Beauty Itself

Abstract

Up to now, the lessons have been practical. Socrates has been urged to grasp the “work of love.” He is to move from love of one particular body to seeing beauty in many bodies, and on to beauty of spirit, and to beauty in customs and laws. The movement has been expansive and inclusive, out onto a wide “sea of beauty” in human practices, arrangements, systems of legislation, fields of knowledge. All involved seeing along with acting. But now, Diotima warns Socrates, there is a final knowledge that he may have trouble achieving, a vision at the very horizon of human experience. Beyond the attraction of any individual beautiful thing is the fact of beauty itself that survives any one beautiful thing. This is not a particular physical or mental entity, not any one idea or form; the final “theoretic” vision is comprehensive, ranging over a wide field of phenomena as a glimpse of what sustains and binds them together.

Now, with strength and power from what has gone before, comes a certain singular knowledge connected with another beauty. And here, I beg you, she said, you must give me all of your attention. When a person has been instructed up to this point in matters of love, seeing beautiful things in succession and correctly, toward the end appears the wonderful nature of beauty. And this, Socrates, is what all the previous effort has been for.

—Symposium 210d6–e8