EROS
The walk

X

Beauty

Why does beauty command attention? Can what attracts us become a way of learning what we value?

Plato’s Eros is entangled with to kalon, the beautiful, which in Greek is larger than cosmetics. Beautiful bodies, beautiful practices, beautiful knowledge. The so-called ladder is a pedagogy of attention.

Pale marble fragment of a shoulder, collarbone and throat in raking museum light.
SPECIMENBeauty as a physical event of light.

FIG. 07 · DIOTIMA’S ASCENT

Plato, Symposium 210a to 212a. A pedagogy of attention.

  1. 01

    One body

    A particular beautiful person arrests attention.

  2. 02

    Bodies

    Beauty noticed in more than one form.

  3. 03

    Souls

    Practices, character, the beauty of a life.

  4. 04

    Laws and works

    Customs, institutions, made things.

  5. 05

    Knowledge

    The sciences and the love of what can be understood.

  6. 06

    The beautiful itself

    A vision that reorders love.

Particular beauty can start the movement. If the movement stops at possession of a surface, Diotima would say the lover has not yet learned what the arrest was for.

Notes · 1
  1. Plato, Symposium. Greek via standard editions. Dramatic date often placed around 416 BCE. Source

Eve

Beauty

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