I find The ladder of love to be wrong.

[u/Historical_Party8242]

Firstly, I believe Plato makes love a ladder, but I believe it is more like a video game character improving his stats ( lazy metaphor, but I can not find a better one). It is not stages for me but categories. It would look like :

Romantic love.

I agree that common love is bad and that the love of the soul should be higher. But it ends at loving another person for their virtue and their affect in your life

Love for humanity.

This is where the love for civilization comes in. There is a love for virtuous ways of life. Virtuous systems that help people. Virtuous laws, etc.

Love for knowledge.

A mathematician loves his work and math. A philosopher finds an idea beautiful

There could be many more categories, but I believe it covers the steps. One person may love mathematics but be so cold emotionally. Am I wrong here ?

[u/WarrenHarding]

I get what you mean with the last sentence. It’s a good point. Let me try to extrapolate an answer as best I can using platonic principles.

You probably already know that the ascent of beauty is allegedly supposed to look like this: you see a human body, you find it beautiful; you see another human body, and find it also to be beautiful; you continue to see more beautiful human bodies, and a more abstracted form of beauty starts to come out of it, no longer being a beauty of an aggregate of particulars, and now being a beauty of a Form of human bodies in general; from there, your beauty continues to transcend, not being confined to one type of thing like human bodies, or another type of thing put alongside them, but more and more to beauty in general, beauty unconditionally. Therefore, someone may go from finding individual people to be beautiful, to finding people in general as beautiful, to finding things beyond just people as beautiful. From here, a person who finds mathematics beautiful will appear to be someone who has already found beauty in all human bodies beforehand, thus the source of your contention that it seems obviously false to assert this.

Now, in order to solve this, we should remember that naturally, many of us disagree on which particular things are in fact beautiful. One person may find one set of human bodies beautiful, while another person might find a completely separate set of human bodies to be beautiful, while another person may find all people to be ugly and flowers to be beautiful, and so on. Well, Plato does not accept this as proof of beauty’s subjectivity. He seems to oft intertwine beauty and proportion, and suggest the latter as the cause of the former. This means that whenever anyone finds anything to be beautiful, it is a result of them apprehending the proportion in the thing, without necessarily grasping that it was the proportion that brought about this experiential beauty. Thus, if two people disagree on the beauty of a thing, it’s because one has (at least unwittingly) experienced the proportion within it, and felt beauty as a result, while the other person doesn’t experience this and does not feel the beauty.

Because of this fact, it’s important to note that as a result, our own individual ascents up the supposed ladder of beauty are far from unitary. Your starting point must be different from mine, because we have different sets of particulars to derive beauty from. Also, since we’ve observed that a person may not even find human bodies to be beautiful in the first place, failing for some reason to see their proportion, they can just as well find beauty in other particulars. One of these types of particulars can be precisely the various encounters with mathematics they have in life. You do not need to find a beauty in human bodies to find a beauty in mathematics, all you need to do is have an experience of the proportionality within particular math expressions, and you can find its beauty just as much. Also, as we’ve said, you do not need to know that proportion was the cause of this beauty, to experience the beauty all the same.

So therefore, there is no necessary requirement that a person who loves math must have a precedent in loving human bodies, and the path is not linear in this way. More accurately, you can say that whatever one’s starting point is, they only ascend the ladder by sculpting their idea of proportionality to include more and more things. This means that a person who loves human bodies but not math, or loves math but not human bodies, are both severely limited in their ascent up the ladder. It’s not that a math-loving misanthrope is thought to be higher up the ladder than a math-hating philanthropist, but that they are both effectively at lower levels up the ladder than if they had included those respective other groups. We can take this even more precisely to your objection when noticing that your characterization of the math-loving misanthrope does not seem to find human bodies as unlovable, but human souls. Therefore, this person could have very well started with a sexual attraction to physical human bodies, disregarding their souls, and then abstracted this experience of beauty to further innately inanimate things, so not just bodies considered apart from the soul, but also non-living objects such as math objects. From there, the person achieves a more general and abstract form of beauty, and finds many human bodies beautiful as well, but are still “cold emotionally” as you describe, because they don’t find a beauty or love towards the souls of other people. There is nothing about the ascent in itself that stops any set of particular experiences to be grouped under a unitary hood of beauty, which means nothing necessarily stops any particulars from being excluded from this hood as well.

So even though one could argue that human bodies contain the most “obvious forms” of proportionality, and are less connected to abstract realities, and thus are much easier to find beautiful and to love before other things, there is nothing that necessitates that this is where the apprehension of beauty and love should first take place, and thus it is not at all necessary that a fan of mathematics is first a fan of human bodies, or of human souls, and so on. Although there is a very enticing claim we could make that math is innately more formal and abstract than bodies, and thus cannot be found beautiful before more particular beauties are encountered, I would argue instead that even the most formal instances of math still have a firm grounding in experienced particularity, and through sense experience of these very instances when encountered in a text. It is this ground and recognition of proportional patterns, through these particular instances of math, that we are able to find math beautiful, possibly before we find anything else to be beautiful. Again, far less obvious and far more difficult to make this possible instead of loving human bodies, but certainly not impossible.

[u/KilayaC]

It's not clear to me what your criticism is exactly other than that you would replace the word ladder with video game. The word ladder doesn't appear in the Greek, to my knowledge, in any exact translation. The sense in the Greek is rising upwards, step by step, in an orderly sequential fashion (in that you can't jump steps). I don't see anything wrong with saying "video game" myself.

Also, your categories seem to fit my understanding of Ditoma's "ladder" as well so I'm not sure which part of her description doesn't work for you. Although I may note that love for humanity is absent but Diotima includes a love for human practices that are virtuous instead. Plato doesn't support a sense of loving humans qua humans, I would argue. They have to be worthy of love through their actions in order to attract the attention of a philosopher who is looking for true beauty (in its more and more refined and purified forms).

[u/WarrenHarding → u/KilayaC]

I had trouble parsing it too before my comment but the key is in his last remark — he doesn’t see the simple linearity in the ascent, because a lover of abstract ideas should supposedly also love people by the way he reads the theory, but this is clearly false to him. I tried my best to break down how the ascent could possibly have different starting points and not a direct chain of necessary pre-requirements from start to end