Love's Ladder #072

Plato on What We Should Love

Hey, welcome back! This is Andy, I'm a philosophy lecturer, and in the past few episodes, we've been talking about love. We talked about love with Eric Fromm, we talked about love with Aristotle, and one very interesting theory is Plato's. Plato is this ancient Greek philosopher, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, a student of Socrates. And Plato has this theory where he says love is essentially a ladder. And when we start experiencing love, it is often through the attraction of our bodies. We find another person's body attractive, and we are in love with this body. And then we enjoy, you know, the sexual union that we have with them. But then perhaps even we want to try multiple bodies, and this is what we often do, right, as young people. We have different experiences with different other people in order to learn more about what love is and what we want, and so on.

The Ladder of Love

But after a while, Plato says we realize that this is not what we want because the bodies repeat themselves essentially. There's not so much difference between one body and the other, and the experiences we can have through just having many lovers in a sexual sense at some point it becomes boring, right? It becomes repetitive; it doesn't give us any more fulfillment. And so what comes next is to focus more on the soul behind the body, to focus on the person that is behind that body. So in the next stage of this development of our love relationships, we're looking more at the souls of our partners, at how they are as people, as men, as women, as persons. And you know, we also become older, so perhaps the body is less the focus of it, and it becomes more a connection to another person. And this is the stage where most people stop with their development of love.

Beyond the Body and Soul

But Plato says beyond that there is much more because what comes after our being in love with a body or being in love with a soul is to realize that even most souls are not that unique, and they are also kind of repetitive. And this also is not fully satisfactory. How can I get even more satisfaction out of love? I realize that what I am in love with is not this particular person's soul but it is a kind of human quality that is the same for all humans. So perhaps the next thing that happens is that I feel like I'm in love with everyone. I become a kind of a Christian love lover, right? You could say somebody who is loving everyone equally.

Love for Eternal Knowledge

And after that is another stage where realize that people will actually die, so being in love with people is never a really good move in the long run because I will die, they will die, and this makes my love somehow limited. Now, you can disagree with this, of course, but this is what Plato thinks. So if we want to have the full satisfaction of love, we want to have love for something more eternal, more long-term than just human beings. And what is more long-term? Knowledge, science, mathematics, physics, history. By learning these things, I have an object of my love now—knowledge, learning that is not going away. It's not going anywhere; it cannot betray me; it cannot die; it cannot leave me. I can be in love with knowledge forever.

The Lasting Power of Knowledge

And then of course, the fact that it lasts forever, we can see in the fact that we today are still talking about Plato and about Plato's works because his works were written down, and we have access to them forever, as he says. So when I have a relationship with Plato today, I can have a relationship with Plato. I can have a love relationship with Plato's mind, with Plato's ideas, because these ideas have crossed the 2,500 years that separate us, and I can receive these ideas in my life today. So I don't know what we are to make of this. Plato has been criticized for being a little too dismissive of human love, right? And you would generally think that perhaps these are different things, right? The love to a partner is different from the love to a book.

Reflecting on Plato's Theory

But sometimes perhaps it bears keeping in mind that the sexual, erotic love which we often have for other people and which often seems so important to us and makes us, you know, crazy with desire and so on, that this thing is really not anything very special. And that perfect bodies are not very special; there are many of them, and they are they are all exchangeable essentially. And what really counts are the more internal parts of love, whether this is love towards a soul, towards a person, or all people, or towards learning in general. Perhaps we don't need to go all the way up the ladder, but just being aware that there are a few steps up the ladder is already a great improvement for our lives.

Thank you, and see you next time!