A Few Rungs on the Ladder of Love
Plato wrote of his teacher Socrates who was taken by a metaphor: the Ladder of Love. On the bottom rung is physical attraction. Lust. At the top is pure love — love of beauty itself. (Yep, that’s where the term “Platonic love” comes from.)
This metaphor is sometimes called “Plato’s ascent.” The assent from the physical to the spiritual. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Well, that’s the problem. It sounds good. But, like cheese cake, it’s not good for you.
Of all the negative ideas that Greek philosophy fed into Christian thought and hence into Western thinking, this has been perhaps the most damaging. Not only has it encouraged the fetishization of body image (Barbie!) but it has also created categories and boxes that too many people have felt compelled to fit into.
Boxes like “man” and “woman” and . . . oh, Barbie and Ken and hero and beauty. Those sorts of boxes.
The contemporary philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum begs to differ with Plato’s kind of love, calling the ladder, instead, “the descent of love.”
The Ladder of Love, Nussbaum remarks, “leaves out of account, and therefore out of love, everything about the person that is not good and fine — the flaws and the faults, the neutral idiosyncrasies, the bodily history.”
Yes, that about sums up the problem.
If the ideal — the top rung — of love is totally abstract perfection . . . well, that’s even beyond air-brushed. It’s beyond the human capacity to achieve it.
And there’s the problem — let’s call it the delusion — of dualistic thinking.
The Western World’s belief that there is a spirt — or spiritual — world of perfect forms, stuff starting with capital letters like Beauty and Love and Truth and God and Democracy and on and on — makes us . . . not love the imperfect.
Which is, like, you know . . . everything.
“Everything about the person that is not good and fine — the flaws and the faults, the neutral idiosyncrasies, and bodily history.”
Which is . . . everything.
Getting over Plato isn’t easy. Who doesn’t wish there were a perfect world of Truth and Beauty beyond this one?
But getting out of this way of thinking is the only way out of the chutes and ladders of delusion.
Everything there is is all right here. For better and worse.
Welcome.
Source: https://philosophynow.org/issues/122/Embracing_Imperfection_Plato_vs_Nussbaum_On_Love
Rev. Dr. David Breeden is Senior Minister at FirstUnitarian.org
