Plato’s Scala Amoris: the Ladder of Love

If I asked you why you loved someone, what would you say? How would you define the feeling of love? This is the task ancient Greek philosopher Plato gives his characters in The Symposium, one of his most boisterous and beloved Socratic dialogues, written around 385 BCE.

The Symposium features the philosopher Socrates and a host of influential Athenians at a drinking party discussing eros (romantic love).

The headline act is of course Socrates, but one of the most memorable offerings comes from the comic playwright Aristophanes, who presents an absurd take on love’s origins.

Humanity began as spherical beings who rolled around the earth, Aristophanes reveals, but one day we took our freewheeling too far and attempted to scale Olympus.

Zeus punished us by splitting us each in two. We became weak, vulnerable, incomplete. Love, Aristophanes famously concludes, is seeking reunion with “our other half”:

human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.

Socrates, in response, goes on to recount what he learned about love from Diotima of Mantinea, “a woman wise in this and many other kinds of knowledge.”

Aristophanes was partly right, Diotima tells us: love does seek something. But we don’t seek our “other half”. There isn’t a particular individual soul mate out there who will ‘complete’ us, a poetic metaphor that underscores more modern conceptions of romantic love.

Rather, love seeks possession of the good and the beautiful, Diotima suggests. We desire not ‘completion’ through love, Diotima thinks, but to overcome our mortality. This is the subconscious motivation behind love: we want to extend our mortal lives through creations that outlast us.

The obvious example is children: through love we procreate and generate lives that survive our own.

But it’s not just through children that we can transmit parts of ourselves into the future, Diotima suggests; it is also through contributions to history, art, poetry, science, and wisdom — great deeds and works, inspired by love and beauty, that echo down the ages.

We might wonder what on earth romantic love has to do with art, science, wisdom, and the accumulation of knowledge.

So, to help expand our vision, Diotima presents us with her famous scala amoris, the ladder of love.

By climbing this ladder, we ‘ascend’ from an initially limited appreciation of love and beauty to a sophisticated understanding — one that promises to deepen and enrich our romantic lives.

The scala amoris, the ladder of love

At the ladder’s first rung, Diotima tells us that love begins with erotic desire for the individual: we are drawn to the beauty of someone’s body. From here, we might then extrapolate to a broader ‘type’ of body that we find physically attractive.

But we must soon realize, Diotima observes, that even if we grow to value all kinds of physical beauty, a love based only on bodily beauty — which is neither exclusive nor everlasting — is doomed to be rather shallow and fleeting.

Thus our understanding of love matures. We release ourselves from obsessing over the appearance of individual bodies, and climb to the next rung on the ladder: appreciating the beauty in someone’s personality or “soul”.

Here we are drawn to individuals not just because we find them physically attractive, but because we value who they are. We love not just their bodily form and mannerisms but their values and goals, their way of looking at the world, their approach to life.

For many of us, this stage of the ascent probably marks the completion of love’s story. If we find someone we’re deeply attracted to physically, psychologically, and emotionally, what more could we possibly want from love?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Rather alarmingly, Diotima indicates we are not yet even halfway up the ladder.

Because mental qualities aren’t unique either: if we value kindness or courage or a great sense of humour, such characteristics are to be found in many people.

The discerning lover recognizes that, if we love such qualities, we should really love the wider social forces responsible for enculturating such qualities.

Thus we ascend to the next rung: from loving particular personalities, we turn our affectionate gaze to virtuous laws and institutions…

If we’ve been following Diotima up the ladder so far, this might be where our foot begins to hover in midair. Being in love with laws and institutions — really?

But from virtuous laws and institutions, Diotima beckons us to climb ever further: to a love of the sciences, contemplating “the vast sea of beauty” that is existence, to then revel in a “boundless love of wisdom” more generally, until finally we arrive at the heady heights of the top rung.

This is what the ladder of romantic love leads us to, we find: the transcendent Platonic form of Beauty itself:

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.

From an erotic desire for earthly beauties we mount upwards to get in touch with the eternal: Beauty itself. And, by perceiving not “images” of beauty but beauty itself, we better understand what it means to be good. Love is thus a ladder to the beautiful and the good.

We might think Diotima’s views on romantic love ultimately lead us away from individual relationships. The beloved individual is a mere stepping stone in our ascent upwards to love and even reproduce with abstractions like wisdom. We desire “birth in beauty, whether of body or soul”, Diotima tells us. The higher we climb, the more we shed the “pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life”.

Some scholars, however, suggest the ladder simply deepens and enriches our love of an individual.

At no point does Diotima tell us to reject our beloved; ascending the ladder simply develops what we value in them. The more stable upper rungs of true beauty help us better see and appreciate the beloved individual, the earthly embodiment of a transcendent form…

Where does the ladder of love leave us?

Whichever interpretation of the scala amoris we go with, The Symposium remains a brilliantly fun and rewarding dialogue. It reads like a Socratic adventure story, full of humor, intrigue, and profundity, and offers a real sense of the life and thought of ancient Athens.

Perhaps we might admire Plato’s broadening of love beyond individual erotic desire. We might also find thought-provoking his connection between romantic love and the love we might have for art, writing, music, sculpture, or knowledge-building of any kind: the act is creative, transmitting bits of ourselves into the future.

(Freud had a field day with Plato’s allusion to this subconscious drive away from death, this erotic will to live and procreate in our romantic loves and creative acts.)

But we might also be suspicious of the abstraction away from erotic bodily love as if it’s something base, this increasingly bloodless hierarchy Plato and Diotima impose on love. For a conception of romantic love it’s not exactly the most, well, romantic view.

Consider, by contrast, the perspective offered in Aristotle’s discussions on friendship: that one of our greatest and most important achievements is participating in a loving relationship. There is immense value in the relationship not for the role it plays in some grander scheme of personal enlightenment, but because of the relationship itself, in all its frail and precious mortality, here and now on planet Earth.

What do you make of Plato’s ladder of love?

• Does Diotima’s ‘ascent’ towards greater abstraction and enlightenment in the name of love, beauty, and immortality resonate with you?
• Does your conception of love chime more with the image given by Aristophanes, that we yearn for reunion with our other half?
• Or do you prefer Aristotle’s view, that the value of love comes from the value of the relationship itself?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Authentic Love: Simone de Beauvoir on What Makes a Healthy Relationship
• Nietzsche on Friends Growing Apart
• Aristotle On the 3 Types of Friendship (and How Each Enriches Life)
• Plato: the Best 6 Books to Read
• Socrates: the Best 5 Books to Read

In the political philosophy of international relations, a very broad distinction can be drawn between ‘realists’, who foresee perpetual conflict on the world stage, and ‘idealists’, who emphasize cooperation.

Realists tend to operate according to the following assumptions:

1. Human beings are inherently self-interested. Nations of human beings will thus operate solely according to their own self-interest.
2. A nation’s self-interest is fundamentally tied to its security. Given there is no real overarching authority or international law enforcement, nations will actively seek to consolidate their own strength by undermining each other’s.
3. Ethics, justice, and rules have no force or place in the ‘anarchy’ of international relations: they are convenient ad-hoc justifications for a nation’s self-interested conduct. The only real currency is power.

Idealists, by contrast, champion values like international law, collective security, national self-determination, and a belief that if justice is threatened in one part of the world it threatens justice everywhere else.

In the long run, say idealists, it’s in everyone’s interest, even the most powerful nations’, to base international politics on rules derived from principles of justice.

One of the earliest examples of the debate between a realist and idealist conception of international relations comes from the ancient Greek Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue, a key part of the History, relates the events of 416 BCE, when Athens invaded the island of Melos.

Thucydides presents the Athenians as basing their logic on a ‘realist’ conception of international relations. It is only right that they capture Melos, they reason, for doing so will consolidate their own security by sending a message to other islands in the region: Athens is not to be messed with.

The dialogue begins with Athenian envoys urging the Melians to realize that their only choice is between destruction and surrender. Do not appeal to justice, say the envoys; in the face of our might, such appeals are irrelevant. Think only of your survival, they implore:

We both know that the decisions about justice are made in human discussions only when both sides are under equal compulsion, but when one side is stronger, it gets as much as it can, and the weak must accept that.

The Melians, however, do not see the choice as between surrender or destruction; they see it as between subjection or war. They love their country, and they don’t want to give up their freedom: despite being militarily weaker, they announce their intention to defend themselves.

While the Athenians told them there was no point in appealing to justice, and to be guided only by self-interest and survival, the Melians suggest principles of justice are irrevocably bound up with self-interest:

[I]n our view (since you force us to leave justice out of account and to confine ourselves to self-interest) — in our view it is at any rate useful that you should not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men — namely, that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing, and that such people should be allowed to use and to profit by arguments that fail short of a mathematical accuracy. And this is a principle which affects you as much as anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance and would be an example to the world.

Were the Athenian empire to crumble, what hope could the Athenians have of fair dealing, ask the Melians, if they had not upheld just principles themselves?

The Athenians remained unmoved by the Melian argument and went on to conquer the island. Eventually, however, they miscalculated: they overextended themselves and were defeated in the Peloponnesian War by Sparta.

As the scholar W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz summarizes in the SEP’s Political Realism in International Relations:

Drunk with the prospect of glory and gain, after conquering Melos, the Athenians engage in a war against Sicily. They pay no attention to the Melian argument that considerations of justice are useful to all in the longer run. And, as the Athenians overestimate their strength and in the end lose the war, their self-interested logic proves to be very shortsighted indeed.

While Thucydides does not appear to come down in favor of the Athenians’ cynicism nor the Melians’ idealism, one of the overarching lessons of the History of the Peloponnesian War is that, left unchecked, power leads only to an uncontrolled desire for more power.

Unrestrained by moderation or a sense of justice, notes Korab-Karpowicz, there “are no logical limits to the size of an empire.”

International political scholar Jack Donnelly, in his book Realism and International Relations, concludes that Thucydides thus warns us to guard against both “naïve-dreaming on international politics” as well as “the other pernicious extreme: unrestrained cynicism.”

Though Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War almost 2,500 years ago, his distinction between these two modes of thought still informs opposing conceptions of international relations today: (1) The only real currency on the world stage is power vs. (2) A nation acting unjustly undermines its own long-term interests and security…

Which position do you lean towards?

• Are you a realist about international politics?
• Do you think embracing idealistic principles ultimately benefits everyone?
• Is there a middle path?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Isaiah Berlin On Why the Pursuit of the Ideal is Dangerous
• Hannah Arendt: 5 Insights into Totalitarianism
• John Rawls: How a ‘Veil of Ignorance’ Can Help Us Build a Just Society
• Catherine of Siena on How Wealth Corrupts Justice
• Political Philosophy: the Best 14 Books to Read

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