溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
How High Can Love Climb?
Is love for one person only the first rung of a ladder toward a greater beauty?
Ascending, as though using the rungs of a ladder, from one upward.
Diotima's ladder lifted love from the particular to the universal, and bred a long argument over love's direction. Plotinus and the Neoplatonists pushed the ascent to its extreme, painting love as a return to the source. The medievals inherited this, making the ladder of love a path of ascent toward the eternal. But from the other side some asked: does a love that climbs from the particular to the universal not consume that one person as a mere rung? Does love climb, or does it stay beside? The question still divides love aimed at an ideal from love aimed at one person.
We still hesitate between loving one person wholly and moving, through love, toward something larger. The ladder still stands before us.
Diotima says love has rungs: it begins in loving one beautiful body, rises to the beauty of all bodies, then to the beauty of minds and knowledge, and at last to beauty itself.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Diotima says love has rungs: it begins in loving one beautiful body, rises to the beauty of all bodies, then to the beauty of minds and knowledge, and at last to beauty itself. First love is not discarded but becomes the first step one climbs from. I find this ladder beautiful and cold at once: then was the one person I loved an end, or a step? Between the love that climbs upward and the love that stays beside one person, I ask which rung I am standing on.
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