Eros and Pilia，“愛“與愛

Eros and Philia

Two families of Greek words, each with its distinctive semantic contents, can properly be translated as "love."

On the one hand, there is the verb philein and its cognates - a word we use all the time when we talk about phil+anthropy 博愛, phil+osophy哲學, phil＋harmonic 愛好音樂，交響樂, and the like.

One the other hand, "to love" is also the proper translation of the verb eran. "Eros" is the name of this psychological force, "erates" designates a lover, and "eromenos" is the one who is loved.

Those Greek terms are of course no less familiar to us than the "phi . . ." family, from them we have "erotic", "erogenous zone", and so on.

Although our terms "erotic" and "sexual" are by no means interchangeable(a depiction of sexual organs, for example, need not be erotic), no discussion of the place of eros in human life could possibly ignore sexual desire and sexual activity.

Similarly, Greek texts that concern eros - the subject of Plato's Symposium, and one of the central topics of Phaedrus - must dress themselves to sexuality, though they can encompass/surround far more than that.

Eros, unlike philia, pick out a type of desire that drives people, under certain conditions, to physical contact - to touch, to kiss, to embrace, to "make love" - and also to think obsessively of the person who is loved and to be filled with longing when he or she is absent.

愛若斯（eros)和費拉（philia)都是希臘字談到愛的意思，但是它們倆有相當不同的意思。費拉會組成博愛、哲學、交響樂或是愛好音樂等名詞，換言之，費拉在詞當中作為組成，因而含有愛的意思；而愛若斯是一個名詞，它的變化，愛倫（eran)在希臘字當中就有表達心理上的動詞，“愛...“，愛倫特斯（erantes)指某位愛人，愛若莫斯（eromenos)則是動詞的被動用法。

特別是英文中的erotic和sexual，在意義上是不能等價交換使用的，因為，一組sexual的描述可以不須要使用erotic，雖然對我們來說，一般上，愛若斯似乎無可避免地令人聯想到性慾與性行為。無論如何，sexual不需提用erotic來描述自己，那麼，sexual有沒有包含erotic ？

在柏拉圖的饗宴和斐德若篇，似乎認為愛若斯和sexual有關，即使我們可以想像：它們事實上可以無關。但是，愛若斯會驅使人們在物理行為上做出親密行為：親吻、擁抱、或是性，也毫無疑問地，使得某人迷戀一個思慕對象。