Philosophy
Plato’s Symposium hides a war between two visions of love: one that climbs toward abstract perfection and one that clings to the messy beauty of real people.
The Symposium
The speeches build in sophistication. Phaedrus argues love inspires virtue: no one would commit shameful acts before their beloved. Pausanias distinguishes “common” love (desire for bodies) from “heavenly” love (desire for souls and moral goodness). Eryximachus, the physician, sees love as a cosmic force maintaining harmony in bodies, music, and the universe itself. Then Aristophanes offers the most haunting myth. Initially, he says, humans were spherical beings with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Some were male-male, some female-female, some male-female. They were powerful, so Zeus split them in half. Now we wander the earth searching for our other half, desperate for wholeness. Love is the name for that ancient longing, the ache of incompleteness. This myth captures something profound: love as ontological rather than merely emotional. We don’t just feel love; our incompleteness constitutes us, our need for another. Love reveals that the isolated individual is a fiction, that we are fundamentally relational, severed halves seeking reunion.
But then comes Socrates, channelling his teacher, the priestess Diotima. And here philosophy begins its significant evasion.
Diotima teaches a “ladder of love.” We start with a desire for a beautiful body- the beloved’s physical form attracts us. But this is just the first rung. The philosophical lover climbs: from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies (recognizing beauty as universal rather than particular); from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls (valuing inner qualities over appearance); from beautiful souls to beautiful practices and institutions (loving just laws, virtuous actions); from practices to knowledge itself (loving wisdom, mathematics, sciences); and finally to the Form of Beauty; eternal, unchanging, perfect and beyond any particular instantiation. Notice what happens here. Love transforms from a relation with a specific person into contemplation of an abstract Form. The ladder requires leaving behind the specific beloved—their laugh, their quirks, the way they exist in time. “True” love, for Diotima, is not love of another person at all. It is a philosophical contemplation of eternal Beauty. The person you love becomes disposable scaffolding. You use them to climb toward something better, then kick away the ladder once you’ve ascended to pure intellectual vision. This is love as self-transcendence, not as relation; love as escape from particularity rather than embrace of it.
Yet Plato includes one more voice: Alcibiades, who bursts in drunk and uninvited. He praises not abstract Forms but Socrates himself- this particular man with his flat nose, bulging eyes, courage in battle, and ability to drink everyone under the table while remaining sober. Alcibiades loves Socrates precisely in his particularity, his embodied existence. This is love as vulnerability, desire and frustration when the beloved will not reciprocate.
The Symposium contains both possibilities: love as philosophical transcendence (Diotima) and love as embodied encounter with another person (Alcibiades). Most philosophers chose the first path and spent centuries trying to escape the second.