The Ladder of Love: Exploring Plato's "Symposium"

Plato’s Symposium is philosophy disguised as a dinner party. A group of friends in ancient Athens, including the playwright Aristophanes and the young, brilliant Socrates, agree to spend an evening drinking and taking turns to give a speech in praise of love. What follows is funny, tender, and surprisingly profound, a series of rival theories about what love is and what it is for, building toward a vision that turns the whole subject upside down. I came expecting a treatise and found a conversation that still feels alive, the way real talk about love always does.

Here is what the Symposium taught me about our search for our other half, about love as the child of need, and about the ladder that leads from a single beautiful face to beauty itself.

Key takeaways

• Aristophanes’ myth: we were once whole and were split in two, and love is the search for our other half.
• Love is born of lack; we desire what we do not have, so love is always a kind of need.
• The “ladder of love” rises from one beautiful body to all beauty, and finally to Beauty itself.
• Love is a longing for the eternal, a desire to possess the good forever.
• Eros can be a path to philosophy, a force that pulls us upward toward truth.

The search for our other half

The most charming speech belongs to the comic playwright Aristophanes, and it has outlived all the rest in the popular imagination. Human beings, he says, were originally round, double creatures, and the gods, fearing their power, split them in two. Ever since, each half has wandered the earth searching for the other, and that searching is what we call love. It is a myth, told half in jest, but it captures something we still feel and say, the sense that to love someone is to find a missing piece of ourselves. Plato gives this beautiful idea its due, and then, through Socrates, gently complicates it.

Love as the child of need

When Socrates speaks, he reports a teaching he received from a wise woman, Diotima, and her account reframes everything. Love, she says, is not itself beautiful or complete; it is the desire for beauty and goodness, and we desire only what we lack. Love is therefore the child of poverty and resourcefulness, always wanting, always reaching, never satisfied for long. I find this a more honest picture than the romantic one. Love is not a state of having but a state of longing, a hunger that keeps us moving toward what we sense is missing. It explains why even fulfilled love keeps reaching for more.

The ladder of love

Diotima’s most famous teaching is the ascent, often called the ladder of love. We begin, she says, by loving one beautiful body. If we are wise, we come to see that the beauty in one body is akin to the beauty in all bodies, then that beauty of soul is greater still, then the beauty of laws and knowledge, until at last we glimpse Beauty itself, eternal and unchanging, of which every lovely thing is only a reflection. Love, in this vision, is a force of education, a power that can carry us from the senses toward the truth. I am not sure I can climb the whole ladder, but I recognise the first rungs, the way loving one particular thing can open the eyes to a beauty far larger than itself.

What I’m taking with me

The Symposium is the rare philosophy book that is also a celebration. What I am taking from it is a richer sense of what desire might be for. Aristophanes reminds me that love feels like the search for wholeness; Diotima suggests it is really a longing for the good and the eternal, a restlessness that can drag us upward if we let it. Whether or not I reach the top of her ladder, I am glad to be reminded that the love that begins with a single face need not end there, and that our deepest longings may be pointing at something larger than we knew.

Frequently asked questions

What is Plato’s Symposium about?

It is a philosophical dialogue set at a dinner party where guests give speeches praising love (eros), culminating in Socrates’ account of love as a ladder leading from physical beauty up to Beauty itself.

What is the “ladder of love”?

The ascent described by Diotima in which love rises step by step, from loving one beautiful body, to all beauty, to beauty of soul and knowledge, and finally to the eternal form of Beauty itself.

What is Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium?

The story that humans were once whole, double beings who were split apart by the gods, so that love is our lifelong search to reunite with our “other half.”

References & further reading

1. Plato. The Symposium. (Translated by Walter Hamilton, Penguin Classics, 1951; or Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Hackett, 1989.)
2. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
3. Vlastos, Gregory. Platonic Studies. Princeton University Press, 1973.