I'm back, and hopefully will start posting more often again now that I'm not stuck in Arabic prison. I have been putting together readings for my Philosophy of Human Nature class, and in re-reading Diotima's speech in the Symposium I was struck by something which I would like to discuss. Here's a nice summary paragraph given toward the end of the speech:
He who, ascending from these earthly things under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair bodily forms, and from fair bodily forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair sciences, until from fair sciences he arrives at the science of which I have spoken, the science which has no other object than absolute beauty, and at last knows that which is beautiful by itself alone.
There are two ascents here: one from the physical to the intellectual, and another from what is particular to an individual to what is universal and general. Now, I'm not sure that I need to quibble too much with the first ascent. I can imagine two women, for example, the first of whom I find merely physically beautiful, and the second whose character I admire. Even when I find the latter physically beautiful (and I may even find her strikingly so), this is mediated by my appreciation of who she is, which is primary in value and (for me at least) is part of what makes me consider her physically beautiful. Overall, this makes her an order of magnitude more beautiful than the woman I merely consider to be physically beautiful. And from reading through the Symposium and the Phaedrus, I think that Plato likewise allows for lower orders of beauty being caught up in the higher, even if the higher are valued more. Socrates never does seem to get over his appreciation for pretty young things, after all.
My problem is with the ascent from the individual to the universal, or at any rate with stopping at the universal as Diotima appears to do. I think that this first step makes a lot of sense: it is silly to pretend that one person is the only truly beautiful person in the world, either in looks or in character. That's merely blindness. So we can recognize that there are many beautiful people (and societies, etc.) out there, and this is in itself a healthy step: your own local circumstances and your own loved ones are not the only reality.
But at this point, I'm reminded of the Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, or perhaps a woman he was talking to. In either case, the point was that it is easy to love "humanity", but those who love "humanity" in the abstract can find it all the more difficult to love particular human beings. So I think that we need a descent as well on Diotima's ladder of beauty: we need to rise up out of our particular circumstances, recognize that we and our loved ones are not the center of the world, but then also realize that this is our portion of the world to tend. We take care of particular, concrete human beings, and we serve this and that segment of a real society. Rather than avoiding attachment to anyone in particular, we attach ourselves to individual people in light of the whole, as our specific way of helping out the whole shebang (to use Fr. Jones' technical phrase) and our own specific recognition and contemplation of beauty.
