Troy Terwilliger’s Reviews > Symposium > Status Update

The Form of Beauty Itself (Auto to Kalon): Finally, at the top of the ladder, you catch a sudden vision of absolute, everlasting Beauty—pure, unmixed, unchanging, and divine.

For Plato, when you are captivated by a beautiful person, face, or work of art, you aren't just experiencing a random physical sensation. Your soul is recognizing a spark of something eternal.
"Love of what is beautiful" is the thread that pulls us out of our immediate, earthly existence and guides us toward wisdom, creativity, and the highest version of ourselves.

People whose souls are pregnant carry ideas, virtue, wisdom, art, and justice. When they encounter a beautiful soul, they give birth to "conceptions of the soul"—great works of literature, philosophy, laws, and moral guidance (like Homer).

Diotima explains that all human beings are "pregnant"—some in body, and some in soul.
Why Beauty Matters: We cannot give birth in the presence of ugliness; ugliness repulses us and makes us shrink back. Beauty acts as the midwife. When we encounter something or someone beautiful, it inspires us to release what we have been carrying inside and give birth.

When Socrates stumbles over the answer, Diotima simplifies it: if you replace the word "beauty" with "goodness," the answer becomes obvious. Loving what is good means wanting to possess the good forever so that you may be happy (eudaimon).
This leads directly into Diotima’s most famous revelation: how "love of what is beautiful" acts as an engine for human mortality striving toward immortality.

Up to this point, everyone agreed that Love seeks what is good and beautiful. But Diotima asks the crucial follow-up question that no one else thought to ask: Why? What does a person actually gain by possessing beautiful things?

“You can not desire what you don’t realize you lack.”

When you combine Agathon’s idealist view with Socrates’ philosophical view:
Agathon’s view: Love creates justice through harmony, gentleness, and mutual consent.
Socrates/Diotima’s view: Love drives the soul upward toward the "Form of the Good." For Plato, true Justice in a person’s soul—and in a society—can only happen when a person's desires are ordered toward this ultimate Good.

To be an "expert on love," then, is not to write beautiful poetry praising it as perfect and just. It is to recognize that love is a perpetual state of longing—a drive that pushes us from our state of lacking toward the eternal pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Love is a "Medium" or "Daemon": Socrates reveals that his expertise doesn't come from his own intellect, but from a priestess named Diotima of Mantinea. She taught him that Love is an intermediate spirit (daemon) bridging the gap between what is mortal and what is divine, between ignorance and wisdom.