The Setting: A Feast with Philosophical Stakes

The Symposium takes place during a banquet held in honour of the poet Agathon, who has just won a prestigious prize. Rather than spend the evening in excessive drinking, the guests agree to take turns delivering a speech in praise of Eros. This is no arbitrary choice. By making love the subject of philosophical inquiry, Plato elevates a common human experience to the level of the most fundamental questions about existence. Who — or what — is love, truly? What does it seek? And where does it lead us?

The speakers are carefully chosen, each representing a different perspective. Phaedrus opens with a celebration of the courage that love inspires. Pausanias draws a distinction between heavenly and earthly love. The physician Eryximachus sees Eros as a cosmic principle of harmony. The comedian Aristophanes tells his famous myth of the halved beings searching for their other half. Agathon praises the beauty of the god himself. But it is Socrates who lifts the conversation to an entirely different plane.

Diotima and the Ladder of Love

Socrates does not present his own theory. Instead, he recounts what he once learned from Diotima, a wise woman from Mantinea. She taught him that Eros is not a god but a daimon — a being that mediates between the mortal and the divine. Love is not possession; it is a longing for the good and the beautiful that one does not yet have. Love is movement, not a static state.

At the heart of Diotima’s teaching is the so-called ladder of love. A person begins with love for a single beautiful body. Gradually, he learns to appreciate beauty in all bodies and recognises that the beauty in each of them is one and the same. From there, he turns his attention to the beauty of the soul, then to the beauty of laws and knowledge, until at last he beholds Beauty itself — unchanging, eternal, without form or matter. This is not merely an aesthetic experience; it is a spiritual ascent.

Love is the desire for the eternal possession of the good, and the ladder of beauty is the path by which the soul ascends toward that light.

The Symbolism of Ascent — and Its Masonic Resonance

The ladder of love is more than a philosophical diagram; it is a symbol of inner transformation. Each rung requires letting go of a narrower attachment in favour of a broader one. The body points toward the soul, the soul toward reason, reason toward the eternal. This image of gradual refinement and ascent resonates profoundly with Freemasonry, where the initiate progresses through degrees of insight, working step by step on the construction of his inner temple.

The rough ashlar that is shaped into a perfect cube is no accidental parallel. Just as the lover in Plato’s scheme redirects his attention from the superficial to the essential, the Freemason learns to recognise the imperfections within himself and transform them. Love, understood in this way, is not a sentimental feeling but an active striving toward perfection. It is the force that sets the soul in motion.

This progressive refinement — from the outer to the inner, from the material to the spiritual — lies at the very core of the Masonic journey. The winding staircase, the movement from darkness to light, the pursuit of lost knowledge: all of these echo the Platonic ascent described by Diotima.

The Myth of Aristophanes: The Longing for Wholeness

Another famous passage in the Symposium is the myth told by Aristophanes. Originally, he says, humans were spherical beings with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Because of their arrogance, Zeus cut them in half. Ever since, each person has been searching for their lost other half — and this search is what we call love.

Though comic in tone, this myth touches on something deeply real: the human longing for wholeness. Love, in this view, is not the acquisition of something new but a reunion with what was once lost. Here too we find a rich symbolic layer. The human being as an incomplete creature, striving toward the restoration of an original unity — this motif recurs in countless mystical traditions, including Freemasonry with its emphasis on recovering lost knowledge and restoring inner harmony.

The Central Message of the Symposium

The central theme of the Symposium is that love does not end at its object but points through that object toward something higher. Every concrete desire — whether directed at a person, an idea, or a creative act — carries within it the seed of a more universal aspiration. Plato invites us to recognise, in our everyday attachments, the traces of a deeper longing: the longing for the good, the true, and the beautiful as such.

Several key ideas emerge from this reading:

• Eros as mediator between the mortal and the divine
• The ladder of love as a path from the body to the eternal
• The longing for wholeness as the driving force of the soul
• Love not as possession but as a transformative power

This is the enduring relevance of the Symposium: it reminds us that within every sincere love lies an invitation to look beyond the immediate, to perceive the timeless within the temporal.

Plato’s Symposium is far more than a historical document. It is a mirror for anyone who has ever wondered what love truly is. Through the words of Diotima, Plato shows us that love is a movement — an ascent from the finite to the infinite. This idea finds a powerful echo in Freemasonry, where the building of the inner temple is likewise a step-by-step process of refinement and illumination. Read with an open mind, the Symposium reveals that the longing for beauty and goodness is not something that stands apart from life but is the hidden thread that binds all our aspirations together.

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The message Plato’s Symposium: Love as the Path to the Higher Self first published on De Vrijmetselaar.