Plato's Ladder of Love in the Symposium

Comments on the Ladder of Love passage, Diotima speaking, in Plato's Symposium. 

I will be using the Jowett translation in these comments.  This, of course, is limiting, since there are more recent translations and since a better commentary would rely on the Greek.  Another factor in these comments is that I am responding here to student questions and have been influenced in some instances by these questions themselves.  So I thank my students for their contributions.


"But I will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you  can. For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only-out of that he should create fair thoughts;

The translation here is a bit odd since "visit beautiful forms" really means visit and be attracted to beautiful young men.  Who is "the instructor"?  Presumably it is someone like Diotima to Plato:  the person who teaches him or her the art of love.  But why is guiding a person right a matter of focusing on one form (one physical look of a beloved person) rather than on something else?  This is a difficult question.  My feeling is that Plato thought that the erotic force is a strong motivator that lies behind many or even most of our efforts in life.  It may be surprising to think of Plato as holding to a kind of materialistic position here, one that Freud, for example, would not reject.   But I think that in general we over-idealize Plato.  For example, in Book X of the Republic few notice that God the creator of the first bed is eventually replaced by the expert in the use of the object the essence of which we are seeking.  

Note also that the pursuit of this one person helps the lover "create fair thoughts."  I think this means that the lover engages with the beloved in conversations much like Socratic dialogue and that many of the thoughts generated in this are beautiful.  One wonders whether Socrates can be serious about that since most of the thoughts in a dialogue, i.e. most of the definitions, are refuted by Socrates...and this, surely, would not be an indication of their being beautiful.  It is likely that the "fair thoughts" are thoughts about beauty rather than, strictly, beautiful themselves.

Some students wonder whether attraction to someone's body is the same as being in love with them.  Surely not.  But if one is in love then the object of love is beautiful.  Plato does not work this out but there must be a lower level attraction and physical beauty that does not involve love.  Love, for Plato, comes with deep conversation with the beloved.   

"and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same!"

There is a nice video about Derrida in which he discusses the nature of love.  His discussion can be seen as an attack on Plato's theory of love and beauty, especially against this point that when we love correctly we see every form as the same.  As Derrida suggests, it is the unique individual we love.  Plato also seems here to jump quickly from all beauty being akin to all beauty being the same.  The first is much more plausible than the second.  But, for Plato, for two things to be akin they must be the same insofar as they partake in that Form.

 And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; 

One of my students asks "Is Diotima's theory of beauty strictly linear?  Do people always need to literally be attracted to [one person's] physical form in order to achieve the next level?"  The student also asked whether one can regress, i.e. be attracted to a mind and then later on only to the physical form.  I think it is in fact linear and that Diotima/Plato is intentional about the sequence.  Yes, of course, regression is possible.  Plato discusses regression from the ideal society in the Republic.  

"Violent love of the one" may seem strange, and yet the Greeks thought of romantic sexual love as violent or at least "mad."  This is what we today refer to as "falling in love" or being obsessed by love.  Acts of jealous violence show how love of the extreme romantic sort can turn sour. 

in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form.

 Of course we contemporary anti-dualists have a problem with this.  It presupposes that the mind is radically separate from outward form.  And yet what we call "mind" in the beloved is ultimately to be found in our experience of the beloved, in her gestures, her spoken thoughts, her kind acts, and so forth. 

Many of my students have suggested that you can be attracted to the mind first and then the body.  I think so, and not only that, but I think that Diotima, Socrates and Plato would have allowed for this.  Plato has Socrates seemingly fall in love with Theaetetus in the dialogue of that name even though he is considered physically unattractive.

It might be best, when pursuing the ladder of love (assuming that the pursuit is legitimate) to oscillate between the beloved in physical aspect and the beloved in mental aspect:  abstracting the physical or the mental from the whole person may itself be a hindrance to advances in love.

 So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may improve the young,

You can fall in love with someone who is not physically beautiful.  The subject of this sentence (as always, at least in this translation) is unclear.  But note again that the path to Beauty is by way of the kind of conversation that brings to birth thoughts (here, the metaphor of generation comes in again) and that these thoughts are specifically those that will improve the young (especially, in this case, the younger beloved.)

 until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle;

It seems strange to many of my students that the next stage of the ladder of love is love of institutions and laws.  One could say that the movement is from one to many to one's country in general.  Love of country is a common enough idea.  Then one can quickly realize that it is the institutions and laws that makes one's country well-ordered, although they are not perhaps what makes it lovable.  Still, for Plato, these would be the same.  Today we are often skeptical of laws and institutions, for example as merely uploading class dominance.  Still the idea of a well-ordered society is something to consider.

 and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, 

The love of knowledge (or of wisdom) seems the natural next step, especially for Plato.  Of course, I, a professor, can identify with this easily.  Others might focus on their love of a profession or craft.

that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom;

For Plato, a free man, someone not a "servant," is going to be someone other than Ion in the Ion who only loves Homer.  The free man will not be narrow-minded in his appreciation.  He/she will contemplate the "vast sea of beauty" and also, in doing so, will create "fair and noble thoughts" by way of his "love of wisdom" i.e. his philosophy.   So the two are closely connected:  contemplation of beauty and love of philosophy. 

 
until on that shore he grows and waxes strong,

The image is carried through.  The lover is on the shore viewing the vast sea, and also the lover "grows and waxes strong."  

and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. 

The idea of a vision being revealed is central to the entire quest.  So it seems strange to us today to see this in terms of a "single science."  How can a single science be the result of a vision.  Not only is there a vast sea of beauty but there is a science which studies it?  This of course would be what we today call Aesthetics.  Aesthetics studies the vast sea of beauty. 
 
To this I will proceed; please to give me your very best attention:

"He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)-a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some and-foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things.

This nature of wondrous beauty which is perceived suddenly is like the Parmenidean One:  everlasting, not growing or decaying.  A student asked me whether Plato had any influences in this theory, and the answer is (beyond of course Socrates and Diotima) Parmenides.  Also the beauty of this thing, Beauty itself, is not relative to person, point of view, place or time.   This is an attack on all theories that beauty is subjective. 

Also it is is not to be found in the things we think to find beauty, i.e. in imitations of face, hands, body, or in forms of speech or knowledge.  Indeed it is not to be found in any particular being.  This is because it is, again, "absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting." And yet it is "imparted" to the beauties of all other things.  The latter beauties always grow and always perish.


 He who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. 

Diotima speaks of "true love" and one wonders whether this refers to the eternal Form of Love.  But then how can Love be a Form if it is not divine, but just is a lover of the divine.  What would the final definition of love be?  It seems that Diotima does not even care.  What she does, instead, is to provide a process for achieving apprehension of Beauty.  True Love may just be what comes at the end of the ladder of love.

Is it being implied here that perceiving absolute Beauty is not really the end?  

Some of my students have asked how one knows that one has reached the end of the ladder of love.  This is a good question.   There might, after all, be a false ending of the quest.  So, "you just know" might not be an adequate answer.
  
And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, 

Diotima here repeats the steps.  But she also varies this.  For example beginning with the beauties of the earth is beginning in a much broader place than beginning with the particular look of a beloved person.   Many students are concerned that one must start with sexual love, with lust.  This is not necessarily the case, as can be seen in this comment about "beauties of earth."  Another factor in this is that Diotima is now speaking of two species of love, not several.  So there is an implicit dualism here.  The lower beauties are things to begin with.  The upper beauty is Beauty itself.   The "beauties of earth" seems to refer to the process of going from one to two to all fair forms, i.e. all beautiful appearances on the earth.

 
and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions,

Again, there is big distinction between this and the earlier version of the ladder (if we are to accept Jowett's translation...which is always my proviso).  Beautiful practices and notions are not exactly the same as beautiful institutions and science:  here too the category is more general, and therefore, in a way, more acceptable.

 until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.
 I wonder whether arriving at the notion of absolute beauty is the same as knowing the essence of beauty.  Probably is.

 This, my dear Socrates," said the stranger of Mantineia, "is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; 

Most people will balk at this.  After all, there are many other choices in life.  Who really devotes him or herself to contemplation of absolute beauty?  In what sense can this really be the way man should live?   Perhaps Socrates was doing this when he was transfixed in the doorway before coming to the Symposium.  But even he did not devote his entire life to such contemplation.  So it seems to be an unreasonable demand.  Is it a symbol for the entire pursuit of beauty?  I could see saying that the goal of life is to pursue beauty both through making aspects of the world more beautiful and through seeing the beauty in things, all of which cannot happen unless one grasps the essence of beauty.

 
a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; 

Protagoras had said that man is the measure of all things.  Here the question rather is how one measures beauty, or rather determines that something is beautiful and to what extent.  This list, of gold, garments and beautiful youths is a list of things commonly said to be beautiful, things that also entrance, and yet these things are beautiful in a superficial way.  

and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible-you only want to look at them and to be with them. 

This of course is a description of a lover, who is "mad" in a certain way.  It is interesting that the lover is willing to sacrifice some material goods, meat and drink, for this thing which is less direct and more contemplative, i.e. looking at the beautiful beloved, and being with them, which also requires that one is involved in conversation with the beloved.

But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty-the divine beauty, I mean, pure and dear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life

As previously mentioned, it might seem wiser then to avoid these colors and vanities and seek the divine beauty directly. Why is there even a ladder of love?  Why start with what is already polluted?

-thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine?

 True beauty replaces the beloved boy as something to hold converse with and something to look at.   But converse and communion imply something mutual.  What can we offer Beauty itself?


 Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), 

Bringing forth realities based on having taken hold of a reality:  this would mean creating beautiful things in this world. 


and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?" 

 What are the beautiful things brought forth.  They constitute true virtue.  This "true virtue" is not necessarily moral virtue or just moral virtue:  it is excellent generally.  

Contrary to most religions, here the only immortality available to man is this one in which the seeker becomes "friend of God"  leading the noble life, a life in which true virtue is constantly created out of apprehension, contemplation and creation of beautiful things.  An afterlife is not at issue here. Virtue in the context of love and beauty might be a matter of actualizing one's excellence through seeking out and finding the essences of things.

Diotima's Truth: The Symposium Deconstructed

This is a bit of an unorthodox reading of the Symposium, so students beware:  your teachers may not like this.  But I also think it is true.  The Symposium is not what it seems to be. Diotima takes us down a rosy path, or rather the endpoint is not the end.  There is a myth at the center of the Symposium, and perhaps a secret truth. The secret truth is to be found in something somewhat more mundane than one would think.  The unorthodox reading, in short, is that the lesser mysteries of love are actually the deeper mysteries, or at least the lesser mysteries are key to understanding the deeper mysteries. This reading is partly inspired by Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.  Nietzsche well saw that the Apollonian world of Forms, what we find at the end of the ladder of love in the Symposium, is a myth.  This is not to say that it is not valuable.  Ultimately, the point of the story is not, as it may seem to most readers, the static world of Forms, but rather the dynamic path of the seeker, the philosopher, the lover of beauty...a path that leads us, it is true, to the mythology-like realm of Forms, a clever replacement for the Olympian world of the gods, but then back down into the world that Socrates only superficially denigrates.  This deep reading of the dialogue goes radically against the usual surface reading. Hence my strategy is deconstructive in the tradition of Derrida. But don't worry I have no intention to talk about Derrida here or use any of his more explicit ideas.  

So, let us look first at the lesser mysteries of Diotima.  She informs us that the nature of love is the "everlasting possession of the good" or more circularly "love of the everlasting possession of the good." This comes after a significant expansion of the notion of poetry, interestingly similar to recent efforts to expand the notions of art and aesthetics.  I believe that this expansion is no accident. i.e. that this is not a randomly chosen example, but that it points to a close connection between the theory of love/beauty to be offered and a theory of creative art that is implicit and that is much more positive towards the arts than the one presented famously in Book X of the Republic.

Diotima then tells us that the object of love is the beautiful.  This introduction of the beautiful marks this discussion as a cornerstone document for aesthetics, which studies aesthetic properties, beauty being the most famous and perhaps the most important.  In particular, as Socrates agrees, what is loved is possession of the beautiful, i.e. "that the beautiful be his [the lover's]."  Now when a person loves the good (which Diotima seems to assume is ontologically equivalent to the beautiful) he or she wishes to possess the good, which means that he/she wishes to gain something, which it turns out is happiness, i.e. the happy are made happy by the acquisition of good things. (No surprise here...rather surprising only in that it is such a mundane comment coming from Plato.)  All men desire this.  

Diotima's illustration to explain this, which is more than just an illustration, is that poetry, which was generally considered to be a matter of creative making in ancient Greece, is now defined, very broadly, as "all creation or passage of non-being into being" thus equating poetry with any making at all (indeed, any change!), and yet she then says "and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers," even though they are not actually called poets, that term usually limited to people who produce music and rhymed verse.  The idea is to recognize that there is an important sense in which all makers are, or at least can be, creative in the way poets are.  People usually take Plato to be using this as a way to once again denigrate poetry, but I think he (and Diotima) more importantly is upgrading the other forms of making, the practices of everyday life, which are now seen as aesthetic in the strong sense that they participate in this overall process called the love of beauty.  In short, poetry is no longer the key example of poetic making. 

Diotima uses this extension of the concept of poetry to set up a similar point for love, that love is much broader than we think, where all desire for the good and for happiness is "only the great and subtle power of love" and lovers are not then limited to romantic lovers.  Rather, the class of lovers is extended to include various other paths, including those of money-making and gymnastics, as well as philosophy.  That is, even money-making, gymnastics and philosophy can be forms of creative making.  All of these involve love.  What humans love, once again, is everlasting possession of the good, and all of their activities, whether money-making, gymnastics, or philosophy are directed to that.  All of these activities are ultimate directed to aesthetic ends.

Then Diotima takes us to another level:  "the object which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul."  This is perhaps the key to the entire dialogue.  The object of love is not beauty itself so much as that which can come out of the love of beauty, i.e. the births and the creative discoveries.  This is the dynamic soul, the lack of static end point, that is essential to the dialogue, and which is somewhat occluded by a shallow reading of the passages on the ladder of love at the end of Diotima's speech. 

But we need to understand what is meant by "everlasting" and it turns out that this is radically other than everlasting presence in the everlasting unchanging world of the Forms. That's a nice myth for beginners in the art of philosophy and the love of beauty.  But the true story is to be found earlier. "There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation" says Diotima, and this procreation is "in beauty" and is a "divine thing."  Socrates was accused, says the Apology, of introducing new divine things which were perhaps not actually divinities:  this is why he died, since although in the Apology, he insists that divine things must be divinities or children of divinities, there is an irony in the pronouncement, since divine things could just replace divinities and children of divinities.  These divine things are precisely things of the a non-divine world.  They are, in short, things that can be considered "divine" in an atheistic sense of the word.  The divine as traditionally conceived, as a world of eternal things, is not a realm of procreation, since change is contrary to such a realm. So we find something in our world, i.e. procreation, which is to say both conception and generation, which makes up "an immortal principle in the mortal creature" says Diotima.  

Diotima begins with bodily procreation, but what she says about it can also be applied to the non-bodily sort: she says, personifying the conceiving power within each of us, that "when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit; at the sign of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception."  The easy interpretation, the first level, would be that we are talking about a heterosexual male who is sexually excited by a woman of great physical beauty but runs when confronted with her ugly counterpart.  But something else is meant. We have a specific process in mind which is best understood in terms of how it would be applied to creativity in non-sexual productive friendship and also in creative making described broadly under the concept of poetry earlier expanded.  So when Diotima says "when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail" she is talking about the creative process. Beauty is necessarily connected with the creative birth of a virtue, discovery or idea.  We all know about the moment of ecstasy that comes with inspiration:  we are prepared to conceive, and yet the process of creative making is painful since contrary to conventions and habit, it is not the easy path, and yet again it is alleviated by the presence of beauty, where the object of one's creative activities, the thing coming to birth shines with beauty.  Diotima insists again, to stress the point, "love is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only" but "love of generation and the birth in beauty."  Beauty pervades creative making.  Moreover, this generation to the mortal creature is "a sort of eternity and immortality."  It is, indeed, from the atheist perspective, all the immortality we are going to get...and it is enough too, since the other immortality is little more than a destructive illusion (one that Diotima and Socrates never saw, but Freud, Marx and Nietzsche did).  It is important that the next passage is one in which Diotima explains her ideas in terms of procreation amongst animals.  She at least dimly (perhaps unconsciously) recognizes what Dewey saw clearly that man in an animal interacting with his environment.  

The explanation of why generation gives us immortality that follows is central to understanding the truth about love and beauty that Diotima is trying to teach the dim young Socrates.  She says, and mark the end of the quote, "the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old."  Immortality in our world, the only world there is, happens by way of the new thing generated by love (in beauty which replaces the old.  Moreover this is explained in terms of the fact that in life the same individual is the result of succession, "not absolute unity" (take that! Descartes). Even though we are "called the same" there is a "perpetual process of loss and reparation" in which all parts of us, skin, hair, etc., are changing.  She insists that this is also true for the soul and most notably for knowledge since "not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change."  At this point Plato reintroduces the doctrine of recollection which he had explored in the Meno and the Phaedo.  Here it has a specific use:  the word "recollection" means the "departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law of succession by which all moral things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind - unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another."  So the mortal takes part in immortality by way of a series of substitutions by which the illusion of sameness is achieved and maintained.  Moreover, this is in, and by way of, moments of beauty associated with procreation and hence with love.  Socrates asks if this is true and Diotima gives, as evidence, something very different but interestingly related:  the quest for the immortality of fame.  Someone, after all, can have the somewhat delusive unity achieved through "recollection" without being concerned at all with creative making or fame, or vice versa, pursuing fame with no interest in the kind of unity of knowledge called "recollection," that is, if we were to interpret "recollection" in a flat-footed way.  But let's not.  Diotima explains the search for fame in terms of the desire to leave behind a reputation, a name, that is eternal.  If the memory of our virtues is passed down we are immortal in some sense.  But there is a deeper story here, and we understand it further from the next paragraph, when we find that souls that are pregnant and "mean who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies" conceive "wisdom and virtue in general" which Diotima immediately and at first associates with "poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor." So the expanded notion of the poet appears again at this critical juncture!  This of course is quite contrary to what is said of the poet literally speaking in the Republic or in Ion, although Ion also tells another story at another level as I have argued in other posts.  Of course Diotima then insists that the greater wisdom is to be found in "ordering states and families."  That does fit the vision of the Republic.  But it is followed by something that seems right our of Phaedrus and has to do with the lover/beloved relationship in philosophical friendship.  I will stop here, and in the next revised version of this post I hope to explain the role of this friendship and how the lesser mysteries illuminate the true meaning of the ladder of love which reaches beyond Beauty itself to that which is generated from grasping Beauty.