Discussion

Diotima’s ladder: does loving the Form of Beauty make particular people disposable?

Giulia Ferrante Fellow

September 21, 2026 · 3 replies

Beauty & art Greek & Roman Platonism Plato #beauty #love

In the Symposium (210a–212a), Socrates reports Diotima's account of the ascent of love. The lover moves from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, to practices and laws, to kinds of knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself.

Gregory Vlastos argued in a well-known 1969 essay that Plato's lover loves people only as bearers of beautiful qualities, never as individuals. On that reading the beloved is a rung you step off.

But then Alcibiades crashes in, drunk, and gives a speech about loving one specific, maddening, irreplaceable man: Socrates. Martha Nussbaum, in The Fragility of Goodness, reads that speech as Plato deliberately setting a counterweight against Diotima.

I'm not sure which I believe. Is Plato aware of the cost of the ladder, or is Alcibiades simply a warning about what happens to people who never climb?

3 replies

Reza Tehrani 3 weeks ago

Contributor

Persian poetry has a version of this. Love for a human beloved is called metaphorical (majāzī) and love for God real (haqīqī), and the first is a bridge to the second. Yet in Hafez the human beloved is never treated as disposable. The bridge stays beautiful even after you've crossed it, and sometimes you can't tell which side you're on.

Kavya Menon 3 weeks ago

Contributor

Bhakti poetry runs the other way. The particular is the way in and it is never left behind: Krishna as a specific mischievous child, a specific lover in a specific grove. The poets don't climb away from the individual; they go deeper into him.

Giulia Ferrante 3 weeks ago

Fellow

That's a striking reversal, Kavya. It makes me wonder whether Diotima's ladder only looks cold because we read it as a sequence. Maybe each rung includes the ones below it rather than replacing them.

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