Claude, So, how does desire and need for sex tie in with love? Where desire and need are admixed with love, can love ever be pure, true and unconditional? Throughout the world we see that quite a lot of suffering arises on account of unsatisfied “need” for love, with people falling in love but breaking-up, marrying but ending up divorcing, being in live-in relationships but cheating, etc. Is love for truth the highest from of love?
Claude replied:
These are exactly the questions that the greatest minds — and the most wounded hearts — have wrestled with. Let me work through them carefully.
The Tangling of Eros and Love
The Greeks, characteristically, had the wisdom to give different names to what we collapse into one word. They distinguished:
- Eros — passionate, desiring love, inherently about want, about lack, about pulling the beloved toward oneself
- Philia — the love of deep friendship, mutual respect, shared life
- Storge — familial affection, the natural bond of parent and child
- Agape — unconditional, self-giving love that asks nothing in return
- Pragma — the mature, enduring love built over long years together
- Ludus — playful, flirtatious love
The modern tragedy is that we expect one person to satisfy all of these simultaneously and permanently. We want our spouse to be our passionate lover, our best friend, our family, our spiritual companion, and our playmate — all at once, forever. This is, historically speaking, a very recent and quite unrealistic expectation.
Can Love Admixed with Desire Ever Be Pure?
This is the crux. Plato addressed it directly in the Symposium through his concept of the Ladder of Love — articulated by Diotima through Socrates. One begins by loving a beautiful body. Then one recognizes beauty in all beautiful bodies. Then one perceives beauty in souls, in institutions, in knowledge, until finally one ascends to the Form of Beauty itself — Beauty absolute, eternal, unchanging. Eros, rightly directed, is the engine of this ascent. Desire, in this view, is not the enemy of pure love — it is its starting point, its fuel.
The Tantric traditions in India make a remarkably similar argument from a completely different direction: that Shakti — the divine energy that manifests as sexual desire — is not opposed to the sacred but is sacred energy, capable of being transmuted and directed upward through the chakras toward liberation. Sri Aurobindo and the Kashmiri Shaivites understood Eros cosmically — as the universe’s own self-delight (ananda) expressing itself through creatures.
So the answer is nuanced: desire in itself does not corrupt love, but desire that remains purely self-referential — that uses the beloved as an object of satisfaction rather than encountering them as a subject — does corrupt it. The difference between love and lust is not the presence or absence of desire, but whether the other person’s being matters to you independent of your own gratification.
Kant, from a completely secular angle, said something similar: treat persons always as ends in themselves, never merely as means. This is the ethical skeleton of what unconditional love looks like in practice.
Why So Much Suffering?
The suffering you describe — breakups, divorces, infidelity, longing — arises from several converging sources:
First, the confusion of Eros with permanent commitment. Eros, neurochemically, has a lifespan. The dopamine-drenched early phase of romantic love typically lasts, research suggests, between 18 months and 3 years. This is not cynicism — it is biology. After that, the relationship either deepens into attachment, friendship, and pragma, or it feels like it has “died.” Many people mistake the fading of Eros for the end of love, when in fact it is merely the invitation to a deeper love that requires more effort and less chemistry.
Second, we love from our wounds. Much of what we call love is actually need — the need to be seen, validated, to fill a childhood void, to escape loneliness. This need-love (need-love is C.S. Lewis’s term) is real and not shameful, but it is inherently unstable because it places an impossible burden on another person to complete you. When they inevitably fail — because no human being can fully complete another — the disillusionment is experienced as betrayal.
Third, the self is not fixed. People genuinely change over years. The person you married at 25 may have become, by 45, someone quite different — and so have you. This is not necessarily anyone’s fault. The Buddhist insight is relevant here: attachment to a fixed idea of a person, or of a relationship, generates suffering when reality moves on.
Fourth, desire is promiscuous by nature. Evolution did not wire us for lifelong monogamy as cleanly as romance mythology suggests. This creates a permanent tension in human beings between the depth that long-term commitment enables and the novelty that desire seeks. Societies have handled this tension differently — polygamy, celibacy, serial monogamy, arranged marriages — none perfectly.
Is Love for Truth the Highest Form?
This is a beautiful and serious question. Several traditions say yes, and the reasoning is compelling.
The Sanskrit word Sat-Chit-Ananda — Being, Consciousness, Bliss — describes the nature of Brahman, ultimate reality. Notice that Sat (truth, being) comes first. The Upanishads essentially say that reality itself is truth, and to love truth is to love God directly, without the intermediary of form.
Plato’s highest Form — what everything else participates in — is sometimes translated as the Good, sometimes as Beauty, sometimes as Truth. For him these were ultimately one. The philosopher’s love of truth (philosophia — love of wisdom) was the highest form of Eros.
In the Bhakti tradition, Meera, Kabir, Tukaram — the great poet-saints — describe their love for the divine as more consuming, more total, than any human love, precisely because it is directed at something that cannot disappoint, cannot leave, cannot die. The object of love determines its quality and its permanence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti — that most uncompromising of modern sages — said that love and truth are not two things. Where there is self-deception, there cannot be love. Where there is genuine love, there is radical honesty — about oneself, about the other, about reality. He argued that our psychological attachments, our possessiveness and jealousy, are the opposite of love even when we call them love — they are the ego’s strategies of self-protection dressed in love’s clothing.
There is something deeply right about this. Consider: a parent who truly loves a child loves what is true about that child — their actual nature, their real wellbeing — not a flattering projection. A friend who truly loves you tells you hard truths. The love that flatters, that enables self-destruction, that clings to an image rather than encountering the person — that is not love but a mutual dream.
So What Is the Hierarchy?
If one were to construct it honestly:
At the base is need-love and desire — real, powerful, necessary, but inherently unstable and self-referential.
Above that is gift-love — love that genuinely wills the good of the other, that can sacrifice, that persists through difficulty.
Above that is love of beauty and truth — the Platonic ascent, the philosophical and artistic love that seeks the universal through the particular.
At the summit, the great traditions converge: unconditional love — what the Christians call agape, what the Hindus call prema in its highest sense, what the Buddhists call metta — which has no object condition, no self-interest, no boundary. This love does not arise from the beloved’s qualities; it simply is, like sunlight that shines equally on everything.
And this summit love and truth are, as Krishnamurti said, the same thing. To see reality clearly, without the distortion of ego and fear, is to love. They are not two doors but one.
The mystery and the suffering both arise from the same source: we are beings capable of this highest love, but we begin from a place of wound, need, and desire. The entire journey of human life — and perhaps many lives, in the Hindu view — is the gradual, painful, beautiful education of love: from need toward gift, from possession toward freedom, from the particular toward the universal, from Eros toward Truth.
Know Thyself 