From Platonic love to Stoic endurance: Everyday expressions we stole from Greek philosophers

“I have found my soulmate, when we are together everything flows in perfect harmony, but I am a little skeptical about whether he feels the same.” It could be a fragment of a conversation between two friends in 2024. However, three of the expressions in that sentence originate in the philosophy of classical Greece, which bequeathed us a linguistic and cultural heritage that is part of our everyday vocabulary, although we have sometimes distorted its meaning over time.

Platonic love?

Few terms have more definitions than love, if we dare to define it. Plato tried about 2,400 years ago, drawing it as an instrument to reach beauty, the highest ideal of man. Difficult and costly, but attainable and affordable for anyone who wants to approach knowledge. What we understand today by Platonic love is an entelechy — a word coined by his disciple Aristotle that today is defined by the Collins dictionary as “actuality as opposed to potentiality”— something practically unattainable. José Carlos Ruiz, a professor of philosophy at the University of Córdoba and author of books such as El arte de pensar (The art of thinking, 2018), explains in a telephone conversation that platonic love today “is considered something unattainable because it has been subjected to a certain prior idealization.”

My soulmate

“The primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces.” The image is disturbing, but this is how Aristophanes narrates this myth in The Symposium, one of Plato’s best-known works. After offending the gods, Zeus ordered Apollo to split each individual in half, condemning them to forever search for… their other half? Their soul mate?

Harmony

Philosophical concepts “are changed or distorted over time because people tend to assimilate particular traits of the characters at the forefront of certain philosophical currents, affixing the anecdote more than the real meaning of the word,” explains José Antonio Berenguer, an expert from the department of Greek and Latin Studies at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He gives the example of the word harmony, which we use today to mean concord between people or objects, but in classical Greece it meant only union or assembly, not necessarily concord. Pythagoras (569-475 B.C.) relates harmony to music (a relationship that has survived to this day), specifically to a melody produced by the movement of the planets that the human ear is not able to hear.

We are not as cynical as Diogenes

We say that someone has Diogenes syndrome if they hoard things in an unhealthy way, particularly garbage. Paradoxically, the philosopher who gave his name to the disorder, Diogenes of Sinope (412-323 B.C.), was characterized by renouncing practically all material goods. His only belongings were a bag, a cloak, a staff, and a bowl. And, when he saw a child drink directly from the water he collected in his own hands, he got rid of the bowl because it seemed pretentious. This disdain for material things was a common trait of the members of his philosophical school, the Cynics, who rejected ostentation and the socially established. The word cynic today defines someone who acts with blatant falsehood or shamelessness, and this conception probably comes from some episodes in Diogenes’ life. Ruiz explains that during a banquet, to mock the philosopher, they threw bones at him like a dog (the word cynic comes from the Greek kynikós, which means canine), to which the philosopher responded by behaving like the animal: he raised his leg and urinated in the food of those who had offended him.

Skepticism

There are people who doubt the existence of true love: the “love skeptics,” they could be called, because Pyrrhon (360-270 B.C.) thought he was very clear about his philosophy until he accompanied Alexander the Great on his expedition to India and saw that there were people with very different ideas and ways of thinking. He created the skeptical school, which invited distrust in the possibility of knowing the truth. The word skepticism has retained its meaning almost unchanged, and the Cambridge dictionary defines it as “doubt that something is true or useful.”

Hedonistic pleasure

We call the pleasure-seeker a hedonist, as did Epicurus (342-270 B.C.). His idea of hedonism and pleasure, however, does not correspond to that of our time. Ruiz says that the important thing for Epicureanism was “that pleasures were communal, and not selfish,” and gave special importance to friendship and moderation. The Greek philosopher “defended the necessary natural pleasures, such as eating and sleeping; the unnecessary natural pleasures, such as sex; and those that did not fall into any of these two categories, which were the least desirable.”

Stoically endure

Some of the great philosophical thoughts are not only present in our society, they are also in fashion. This is the case of Stoicism, a school founded at the beginning of the third century B.C. by Zeno of Citium. These philosophers thought that it is possible to achieve freedom by being indifferent to material things and fortune, being guided only by reason, and being impassive in the face of negative events. Although the school originated in Hellenistic Greece, it reached the Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius and influenced Christianity. One of its references was Seneca the Younger (4 B.C.-65 A.D.), a philosopher born in the Roman city of Corduba, modern-day Córdoba in Spain. It cannot be said that he put into practice the renunciation of material goods: “Seneca, who was a multimillionaire, gave stoic advice when he was not much of one himself,” says Ruiz of his countryman, who was a senator under four Roman emperors and had a fortune of 300 million sesterces, compared to the five that an average senator would have. The professor stresses that many Stoics did have to resign themselves to less affluent lives: “Epictetus (55-135 A.D), one of the great Stoics, was born in Greece but was sold into slavery in Rome and advocated an exercise of constant restraint in which he distinguished what depends on you and what does not. A wise man had to be emotionally resilient to misfortune, and he was.”

From four to 118 elements: What is the world made of?

Some of the philosophical ideas of the classical era have found their way into the movies. To give a recent example, in 2023 Pixar released Elemental, which tells the story of the difficult relationship between fire and water, which cannot touch each other. Although today chemistry has identified up to 118 elements, when we talk about them outside a laboratory we usually think of four, adding air and earth to this tormented couple. This idea did not come from Pixar, but from Empedocles of Agrigento, a philosopher of the fifth century B.C., who established that “there are four elements: fire, water, earth and air. Friendship unites them and hatred separates them.” Earlier, several pre-Socratic thinkers sought a scientific explanation for material facts, instead of resorting to religion or mythology, and laid the foundations of scientific thought: Anaximenes chose water as the elementary principle; Heraclitus, fire; Thales of Miletus, water; and Xenophanes, earth.

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