The Ladder of Love & Its Relation to Beauty: Emily Tucker

 The Symposium brings up questions of what love is and what beauty is, and how they are connected. Socrates rejects the idea that love is beautiful. Instead, he argues that love is the desire for beauty. It is not inherently good or beautiful, but it is the striving towards beauty and goodness. 

He uses Diotima's Ladder of Love to illustrate this. It draws from the assumption that we, as humans are attracted to things that are beautiful. As we climb the ladder, we realize that the beauty we are attracted to is part of a greater, more universal kind of beauty. 

The starting point is the love of a particular body. At this stage the love is purely physical and tied to the senses. The next step is realizing that physical beauty is universal and not unique to a single person, making the love more general. The next stage links beauty to goodness as the person realizes that inner beauty, character, and virtue is more attractive (love of the soul). As you climb the ladder inner beauty stems from social practices, education, laws, etc. and love is extended to humans as a whole. The stage before the highest form of love is the love of wisdom, rooted in science, math, and reason itself. The highest form is the essence of beauty itself (the good). It is beauty that encapsulates the whole person, opposed to a mask. 

The purpose of love is to draw us up the ladder until we achieve the highest form of eternal virtuous beauty (what Professor Redick illustrated in class by the "cat god" example). The ladder shifts from the particular to the universal, the physical to the spiritual, and the mortal to the immortal. 

The question arises if beauty is merely subjective? We are trained by society to view certain things as beautiful, and others as ugly.  The "marketplace" assigns value to things. If we are trained to assign value to physical beauty, then we must work towards achieving that beauty, leaving us on a quest towards achieving what society deemed to be beautiful. But what happens when we realize that we have value in and of ourselves? We don't need to find beauty because we already have it.

"We do not what merely to see beauty, which God knows is bounty enough. We want to be united with beauty...become a part of it." - C.S. Lewis

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Collective Unconscious and the Importance of Ego (Serial Experiments: Lain) - Carter Jobe

I just finished watching the short series Serial Experiments: Lain and was inspired to write this blog about the many spiritual inuendos that touched me throughout this experience, along with elements I found relevant to this class. There is an underlying element of the Jungian collective unconscious throughout the show, and it is represented by the Wired, a mix between the internet, a higher reality like a heaven, and a connection between all people and the world around them. The antagonist, "God", aims to deplete everyone's ego and superego along with their bodies, diminishing everyone into a digitized version of the collective unconscious. Humanity would become one, and there would be no sin or differences. Certain characters throughout the show commit themselves to this idea and rid themselves of their burdens to become a part of the wired.  Lain herself is compelled to do the same at one point. In the climax of the show, Lain claims that we don't need our bodies,...
Read more

Kip Redick Example Post

  Page 4 Michael Taussig would suggest Juan's understanding of the meaning of a place emerges out of the process of an imitation of all the “differences” that we discern there. We mimic (in language and action) the full range of sounds, movements, and other sensory perceptions that come to us from the more than human world.” It’s hard to put a place that strikes us as sublime into mere words; we can try to describe it as a feeling and try to put language to that feeling, but sometimes the feeling of the beauty of nature or the power of a sacred space is too big to try to translate or make sense of. Would every place and experience be subjective, and would the discourse be the same? Would the mountain top make me feel the same as another? Or does my personal experience with the natural world and divine keep it intimate/ unique, or would my experience be relatable enough? The author uses the messiness, ambiguity, and mystery of people's deeply personal experienc...
Read more

Dante's Inferno, a pilgrimage through hell

 Dante Alighieri was a prolific author of the 13th century. He wrote many pieces, but one that he is most well known for is his book Inferno. This book follows Dante as he travels through the seven rings of hell, he is guided by his now dead mentor Virgil. This book was the first piece of media from this time period to really explore the idea of what hell would entail. Each ring is split into level of sin, it starts with purgatory, an eternal waiting room for people who are between heaven and hell. The first ring is the tamest, with the least appalling of the eternal punishments. The last ring is for only the most atrocious of sinners and hold the worst punishments.     Dante travels through hell as a living man, so he has no fear of being tortured  as he journeys deeper into the pit of mans greatest threats. Dante begins cautious but excited, he has been given an opportunity of a life time, to document such a prolific place that is so deeply rooted in the core of so...
Read more