‘ONLY IN THE CONTEMPLATION OF BEAUTY IS HUMAN LIFE WORTH LIVING’ PLATO, SYMPOSIUM 211d Alexander Nehamas Socrates’ speech in praise of ero ¯s in the Symposium (201d–212c) is perhaps one of the most influential passages Plato ever composed. 1 It is also one of the most discussed, and any attempt to add to the huge literature that surrounds it needs some justification. My reason for returning to it is not so much a desire to offer yet another interpretation of what Plato really meant to say about the relationship between ero ¯s and its inherent attraction to to kalon, which I will translate as ‘beauty’. What I would like to try to do is to see how much of what Plato says here can be read not just as an inspired (and inspiring) flight of the imagination but also as something we can actually believe—a solid, knowing and accurate description of the phenomenology of love and beauty. nnnnnnnnnn In the closing parts of his speech, Socrates (claiming to be repeating the words of Diotima, a holy woman with prophetic abilities) describes a complex hierarchy of different levels of love and lovers (207c ff.). At the lowest stage, he locates men who are attracted primarily to the beauty of the human body—these are, he says, lovers of women and their union with beauty results in the generation of children. The second stage includes men who are drawn more to the beauty of the human soul than they are to the human body and turn to paederasty. These lovers themselves are of two kinds. There are, first, those who are in pursuit of fame and who, in love with a particular boy, are inspired to create poetry or legislation which benefits both their lover and their city as a whole—theirs, Socrates says, is an intellectual rather than a biological progeny. But there are also those who are moved by a passion for wisdom and whose intercourse with beauty results in a life devoted to philosophy, which constitutes and produces the greatest benefits of which human beings are capable. Within that last class, there is another complex hierarchy, beginning once again with love of the physical beauty of one boy and gradually rising through love of the beauty of the soul, of laws and institutions and of the sciences until it turns into love of the Form, the nature or essence of beauty itself, which turns out to have been the real object of ero ¯s all along. But if every lover is ultimately drawn to the Form of beauty, which is glimpsed obscurely through everything else in the world that is to some degree beautiful, it European Journal of Philosophy 15:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1–18 r 2007 The Author. Journal compilation r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.