Young Plato fell in love with Socrates, but Socrates was ugly. One cannot fall in love with the ugly; one loves only the beautiful. Plato could not say that he fell in love with the wise one who happened to be ugly. Thus, he proclaimed that his beloved was beautiful, superior in beauty to anyone else considered beautiful by the ignorant. One says, “This is not beautiful, but something else is beautiful,” and Plato proclaimed similarly, “This is a lower kind of beauty, but there is also a higher kind.” However, this higher, true and real beauty is invisible to the pedestrian’s eye. Plato, who loved Socrates, is the one … Continue reading Agnes Heller