The Wednesday Society
A podcast that takes a philosophical deep dive into forgotten or intentionally neglected texts.
The Wednesday Society
01 | On Beauty | Diotima and her ladder
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We start by going back - to ancient Greece, to an itinerant seer named Diotima. She saved Athens from the Plague for ten years; and taught Socrates everything he knew about love and beauty. Diotima, who appears in Plato’s dialogue - the Symposium - gave us the very first philosophical discussion of beauty. Her claim is that beauty is not one. Beauty appears in different guises, and to see these different guises, we must ascend a ladder.
We follow Diotima as she takes Socrates up the ladder of love and beauty. She teaches him the different forms that beauty assumes, and how beauty is related to body, form, morality, and politics. This sets the stage for our later discussions of the many ways in which beauty appears (and disappears) in our world.
The Wednesday Society is hosted by Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. In this first season, Dalia discusses beauty in its many forms with concert pianist and writer, Simon Tedeschi.
- Producer: Sarah Allely
- Composer: Russell Stapleton
- Sound engineer: Bethany Stewart
This podcast was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council, recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney, and supported by the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. The Wednesday Society was created on Gadigal, Kuringai, and Dharug country.
Hello and welcome to the Wednesday Society, a podcast that invites you to slow down, reflect, and discover. And we do this by discussing texts that aren't all that well known. Maybe they've been forgotten or even intentionally neglected. I'm Dalian Asar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. This first season of the Wences Society takes a deep dive into what philosophers and writers have said about beauty over the centuries. We asked the question: can beauty actually change our lives? First, I'm just going to share a story. In December 2025, I organized a little symposium at my house to discuss beauty. It was modeled on Plato's dialogue with the same name. I asked guests to bring along a few thoughts about beauty. I encouraged them to make a short speech, just like the characters in Plato's Dialogue. The event was set for a few days before Christmas, actually on my husband's birthday. But a week before my symposium, two men opened fire at Bundai Beach, just 30 kilometers south of our home. Would anyone still want to speak about beauty of all things? I thought our friends wouldn't be impressed and would see it as a kind of escapism, avoiding the real problems of our world. I was wrong. Almost everyone came, and everyone got up and spoke. They spoke frankly about what they thought about beauty and why they thought it mattered. After my friends shared their ideas and played music and read poems, I asked why they joined in. Their responses made a lot of sense in the context of my research. They said beauty is important, and it's important because we need it in our grave and turbulent times. They said that beauty can shed light, create community, help us to gather ourselves and find resilience. I wonder if people came to my mini symposium and spoke with so much enthusiasm because of the sheer enormity and proximity of the Bundai shooting. I wonder if the significance of beauty grows in the face of uncertainty and anger. I should also add, before going any further, that beauty is a word that we use in so many different ways. And it is hard to know what we mean when we use the term. Someone can call a meal or a car beautiful, others might reserve the label for people they find attractive, and others might save it for natural landscapes or art. But what's interesting is that in so many languages there is a distinction between beauty and prettiness. In just the languages I know: Arabic, French, German, English, and a little bit of Spanish just to show off, the word pretty means cute, sweet, charming, or delightful. But beauty has something a little more serious, more integrated about it. It's often directed at experiences where you think, wow, this is just right. Over this first season of the Wednesday Society, we're going to take an encompassing approach to beauty. And to think with me about whether beauty can change our lives, I've invited a practitioner of beauty, paedist and writer Simon Tedeski. Hello, Simon.
SPEAKER_02Hi, Dahlia. Well, with an introduction like that, I can hardly wait to meet myself.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm very excited to have you here because in each episode, Simon and I are going to discuss beauty in connection to an overarching theme, and in particular, the theme of Diotima's Ladder. Now, you might be familiar with Diotima's Ladder if you've looked at Renaissance art and in particular Botticelli. His most famous work is The Birth of Venus, but he also sketched a picture of Diotima leading Socrates up a ladder. Dietima's ladder comes from the dialogue I mentioned earlier, the symposium, the dialogue that I modeled my party on. It was written on papyrus, the original paper by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, nearly two and a half millennia ago. Now, in ancient Greek, the word symposium literally means drinking party. And this dialogue is set at a drinking party, kind of like the party I had at my house. But in this context, only guys are invited, and one of these guys is Socrates. And they're all asked to make a speech about love or Eros. Diotima, a woman, is not invited. But when it's Socrates' turn to make a speech, he says he's going to tell us what someone much wiser taught him about love. And this is his teacher, Diotima. Dietima argues that love and beauty are connected because you love what is beautiful. How can you not? And what you love appears to you as beautiful. And she uses the image of a ladder of love to teach Socrates about different kinds of love and beauty. As you go up the steps of the ladder, you encounter beauty in a different shape or form. But I argue this ladder is actually a set of practices in beauty, kind of like exercises you have to do in order to get to the next step. Simon, I'm curious when you first came across Diatima's ladder.
SPEAKER_02I must admit, Dahlia, that it wasn't really until reading Plato's Symposium that I fully um understood and became acquainted with it. However, I had heard of Symposia in uh Thucydides the Historian, when he wrote that the uh the Symposia parties had been uh desecrated by Alcibiades, a character in uh Plato's Symposium, um, and he had desecrated them by bringing in flute girls, and uh it was part of the beginning of the end of Athens at its supremacy. So I find that interesting. I came at it from a different historical angle.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell And when did you first encounter Diotima? When did you first read the symposium?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell I had heard about her as an important cultural figure, but I had only like properly read it from beginning to end as a result of this podcast, and that's thanks to you.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Oh, that's cool. I had no idea that um I inspired you, I instigated you reading this book. So the dialogue, the symposium, is relatively well known, but maybe not as well known as we might think, given that Simon only encountered it secondhand via Thucydides. But we're going to use it as a jumping-off point for our conversations about beauty when we look at forgotten or neglected texts. And this makes sense because Diotima's speech is actually the very first discussion of beauty in the history of Western philosophy. So, Simon, shall we look at what Dietima has to say?
SPEAKER_02Yes, let's. I find Diotima a fascinating character because, for me at least, she represents something archaic, um, something even pro-homeric, and yet something that is drastically from the future. Um, she's almost interplanetary. What an extraordinary figure. She teaches Socrates, who, dare I say, must be the most annoying man in the history of Western thought.
SPEAKER_01That's Simon's view, not everyone's.
SPEAKER_02I mean, it must be an oh may okay second.
SPEAKER_00I think there's a lot of people who love Socrates, Simon.
SPEAKER_02I love him, but I mean maybe second to Diogenes with his lantern.
SPEAKER_00Ah, okay.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And I suppose in Fenis we would we would argue that they may be a little on the spectrum now. But uh back then they would have just been seen as annoying. He teaches Socrat or she teaches Socrates the true nature of love, um which is extraordinary. And her her thesis is that Eros, Eros's parents are so Eros is love, the word, the Greek word for love, and it's an encompassing word.
SPEAKER_01It's not like our notion erotic, because it's kind of like you can have Eros in Greek for so many different things. You love reading, you love playing, you so it's quite an encompassing word. Keep going.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Absolutely, it's like uh poetry. Um and Eros's parents are uh poverty and resource. And uh that's extraordinary. So love is not or Eros is not just uh one-dimensional, but multidimensional. It's needy, it's clever, it's resourceful, it's hungry, rapacious even, but it's also inventive. And so here we have uh from a woman, and Socrates, for anyone who's read Socrates, uh is not a fan of women. He's very uh disparaging of women, as I imagine many men were of that time. But here we have this woman almost bursting in from outer space like a flash in the pan, who is educating the founder of Western philosophy about Eros. And that's incredible to me. But love uh does not just want sex. Love does not just want to be a what we would say, a hot person. Love wants goodness. Love is inevitably and invariably tied, therefore, to morality. And that's extraordinary and that's controversial, and I think we're still feeling the aftershocks of that today.
SPEAKER_01So much to think about, but I want to start with the first point about Socrates, because uh obviously you don't like Socrates. Socrates is a guy who doesn't like women. And so Socrates himself, of course, didn't write anything. Everything that we know about Socrates comes from Plato. And Plato's dialogues often include Socrates as the main character, and usually Socrates plays this annoying role where he's the gadfly as he's known. He sort of always questions everybody. So somebody comes in and he says, I'm taking my dad to court today because this, this, and that. And Socrates says, wait, wait, wait, why this, this, and that? And let's let's pull back and ask, what do you mean by by virtue? Or what do you mean by goodness? And he basically deconstructs whatever claim they had and shows them that they are contradicting themselves, they don't make sense. And that's why a lot of people, Simon included, might find Socrates a bit annoying. In this dialogue, which is the opposite of that, Socrates steps back instead of being at the center stage, he says, Look, guys, everybody has just made a speech about love, Eros, and they've all described him as a great god, that when you are possessed by love, you become all-powerful, you're capable of doing so much, you feel divine, and so on and so forth. And he says, when it's his turn, he says, guys, I'm actually gonna tell you what someone much wiser than myself told me about love, and it's a woman. And that's crazy, right? Like you were just saying, Simon, it's crazy. Well, it's a little bit less crazy when you realize that Plato's mother is most likely, what it was most likely herself a philosopher, a Pythagorean philosopher. And I think that's something that a lot of us are just uncovering now. So super exciting. Plato's the writer of the symposium. He puts a woman at the heart of this dialogue, and he has Socrates saying, a woman knows way more about this stuff than I do. It might be because Plato was himself not a misogynist, but actually had a lot of respect for women and for women in philosophy because of his mother. So this is just a little bit of background on this whole Socrates business. And then he said Diatima is kind of like archaic, pre-homeric, and then she's also looking out into the future, super illuminating, and I also think true, because it she is a seer. She's described as a seer, and Socrates, to remind everyone who's listening to him at the symposium, he says she's the one who saved Athens from the plague for a decade. So she has a strong connection to the world of the mysteries, to religious rites. And so she does come from a pre-philosophical, pre-logical age, from the world of myth, right? So there's this archaic element, but she's also looking out into the future because she does not speak enigmatically like other seers do, um, like the um the priestesses at Delphi would have. She speaks to Socrates clearly. She gives him examples, she uses arguments to make her point. So she's like this halfway point between the world of myth that the ancient Greeks are leaving behind and the world of philosophy and logic that they're moving forward to. And she's a really great symbol of that. And then love and beauty are at the center of her speech, which I think is also really interesting because love and beauty are themselves this halfway point between something very, let's say, pre-rational, or maybe something that is not easy to conceptualize, put into words, and something that is, because when we are in love, it's a feeling, right? Or when we experience beauty, as we will discuss over the season, there's something about the experience that is really hard to translate, right? And so they're talking about these things, but they want to put them into philosophical language. And this is the, like I said, the very first attempt by philosophers to do so. Okay, so one of the things that uh you've talked a bit about, Simon, is this beauty and goodness business. And the key question there is how does Dietima connect beauty and goodness? And maybe before we even get into that, Simon, because I think we definitely want to discuss beauty and goodness, it's one of the main claims that she makes in her argument, and one of the most controversial ones. But before we do that, I just want to say you mentioned at the beginning that she gives us this mythical image of who Eros is. His father is uh the god Poros, and his mother is the god is Want, Pinya, and they together uh have this child who is Eros. So Eros is not really human, but he's also not divine. He's sort of in between these two. And I think that's actually a really useful way of thinking about love because when you're in love, you do feel divine, but love can have these negative aspects to it. It can make you feel like you were saying, rapacious, hunger. You don't feel full. There's a kind of desire to be full, but you're not ever 100% sure that this desire is going to be fulfilled. And even when you are kind of like, oh yes, I'm really happy in love, there's always this nagging feeling in the background. Will this last? Will I break up with this person or whatever? So Dieteam is the one amongst all the speakers who says, ah, guys, well, Socrates says this on her behalf. Guys, love is not this great God. He's actually somewhere in between the human and the divine, and he makes us feel divine, but only momentarily because we can also find ourselves after experiences of love in the lowest parts of our humanity. We it's like sleeping, we become homeless because he's also empty. His mother is want, lack, emptiness. So there's this, this is, and this is where this idea of desire comes from that's so important for thinking about beauty, thinking about what it means to be human, is that at the heart of what it means to experience beauty is the desire, the hunger for something that is beautiful or for love. So that's just something as a kind of interesting thing to think about that at the heart of love is emptiness, and that's what makes it into a desire.
SPEAKER_02For me, what makes Diotima special is that she brings together what has, I suppose, historically been called the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This idea that some people accept and that others don't, that ancient Greece and therefore Western society, which sprung out of it, is held together by two competing forces. One, the world of the impulse, the other the world of rationality or the head, or the brain, or logic. And I find this incredibly um special because what Diotima is doing is what this podcast is sort of trying to do with the Wednesday Society. That's the name of this podcast, bringing together and Dio Tima brings together these two elements. I find this amazing, and we're still, you know, however many thousand years later, we're still dealing with this. I'm I'm reminded of my father who told me, you know, ten, twenty years ago, Simon, remember, lust doesn't last. Um, it it is superficial, it is shallow, and then you have to discover the inner beauty of a person. And and it really struck me because that's a very, very Western notion, this idea that you know lust is somehow this kind of vulgar um version of love, and that it is just you know pure instinct, it's almost animal, and that there's, you know, we have to dig deeper into the the inner beauty of the person. But is there not often in lust a deeper element? Sometimes also you can love someone not feel lust for them, but it's quite shallow. So I I think that this entire um symposium, but especially what Diotima has attempted to bring together, which is um morality and mortality, that um we love because we perish, um, to be extraordinary. And it has a real uh ramification for Western culture, and especially now, the way we view art, um, the way we approach uh global catastrophes almost in a moral sense, um, and even for social media.
SPEAKER_01I just want to go back to this idea that of lust and love that your dad uh spoke to you about. This gets us into this Diotima's ladder. So when in his speech, Socrates is talking about his encounters with his teacher, Dietima, he is saying, Well, I've had lots of times where I met uh with Diotima and she taught me different things about love, and she taught me different things about beauty. At one occasion, she gave this argument for why love and beauty and goodness are connected, and this is the claim that has been so controversial. So one of the things that Diotima says is if love is desire and it's desire for the beautiful, right? So we desire the beautiful. Now, and then she says, well, let's transpose that. What is human desire? Well, it's desire for goodness. We want the good for ourselves, right? That's her right, Socrates? And he says, Yeah, we want the good for ourselves. And she says, so if we desire the beautiful and we also desire the good, then the beautiful and the good have to be somehow connected because we can't possibly want what is bad for us. And she gives this example of an infected limb and says, um, if you had an infected limb, as much as you like your leg or arm, whatever it is, and you knew that this arm is going to cause an infection in the rest of your body and kill you, would you get rid of it? And and Socrates says, yes, I would. And so she says, therefore, this shows that you wouldn't want even something that is super close to you to stay with you if it's bad for you. And he says, Right. So therefore, our desire is always for what is good. And if we desire beauty, therefore beauty must also be good. That's her argument. And this has been a hugely controversial argument because people would say things like, um, well, we do desire actually sometimes what is bad for us, like smoking. How can you desire what is bad for you? That is the big question. And we'll probably talk about a lot of this over the next few episodes, where we discuss some of the dark sides of desire, the dark sides, the we could say the shadow aspects of beauty and desire. But Diatima sets the stage for this claim, a controversial claim, to say the least. And then after a few more sessions with her, she begins to lay out this ladder of love and beauty. And what you were just saying, Simon, about lust is really relevant here because she basically says, okay, Socrates, everybody has to start on the first step, which is the love of the body and of a physical body, of a corporeal, a person, a particular individual's body. And this is the only way to start recognizing their beauty. It's through being open in this erotic way. Oh, that you encounter their beauty, that suddenly. Someone who you just barely noticed, you suddenly turn around and you're like, whoa, this is totally different. You're and you enter into a different world where someone that was completely meaningless for you one second ago becomes the center of your world two seconds later, or whatever. And that she says is the way to get started on this journey, as we want to call it, into beauty. But she wants to move forward. She doesn't want to stay there. And this is where Simon, you're having a bit of trouble because you're saying the problem with Western society is that we have moved too far forward, or we haven't allowed ourselves to bring lust and the physical aspects with us along the journey. We have separated the two.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was thinking that Dio Tima's views on beauty are so extraordinary and have had such a cultural imprint that it's not really until the 1800s that the idea, I think Dostoevsky is probably the greatest purveyor of this, that humans seek freedom more than they do virtue and beauty is fully exemplified. That's how powerful Da Diotima's uh argument is. I mean, it's so enormous.
SPEAKER_01And even then, we can have conversations about Dostoevsky as much as you like, but I'll just put this as a footnote. Aliosha, the main character, one of the three brothers in the br brothers Karamazov, is actually an exempl exemplary figure in the sense of he's full of love and he's full of beauty, right? And he's kind of the hero, he's the answer to all the problems. So we can have a long disagreement, I think, about how to interpret the brothers Karamazov there. But in terms of Diatima herself, I think that the interesting question is these steps of the ladder, because as you'll see, um we're gonna go through each of these steps along the way in the next few episodes. We're gonna look at physical beauty next time, and then the next step, she says, after the student has been, as I see it, initiated into beauty, like people in ancient Greece were initiates in their religious mysteries, after you've gone through the first step, you're now ready to go through the second step, which she says is to recognize that all human beings are beautiful, and that's because they all share in the form of the human body. So it's because it's it's simply like you stop looking at one person and being completely obsessed with one person, and you have this breathing space, and you can say, oh wow, human beings in general are beautiful. And I've actually been practicing this myself. Like I'm always looking at people wherever I go, and I'm like, I I know it's easy to do dietema's first step, but how easy is it to do dietema's second step? Can I see everybody as beautiful? Tall, short, fat, thin, you know, any kind of anything, you know, different kinds of colorings, different shapes of a face. And it is a hard practice to just see it's not just what I have a pensions for, what I think looks good, but to really try to see everybody as beautiful.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and in this regard, Diotima is echoing my father because Which is a virtuous moment, right?
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02It is a virtuous moment. Both Diotima and my father are saying that this kind of looking at what we might call, in this day and age, inner beauty weakens obsession.
SPEAKER_01Oh, she hasn't moved to inner beauty yet. We're just looking at the outer beauty. The second step is just looking at the form of the human body. Aaron Powell Okay.
SPEAKER_02I might be wrong there, but is not looking at beauty in a different way, regardless of the specific, you know, aesthetic component a kind of inner beauty, or am I wrong there?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell No, I think it's about trying to distance yourself from the kind the you So we're all born in a specific culture or you know, yeah. And so and we see certain images of people that are beautiful from our perspective. So I remember I was uh shocked to find out when I was in college at the university that a friend of mine, her younger brother, thought one particular woman was the most beautiful woman in the whole world, and that's because she fit all of these things. She was a uh an actor who's uh was really famous in that time. And what were those features? She was tall, she was thin, she had blonde hair and blue eyes, right? And he just couldn't, he was completely obsessed, and all the women in the world were just categorized in accordance with her. And so we could say ev all of us are in some ways kind of like him, but maybe less obviously, or we're less willing to uh to tell others that this is the case. And Yeah, I think that's more the case, to be honest. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah, because everybody's like him, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Look, the and yet the Tabla Russa view of beauty, that culture is literally enculturated, and that's everything I think also has to be challenged, um, because there are recurring things, even um you know amongst and between cultures that just keep recurring. And so this may, in a sense, go against what Diotima is saying. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01So this is this is the standard of beauty. Like everybody across the world, no matter where they come from, think that, for instance, proportionality is uh a sign of beauty, right? Or uh a signifier of beauty. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah, I mean, I think what this is exactly what Diotima is trying to get to in her second step, which is to say stop focusing on the culturally relative image that you have in your mind, step back and look at the form of the human body itself. And this is why Renaissance artists were so into Dietima. And if you think about all of these beautiful kind of proportionality uh images of human proportion that were at the heart of Renaissance art, if you think about Leonardo da Vinci's man, the sort of like the perfect proportions, right? That idea is that there is beauty in the form itself. You don't have to have blue eyes, blonde hair to be this and this in order to be beautiful. You're simply beautiful because you have the human form. The human form itself is beautiful. And so why is this a kind of an interesting move? It's because first it helps us to move away from our biases and prejudices, our culturally inflected biases and prejudices, but it also helps us to really actually open ourselves up to different experiences of beauty. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Would you not say though, um, Dahlia, that that is a subtle distinction between what Diotima is saying, which is essentially all bodies are beautiful, and also trying to move beyond our own specific cultural inflections. For instance, we might look at a person who we don't personally find quote unquote beautiful, and yet nevertheless almost on a an aesthetic level appreciate the uh um the contours of or the shapes or the textures of a body. And I would argue that there is a somewhat of a difference in that. We're almost looking at the body as an aesthetic object, as a form. It's, dare I say, even a kind of objectification, which is a you know a much maligned word these days. But there are differences, and I suppose that also is related to Dia Tima almost treating of beauty as one thing. And and and uh I mean, would you argue that she's talking about beauty almost as this like immutable thing?
SPEAKER_01Um So this is what's interesting, that when we talk about beauty, we don't quite know what we mean by that word, and we use it so often in so many different contexts that we don't even have a sense of whether there's something really genuinely different about beauty and pretty. But we do have those two words in our language, and I think we do often have a feeling that beauty is something more serious and more um, like we said at the beginning, integrated. It's like when when you have this experience of beauty, it's like this is just right. It couldn't have been done differently, right? There's a kind of necessity about what's happening here. So we've covered steps one and two in the latter, and I talked about how I'm trying to practice step two, and I'm finding it really hard. And then step three, Diatima says, is once you've been able to recognize the beauty of all human form, then you're ready to recognize the inner beauty that Simon, you've been talking about, the moral character of a person. And to be completely honest, this is an experience that I had. I was in boarding school for a few years, and one day a new girl showed up, and I looked at her and I thought, she's really ugly. Like that was the first thought I had physically. I know it's embarrassing. I was a I was a kid then, so I'm allowed. And uh and I got to know her, and I really couldn't see her as ugly anymore. It just was that first encounter with her, just seemed so different and so impossible to see that person as ugly. She just suddenly seemed like the most beautiful person to me. And that's because of the person she was. And this is the third step that Diatima outlines is like and and I see it as once you see that there is a beautiful person inside that just trumps your first impression, the physical beauty.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell I think this third step is a is a very profound one because as humans we've all experienced what you have just talked about. The fact that a person may not to our specific tastes or according to the tastes of a magazine uh be beautiful, but has such um an indelibly beautiful character is so moral or so kind and so empathetic that beauty literally shines through. And yes, that does sound uh somewhat new agey, but I think it's because it's true. It's almost become hackneyed because it's it's almost a truism now.
SPEAKER_01Um and in part I think it's why when I look at someone's eyes, that's the feature that for me at least, like really stands out. It's because somehow the eyes tell you something about the person too, and not just And the reverse is true as well.
SPEAKER_02How many times have we met somebody who is, you know, physically extraordinarily good looking? And over time, sure, they remain good looking, but there's a deadness, there's a flatness there. And that's because a certain uh a certain something, an ineffable quality, appears to us and maybe many others to be missing.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. And I guess this is one of the reasons why I think it's it's really great to think with Daytima here because beauty does appear in so many different forms, and this is why we use the word so much. But there are ways that we could say, yes, there is moral beauty or inner beauty, and yes, there is beautiful bodies, and yes, there's this beauty of form, which we'll discuss at some point in the season. And and so she's teaching us as we s climb up this ladder, as I see it, to see these different kinds of beauty, to allow ourselves to open ourselves up. And in this way, she thinks we're actually undergoing, at least this is my interpretation, a genuine transformation. And not just of what we think, but also of how we feel.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And I'm again reminded of the mysteries. It's a a rite of sanctity that the Greeks endured, and they're not even quite sure what happened in them. You know, they were desecrated, but it must have been like uh like somebody doing something to a crucifix nowadays. But the mysteries were religious practices that were like a ritual nowadays. People would emerge from them changed. They could have involved breastbeating, they could have involved crying, wailing, tearing at hair, and yet there was something profoundly healing about it. And so whenever I read Diotima and I read about this uh this uh sense of emancipation and change through beauty, I think of the tradition that she came from and pre-history, and it's uh it just makes her an extraordinary figure.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I think that these if we think about these steps as these initiation practices, which is how I think th they should be read, um, then we see that beauty might actually transform us. And this is this is the premise of the season is can beauty change our lives? And if we take seriously this idea that each step of the way, Daitima gives us an exercise and let's try it out. Let us try to look at everybody in this bus as beautiful. What happens to us if we do this every day?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell I this is something that I myself and I dare say many humans have felt. We've been humbled by beauty. We're all just so tied to our opinions and being so inextricably right on everything. And then somehow we meet somebody who's so humble and is not wanting to argue with us but has such immense goodness and we are disarmed by it.
SPEAKER_00I love the not wanting to argue with us, because I'm definitely not that person, right?
unknownTrevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02No, but you are a beautiful person, Dahlia, and in that way, because you're you're humble to uh to outside experiences. It has nothing to do with having strong opinions. Um we all we all have met the reverse of that, somebody who is not beautiful because of that uh um that sense of guile. And yet you meet somebody who has no guile. You know, I can think of a number of people, and there is true beauty in that, and it is humbling and it is beautifying.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So that's that's great. I love that because I am s I am so gullible. You can make so many you can really Yeah, you've noticed. So I'm glad that there is some beauty in my gullibility. Um then so this gives us the sense of what she means by inner beauty or the beauty of a person's character and and the fact that when we experience that, we are getting access to something that we don't on a superficial level. And so it shows us that we are becoming more mature, becoming more sophisticated. We're encountering people in a more, in a deeper, more profound way, and we can share things with them that we wouldn't be able to if we just stayed on the surface. And then comes the fourth step, which is maybe the most controversial, and we will have a whole discussion about this at some point in the season, which is that once you've encountered the beauty of someone's character, you're now ready to see the beauty of the law itself, that there is something beautiful about order in the world. Right? Now, this is interesting because in Greek the word for the world or universe, cosmos, is the same word as it also means something that is beautiful, right? So the world is beautiful, the universe is beautiful for them, and in part that's because they thought of it as perfectly ordered, harmonious.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and of course the the the danger of this and the controversy that it has engendered in Western and indeed just thought in general is obvious because how close it is to go from beauty is order, order is beauty, therefore small step, beauty is rightness, and rightness is beauty. And I mean, we don't even need to go into the hackney discussion of how this has been abused, probably by people who thought that they were acting with the beauty of order and virtue.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yeah, totally. And you know, I just hearing you say that, I get I get sick in you know, thinking about the the misuse and the kind of way in which beauty can be so manipulated for deeply p troubling political ends.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Absolutely. But I think even on a just on a microcosmic level, we've all done this as people, you know, with our children, with our family, with those we've loved, we have tried to impose our own version of beauty or order or rightness or virtue onto them. And this is why this particular step is so controversial. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01It's so controversial. And so we will discuss it and probably disagree quite a lot uh when we do discuss it. And then the final step, which is the most mysterious of all the steps, is the one that takes us back to the mysteries, probably. Like you were just saying, Simon, we don't know very much about these initiation rites of uh the ancient Greeks. What we do know is that they went through some kind of symbolic death. Um, and this could be like by going underwater or you know, hurting themselves in some way. I'm not sure. We don't know. Going to underwater crypts and things. And then they, after they came out of this experience, they were reborn. And it's an experience of rebirth, and suddenly you were through this rebirth experience transformed. You understood the world differently, you saw things differently. And one of the things that I think is super important in these kind of rebirth experiences is that you become aware of your own mortality, your own finitude because you've come so close to death. And once you come you you are aware of, well, this life is a finite one, which is something we kind of always try to forget. Once that's at the center of your thinking, everything else is seen through that, through it as a prism. And you start to think, well, if we're gonna die, then I will reassess my priorities. What was once super important suddenly goes down in the list of priorities, and what was once uh totally unessential becomes really important, right? And I think there's a kind of this does this exactly in a way what diatima this is what I think, okay, right? So you can all disagree with me. That over through these exercises in beauty, we start to get a better sense of what really matters and what doesn't matter that much.
SPEAKER_02And for me, this kind of beauty can is so uh grand and so expansive that it can even be uh seen, experienced, witnessed, and partaken in through non-beauty. I think of this week I was on social media, which for me represents much of the worst of humanity in many respects. And yet I saw this interview with this man who had been for twenty-six years in a monastery, um living in quite uh um Spartan conditions. And he said it was so incredible that uh with that w when you spend that amount of time thinking and feeling, but not doing things, or just pottering around, doing quite menial tasks, the world seems so much bigger and the self becomes so much l smaller. And then the guy was like, Well, why did you leave? Then he said, Well, now you know, I can do that now, but I can just grab a pint. And I thought there's something really amazing, and I had to go through social media to see that. Is that kind of like or is that not like when I'm playing a piece by Beethoven, who in many respects is was, you know, like many great geniuses, not the best human being in the world, and yet I'll play his opus 110 sonata and I'll experience this step of Diotima's ladder. I'll experience this beauty that goes beyond beauty. You know, Miles Davis, also perhaps, you know, a tricky character, but uh I will experience this uh its sublimity, it's it's beauty at its very uh highest ebb.
SPEAKER_01I love that, Simon, so much. So beauty and sublimity in the history of philosophy have been distinguished. Uh beauty is order, beauty is so that's step four, beauty is harmony, blah, blah, blah. And sublimity is like this openness, it's unlimited. It opens, it can be also kind of too much, whereas beauty is never too much, you can manage it. Whereas sublimity, so people like Edmund Burke and Kant would have argued, um, is has this uh infinite character to it. It's not just ordered one thing. And I think that in a way, Daytima doesn't agree with them. She's just saying in this final step, she's saying, um, you're ready, you've gone through all the experiences, you've seen beauty in so many different shapes and forms, including the order, the harmony bit. And now you can experience this what we would call the sublime, as you were putting it. This opening oneself up to the possibility of being small, like in comparison to the sublime, we always feel small, and also recognizing the beauty of that, of being small, of like this guy you uh whose interview you heard that is sort of like once you allow the world to be big around you, the feeling of being part of the world can also be a very um good feeling because you're not just you by yourself and you're the biggest thing and you're the most important thing. So again, it's about reassessing priorities.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell It is. I this week I also recorded uh Shostakovich's Viola sonata.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell, I love hearing what you've just recorded. That's so cool.
SPEAKER_02He wrote it on his deathbed. He completed it five days before he died. He was concerned he wouldn't finish it. It is a work that was near death when he was near death, and it is dark as hell. Like, oh my goodness, it is so dark. I need a few days to recover after, because I'm very sensitive. And yet the beauty of this piece, and I talk about beauty in the most expansive sense, of Diotima's, you know, the light the latest step we're talking about. The beauty is undeniable. It is beauty beyond beauty, beauty that is not pleasure, but beauty that is almost algorithmic for the universe. So in this sense, I agree with her, um Diotima, that is. Beauty and solemn solemn sublimity, rather, they they touch each other, and often they are accessed through what we might instinctively not call the beautiful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I think that what's really interesting about this final step, which is the most mysterious, which might be taking us back to the Greek initiation rites, is that Dietima is claiming, as we see it, that the beautiful and the sublime are deeply connected. And so when we get to this final step, which we're not going to talk about too much today because we want you to stick around for the season and hear what we have to say about it later on, but it's a mysterious final step, super enigmatic, and it opens us up to the potential of beauty. I love how you put this beyond beauty, beauty in the sublime, or the way in which the beautiful and the sublime are not all that different after all.
SPEAKER_02Dahlia, you know, many people talk about these ancient Greek mysteries and you know, talk about the birth of the West and talk about uh, you know, talk about, oh, that's you know, kind of like Hinduism, or that's kind of like, you know, um the philosophy of the Persian people, or and it's no accident that uh the ancient Greeks were said to have derived a lot of these mysteries ultimately from Near Eastern religions. Um and I think that this just shows that no matter how we subscribe to this idea of beauty, it is so inextricably connected across cultures that what we call Western culture and Western beauty ultimately at its fundament has an has a Near Eastern influence. Um and I think that that's uh that's tremendously powerful.
SPEAKER_01And it makes perfect sense that the two of us are talking about this, right, Simon?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, absolutely. Let's not talk about that.
SPEAKER_01Maybe this is a great place to uh end our first episode and invite listeners to join us for this journey into experiences of beauty, where we ask the question that so many philosophers, poets, and artists have asked over the centuries: can beauty change our lives? You've been listening to On Beauty, the first season of the Wednesday Society. I'm Dalian Asar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Look out for my book on beauty, which I am currently writing.
SPEAKER_02And I am Simon Tedeski, pianist and writer.
SPEAKER_01Our producer and editor is Sarah Allerly. Russell Stapleton composed our music, and Bethany Stewart is our sound engineer. We would love to hear your thoughts on this discussion and any suggestions for neglected texts. Email us at Wednesdaysocietypodcast at gmail.com. This podcast was made possible through the generous support of the Australian Research Council. We're grateful to record at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney and recognize the support of the School of Humanities, also at the University of Sydney. The Wences Society was created on Gartigal, Korengay, and Darrow Country.