Socrates and Diotima — the ladder of beauty

Socrates begins where Agathon left off, but in someone else's voice. Diotima, he says, started by demolishing the same kind of confusion. Eros is not beautiful and not a god. A god possesses beauty and the good; Eros lacks them and longs for them — that is the whole point of him. So is Eros ugly and bad? No. Eros is between. He is a great spirit, a daimōn, who carries messages between gods and men. He is neither wise nor ignorant — for the wise do not seek wisdom, having it, and the ignorant do not seek it, not knowing it is missing. Eros, like the philosopher, is in the middle: aware of what he lacks, reaching for it.

Diotima tells a myth to fix the picture. On the day Aphrodite was born, the gods had a feast. Plenty (Poros), drunk on nectar, fell asleep in the garden. Poverty (Penia), seeing him there, conceived a child by him; that child is Eros. He is therefore both rich and poor, always pursuing the beautiful, never possessing it. He is the figure of the philosopher. What does Eros finally want? The good — to have the good forever. But mortals cannot have anything forever. So they reach for eternity through generation. The body generates children; the soul generates poems, laws, ideas, virtues — children of the soul, which are better than children of the body because they last longer. Homer's children are still alive; most parents' grandchildren are not.

Then comes the ladder. The lover of beauty, Diotima said, begins by loving one beautiful body. He soon realizes the beauty in that body is the same as in another, and he learns to love beauty in bodies generally. He notices that beauty of soul is more valuable than beauty of body, and turns toward souls; from there to the beauty of laws and customs; from there to the beauty of knowledge. And finally, at the top, he glimpses Beauty itself — not beauty in any particular thing, not beauty that comes and goes, but beauty eternal, unchanging, the source from which everything beautiful borrows. To live in contact with that, Diotima told Socrates, is the only life worth living. Socrates ends. The audience is silent. Then there is a great noise outside the door.