Love and hatred are among the most intense experiences in human life. They can change the way we see someone, cloud our judgment, alter our priorities, and drive us to do things we would never have considered under different circumstances. For this reason, the Greeks did not treat love merely as a pleasant feeling, or hatred as a negative emotion. Both concern what we direct our desire towards, what we consider worth preserving, and what we wish to separate ourselves from.
The Greek language has several words for different forms of love. Erōs refers primarily to desire and attraction; philia includes affection, friendship, and bonds in which we wish another person well. Hatred is expressed by misos, while echthra also conveys enmity and hostility. These words do not form a rigid classification, but they help us examine something we often call simply "love" without asking what it actually contains.
We may love someone because we desire them, because they make us feel good, because they are useful to us, because we share an important part of our life with them, or because we genuinely recognize the worth of their character. Likewise, we may believe we hate someone when we are still angry, hurt, humiliated, or unable to accept a loss. Understanding these forces also means learning to distinguish what we feel, because emotions that seem similar can lead us in very different directions.
Eros and Desire
In the Symposium, Plato gives Diotima one of the most profound reflections on love. Human beings desire what they consider good and wish to keep it forever. Eros therefore arises from a lack, from the awareness of something we do not fully possess and towards which we reach. Love inevitably contains desire, longing, and vulnerability: what we love matters to us precisely because we might not have it, might lose it, or might be unable to keep it.
This idea helps explain why love can bring so much joy and, at the same time, so much anxiety. When something becomes precious, its absence becomes a possibility too. An important relationship makes us happy, but it also leaves us vulnerable to separation. To desire someone is to accept that they have a will of their own, one we cannot control.
The quality of love depends greatly on what we do with that vulnerability. We can accept it and learn to sustain a relationship between two free people, or we can keep trying to eliminate uncertainty through control, jealousy, and possessiveness. In the latter case, desire gradually stops seeing the other person for who they are and becomes mainly concerned with the security we want to obtain from them.
Loving and Possessing
Diotima says that love desires to possess the good forever. She is speaking of the desire to have the good always, rather than the possession of another human being. Applied to relationships, however, this raises an important question: how do we reconcile our desire for lasting happiness with another person's freedom?
No person can be possessed "forever" in the way we possess an object. People change, make choices, and may move away from us. Even in the deepest relationships, they remain separate individuals.
An important part of emotional maturity, then, is learning to tolerate that separateness. We can desire someone intensely and build something lasting with them without insisting on controlling their every thought, friendship, choice, or movement. Love becomes fragile when security depends on steadily reducing the other person's freedom.
This also applies to how we understand jealousy. A certain fear of loss can arise naturally when something matters to us, but constantly feeding that fear does not deepen a bond. If every relationship turns into surveillance, love ends up consuming the very freedom that allows two people to choose each other freely.
When Love Changes Our Judgment
In the Phaedrus, Plato describes Eros through the image of mania, a form of madness. He does not use the term only in a negative sense. Socrates distinguishes disordered madness from madness inspired by the Gods, and considers love associated with Aphrodite and Eros one of the forms of divine mania. The same erotic force, however, must be governed by the better parts of the soul. When appetite and desire take control, a relationship can become excessive and disordered.
The experience of falling in love makes this image understandable. One person may occupy an enormous part of our thoughts, change our mood, and make us attach extraordinary meaning to gestures that would seem small to an outside observer. We may idealize them, ignore obvious faults, or find excuses that we would never accept in any other situation.
The problem is not intensity itself. An emotional life entirely devoid of intensity would be impoverished too. The problem begins when intensity replaces judgment, because feeling something with overwhelming force does not automatically mean our interpretation is correct.
Love therefore needs sōphrosynē as well. Self-mastery and desire need not destroy each other. Together they can allow someone to love deeply without handing over the entire direction of their life to a passing passion.
Wishing the Other Person Well
Aristotle offers a different, very concrete criterion. In the Rhetoric, he describes friendly affection as wishing someone what we consider good for that person's own sake, and being willing, as far as we can, to help bring that good about.
This definition raises an uncomfortable question about many relationships: when we say we love someone, do we genuinely want what is good for them, or do we mainly want them to continue satisfying our needs?
The two can coexist. It is natural to want attention, presence, affection, sexuality, and reciprocity in a relationship. But love becomes much poorer when the other person exists only for what they provide us.
Aristotle distinguishes bonds based on usefulness, pleasure, and character. The first two may end when what sustained them disappears. A relationship founded on appreciation of someone's character has greater stability precisely because it does not depend solely on what we receive.
Love Does Not Mean Putting Up with Everything
Wishing someone well does not oblige us to maintain every relationship. Aristotle explicitly asks what happens when a friend changes profoundly and becomes morally worse. If the friend can be helped to correct themselves, he considers it right to try. If their deterioration has become beyond remedy, he considers the end of the friendship understandable.
This principle is particularly useful because it prevents us from turning love into an excuse for limitless endurance. A woman can care for someone and recognize at the same time that the relationship is harming her. She can retain affection, memories, and even compassion without being obliged to remain in that relationship.
Sometimes a relationship ends because love has disappeared. Other times it ends because love alone is not enough to make it good. Trust, respect, responsibility, compatibility, and reciprocity are also part of building a bond. The intensity of feeling does not automatically make up for the absence of these qualities.
Self-Love
Aristotle also devotes an interesting reflection to love of oneself. He knows the expression can refer to selfishness and the desire to claim wealth, pleasures, and honors for oneself, but he distinguishes this from a better form of self-love, in which someone desires what is noble for themselves and strives to act according to Virtue. In this sense, he even argues that a good person ought to have a proper love for themselves.
This allows us to distinguish self-love both from selfishness and from the shallow notion that we should always consider ourselves wonderful. Caring for ourselves does not mean automatically approving of everything we do. It means wanting what we genuinely consider good for ourselves and having enough self-respect to correct ourselves when our actions take us in the opposite direction.
A person can also be divided against themselves. Aristotle describes someone whose reason desires one thing while their impulses continually pull them towards another, creating a kind of inner division. Our ability to be friends with ourselves grows when our thoughts, desires, and actions gradually stop fighting one another.
A woman who has no self-respect also risks demanding something impossible from her relationships: constant proof that she deserves to exist, to be desired, and to have worth. No amount of outside attention can provide lasting stability for something that is continually denied within.
Love Makes Us Resemble Those We Spend Time with
For Aristotle, friendship is more than a feeling of affection. Friends share activities, spend time together, and come to influence one another. In his account, friendships between good people can help both become better, while those built around bad conduct may reinforce that very conduct.
This makes it important to choose carefully whom we allow close to us. Loving someone inevitably means letting them into part of our life, and what is repeated within a relationship can slowly begin to seem normal. Some bonds encourage clarity, discipline, curiosity, and dignity; others accustom us to lies, chaos, contempt, or mediocrity.
We need not choose people according to a standard of perfection that no one possesses. It is reasonable, however, to observe which part of ourselves grows when we spend a long time beside someone. Love shapes character through the habits it creates.
From Hurt to Anger
Love and hatred are often treated as two immediately opposing extremes, but there are many stages between them. Aristotle makes a precise distinction between anger and hatred. Anger arises from a perceived slight, is accompanied by pain, usually targets a particular person, and retains the wish that the other person feel our reaction. It may subside with time.
This description explains why the people we love can anger us far more intensely than strangers. We expect attention, respect, understanding, and reciprocity from them. When these expectations are betrayed, pain can quickly take the form of anger.
Being angry with someone does not mean we have stopped loving them. Sometimes anger shows precisely how much that relationship still matters to us. The difficulty lies in not allowing pain alone to determine what we do next, especially when we want to hurt the other person so they will understand how deeply they have hurt us.
When Anger Becomes Hatred
Aristotle considers hatred far more radical. Anger wants the offender to suffer and may still leave room for compassion. Hatred, by contrast, wishes harm upon the other person in a more lasting way and can even extend to entire groups of people. For Aristotle, hatred can survive the passage of time in a way that anger often does not.
The distinction matters because hatred changes how we see another person. When we are angry, we may still recognize some of their good qualities and remember what we shared. Once hatred takes root, we tend to reinterpret everything through what we despise. Even good memories can become suspect, and the entire person risks being reduced to the wound they caused us.
Compassion becomes harder in this state. We no longer want only to protect ourselves or obtain justice; we may begin to wish for the other person's failure, suffering, or humiliation. Hatred can therefore take a toll on the person who harbors it too, because it keeps part of their inner life organized around the very person they wish to reject.
Yet hatred itself must also be judged according to its cause, direction, and purpose. There is a considerable difference between blind hatred, which seeks suffering without reason or proportion, and justified hatred arising from serious injustice. Hatred can provide the determination needed to resist wrongdoing, protect others, and pursue justice when a passing moment of anger would not be sufficient. What matters is whether that force remains governed by wisdom and directed towards a just purpose.
This distinction is also important within Zevist ethics. Our High Priest explains that hatred, like anger and other powerful human drives, is not inherently evil. When properly understood and controlled, it can serve justice. When it becomes blind, however, it can lead to cruelty, needless destruction, and even the ruin of the person experiencing it.
We should therefore learn to distinguish justified opposition from personal resentment. An injustice may deserve firm and sustained resistance, but this does not give us permission to abandon reason, act without proportion, or direct our hostility towards people who bear no responsibility for what occurred. Even when hatred has a legitimate cause, its expression must remain subject to judgement.
When Love Turns into Hatred
Euripides opens Medea with a particularly stark image. The nurse recalls how profoundly Medea had loved Jason, for whom she had left her father, her homeland, and her home. After his betrayal, the nurse relates how love has turned into enmity and the dearest bonds have been destroyed.
Medea is an extreme and tragic case, not a model of female psychology. Precisely for that reason, her story allows us to observe in an exaggerated form something that can happen, on a very different scale, in ordinary life: when someone has invested almost everything in a relationship, losing it can feel like the destruction of their own identity. Medea had not merely lost Jason. To follow him, she had abandoned much of what made up her former life.
Pain gradually turns into a desire for punishment. In the end, revenge becomes so important that Medea is even willing to strike at what she loves in order to hurt Jason. Medea herself presents her resolve as a form of strength, yet the tragedy exposes the terrible consequences of allowing wounded pride and revenge to prevail over every other consideration.
The tragedy shows how dangerous it can be to build one's entire identity around another person. When the relationship ends, too little inner space remains from which to observe the pain without being completely consumed by it. Deep love requires closeness, but a healthy relationship should not consume every other part of a person.
Hating Someone Still Binds Us to Them
After being hurt, we may want nothing more to do with someone and, at the same time, keep thinking about them constantly. We replay conversations, imagine replies, check what they are doing, or invent scenes in our minds in which they finally understand what they did to us.
In these cases, the relationship has ended outwardly but still occupies an enormous amount of inner space. Hatred can become another kind of bond because it continues to organize our attention, time, and emotions around the same person.
Freeing ourselves from someone does not necessarily require forgiving them in the sense of restoring the relationship. It can mean reaching a point where that person no longer determines our inner state every day. In some cases, indifference reached through clear understanding can be a far more complete separation than hatred.
This does not mean abandoning the pursuit of justice where a genuine wrong has been committed. We can continue to oppose injustice, demand accountability, and protect ourselves without allowing resentment to govern every other aspect of our lives.
Love and Strife as Forces of the Cosmos
Empedocles takes love and conflict to an entirely different scale. In his philosophy, the four fundamental elements are moved by two forces, Philótēs, Love, and Neîkos, Strife or Discord. Love tends to bring different elements together, while Strife separates them. The cosmos arises through their alternation, and neither force remains dominant forever.
We should not automatically turn this cosmology into a psychological theory of relationships, since Empedocles is explaining the structure of nature. The image does, however, offer an interesting thought: union and separation are both part of reality. Not everything that comes together must remain together forever, and separation does not necessarily amount to moral failure.
This relationship between Love and Strife is well developed in our High Priest's teachings. Under Ma'at, Love brings things together while Strife preserves necessary distinctions, boundaries, and the capacity to resist what is harmful. When either force operates without proper measure, Love can become suffocating possession, while Strife can descend into destructive conflict. Harmony requires both forces to remain in their proper relationship.
Even an important relationship can come to an end without making everything that happened before it false. We can recognize that someone mattered during one period of our life while also accepting that the period has ended. The need to turn every separation into hatred often comes from wanting to make simple something that is not simple at all.
Loving without Losing Ourselves
Deep love requires openness. Someone who keeps every part of themselves protected may avoid certain wounds, but also makes genuine intimacy difficult. Opening up to another person means allowing them to know us, entrusting them with a vulnerable part of our life, and accepting a degree of risk.
That openness does not require us to erase our boundaries. A woman can love intensely while maintaining friendships, interests, judgment, autonomy, and an inner life that does not depend entirely on the mood of the person she loves. These things do not diminish the relationship. Often, they prevent it from having to satisfy every human need on its own.
Sacrifice, too, must be considered carefully. Love naturally leads us at times to give up something we want for another person's good, and Aristotle recognizes that a virtuous friend may make great sacrifices for others. But a relationship in which one person continually sacrifices dignity, peace of mind, aspirations, and boundaries while the other only takes has lost the reciprocity that makes true friendship possible.
Love That Educates Desire
In the Symposium, Diotima's path leads desire from the beauty of a single body towards an ever-broader ability to recognize beauty in souls, activities, knowledge, and finally Beauty itself. Desire is not destroyed; it is educated, because what first attracts us through one person can teach us to recognize greater goods.
This idea is directly connected to the subject of beauty. We may first fall in love with a face, a voice, someone's presence, or physical desire, but truly getting to know someone inevitably raises other questions. What kind of person are they? How do they treat those who have nothing to offer them? How do they react when things do not go their way? Can they keep a promise? Beauty may attract us; character determines much of what happens next.
Mature love also educates our desires. Over time, we can become less easily swayed by intensity alone and more attentive to the quality of what a relationship brings into our life.
Within Zevism, Eros also possesses a divine dimension that reaches beyond the immediate experience of human attraction. The desire for beauty and goodness can become part of the soul's movement towards the Gods. Through the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and spiritual understanding, desire can be directed towards increasingly higher forms of beauty and excellence. What begins as attraction towards another person may therefore become an opportunity to develop our own character and deepen our understanding of the Divine.
What We Love Helps Shape Who We Are
Both love and hatred direct our attention. They influence where we choose to devote our time, thought, and energy. The question of what we love is therefore inseparable from the character we are building.
We can love knowledge, beauty, friendship, truth, family, pleasure, power, recognition, or money. No human life has only one object of love, but the order in which we place these goods makes a great difference. When something secondary is treated as indispensable, our whole life risks becoming organized around keeping it.
Hatred, too, can become an organizing principle. Someone may spend years defining themselves in opposition to another person, a group, or an experience from their past. At that point, what they despise paradoxically receives an enormous share of their time and continues to shape who they are becoming.
Educating our character therefore also means educating our love and hatred. It means learning which people deserve to be close to us, which behaviors we must reject without letting that rejection become an obsession, which desires deserve to be cultivated, and which must be kept under control.
Love can make us more generous, courageous, patient, and creative. It can also make us dependent, blind, and willing to tolerate what we would normally recognize as wrong. Hatred may arise from a genuine wound and alert us that a boundary has been crossed. When justified and governed by reason, it may strengthen our determination to resist injustice. But allowing it to become blind or obsessive risks giving that wound power far beyond the event that caused it.
Learning to love therefore also requires learning to choose, set limits, and sometimes let go. Learning not to be ruled by hatred does not mean denying the harm we suffered, abandoning justice, or forcing ourselves into reconciliations we do not want. It means refusing to allow those who have hurt us to govern our judgement and occupy a part of our life we no longer wish to give them.
A woman can love deeply without dissolving into the person she loves. She can suffer a loss without allowing it to destroy every other part of herself, and she can walk away from someone without needing to turn them into an absolute enemy. This ability requires inner work like understanding what we feel, governing it without repressing it, and choosing which feelings deserve to become a lasting part of our character.