Season One: On beauty

Episode one: Diotima and her ladder

We start by going back - to ancient Greece, to an itinerant seer named Diotima. She saved Athens from the Plague for ten years; and taught Socrates everything he knew about love and beauty. Diotima, who appears in Plato’s dialogue the Symposium, gave us the very first philosophical discussion of beauty. Her claim is that beauty is not one. Beauty appears in different guises, and to see these different guises, we must ascend a ladder.

We follow Diotima as she takes Socrates up the ladder of love and beauty. She teaches him the different forms that beauty assumes, and how beauty is related to body, form, morality, and politics. This sets the stage for our later discussions of the many ways in which beauty appears (and disappears) in our world. 

Botticelli’s “Golden Ladder,” conveying a woman leading a man up the ladder of wisdom, much like Diotima leads Socrates up the ladder of love and beauty.

Botticelli’s “Golden Ladder,” conveying a woman leading a man up the ladder of wisdom, much like Diotima leads Socrates up the ladder of love and beauty.