one).
If Agape is true love, Mania is fake love. Ruinous love. Love that harms instead of comforting—that holds on tighter as the loved pulls away. There are simply times when the only truly loving thing to do is let go, but mania denies that truth. It is love that has forgotten to respect the loved’s right to self-determination. Love that treats the loved as an object. A thing to be owned, not a person. As something less than an end unto themself.
Usually, I like to end with a bang of some kind. But I haven’t got one today.
This is a system, a set of words you can use, to better understand your own feelings, so that you can consciously manage them more easily, and correct them when they trend away from agape and towards mania. I hope you find it helpful. It’s worked for me, n=1.
I’m going to lean on Greco-latin terminology here, because it’s what I know best. But note that the al-Razians, the Confucians, every human society in history, explored these ideas in parallel.
Leaning on it because it’s the one I happen to believe, but the idea can be found elsewhere. There are many roads to agape.
Okay so I have a few thoughts - very interesting approach overall though.
Firstly, I think it's generally true that English has a fairly limited number of terms for love, although there are others such as friendship, desire, etc. Even so, I think english has a fairly powerful way of enacting love through language, due to this limitation, so I wouldn't say it's inherently bad and can provide one with a greater sense of the experience of love in some cases (though of course these can also be provided in languages such as Ancient Greek, but potentially without such a necessity for it).
I too would push back slightly on the idea that the biological love's are simple - eros seems to me incredibly complex and interesting, which can be seen for example through Plato's depiction of it in Symposium (see especially Alcibiades' speech).
I enjoyed the way you practically applied examples of things such as Xenia, giving a sense of what the experience of these loves can feel like. but I think that ultimately gets to the slight overall quarm I have with your approach. As much as I think it's really cool to use these defined terms, combining them, to create a sense of different types and instances of love, this seems to miss the point a little for me. Love is something so intimate, unique and experiential, that I think describing them in this almost quasi-mathematical way feels slightly antithetical to the experience of love. Although that being said, I can understand the practical use of a system such as this, and I'm sure it could provide benefit, so maybe I'm just being too idealistic here.
Either way, this is a very interesting approach to understanding love, and while I may disagree in places, it has certainly been an interesting way to evaluate my own stance on this topic, so thank you, and well done for your interesting and thought out theory of describing love!