Beauty Beyond Appearance

Plato's ladder of love challenges the assumption that beauty is primarily physical. Physical beauty, in his framework, is the lowest and most accessible form of a universal quality that extends through character, ideas, and ultimately to the Form of Beauty itself.

This is not anti-body puritanism. Plato acknowledges physical beauty's power. But he argues that stopping at physical attraction is like admiring a signpost and never following where it points. The beauty that attracts you to a person's face is a small sample of the beauty available in their mind, their character, and the ideas they engage with.