Some Plato scholars have identified Symposium’s six speeches-those of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, and Socrates-as roughly approximating the stages of ascent. In short, the ascent, resembling a staircase, goes like this: one “should go from one to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and from practices to beautiful forms of learning… that form of learning which is of nothing other than that beauty itself.” In other words, one must progress from love for physical things to love for mental things, and from love of particular things to love of universal things in order to arrive at true happiness and wisdom. In Symposium 210a-212a, in Socrates’s dialogue with the prophetess Diotima, Diotima describes the stages through which a lover of wisdom must ascend in order to apprehend true Beauty.
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