It’s 380 B.C.. You find yourself seated at Socrates’ dinner table, drinking wine and talking about love. His friend Aristophanes brings up a theory called the Ladder of Love, which he argues that the things our eyes find attractive ultimately lead us from the world of material to a wider, transcendent place that Plato, the author of the symposium you’re at, calls ‘the Good’ — a place of ultimate, perfect beauty.
Looking good, something we easily cast aside as trivial, merely sexual, or superficial compared to characters of the heart, is so much deeper than skin. Whether it’s a haircut, a Russian manicure, LASIK, leg lengthening surgery, or a butt lift, altering our physical appearance is no longer shallow according to Plato’s philosophy. Rather, these little alterations might actually be the foot of a ladder that climbs up to what we might find the loveliest in ourselves, if only just a small part. The physical world of object is connected to the world of ideas and virtues.
Sexiness ca…