By Eben van Tonder, 5 Feb 2025
A series about Inspiration.
**To my wife-to-be**
On another day when courage, love, commitment, family and wisdom are in every single step.
Following Plato’s Perfect Form that I sent her yesterday . . .
Background
For years, I wondered where Plato got the idea of the Forms. The belief that beyond this world of flawed, impermanent things, there existed a realm of perfect, unchanging ideals. The perfect justice. The perfect beauty. Every physical thing was merely a shadow, an incomplete reflection of that higher truth.
It seemed so abstract and distant from experience. But then, I realised something. What if the idea of the perfect Form was not born from pure reason, but from something deeply personal? What if a woman inspired it?
What if Plato had once seen her—the closest thing to perfection he had ever known? Someone who embodied beauty, wisdom, and love so completely that the only way he could make sense of it was to believe that she was a glimpse of something higher, something eternal? What if, unable to keep her, he turned her into a philosophy?
And yet, what he taught, he did not live. He spoke of Forms, ideals, transcending the physical world—but he could not transcend himself. His own love remained unfulfilled, fragmented, a shadow of what could have been.
When I wrote to my wife-to-be, I wrote about Plato. Love and the moment when he saw her. She read it. Thought about it.
Her Reply
“You focus on the moment he saw her,” she says. “You feel its weight. So did he. But Plato spent his life explaining love rather than living it. He turned it into something distant, something he presumed to be more “clean”.”
She pauses.
“He feared eros. That it would burn too hot. Consume the mind, overwhelm reason, make a man lose himself. He tried to tame it and make it safe. Love, in his world, had to rise beyond the body and desire. But love is not a thing to be climbed. It does not wait at the top of a mountain.”
“Eros, to him, was a ladder. First, a man desires the beauty of a single body. Then, he sees beauty in all bodies. He moves on to the beauty of the soul, then the beauty of knowledge, and finally, if he climbs high enough, he reaches the Form of Beauty itself. Pure. Eternal. Unchanging.”
“But what if love is not a ladder? What if it is not something to leave behind?”
She looks at me.
“What if love was never meant to be escaped?”
“Plato’s world belonged to men. Wisdom belonged to men. Yet, in his greatest work on love, he places a woman at its centre.”
“Diotima.”
“She teaches Socrates that love is not possession. It is a force moving between mortality and immortality. A kind of divine madness, an impulse toward something greater. She teaches that the lover ascends, leaving behind flesh, body, and the earth itself. She speaks of beauty not as a thing one can touch, but as an ideal, something to contemplate from a distance.”
She tilts her head slightly.
“Why does he put these words in the mouth of a woman?”
“If he truly believed wisdom belonged to men, why did he make her the one to teach Socrates? Why did he put the highest knowledge in her hands?”
“Did he know her?”
“Did he love her?”
“Did he see something in her that shook him deeply so that the only way to live with it was to turn her into an idea? To strip her of body and desire and make her a voice of wisdom instead?”
“It is almost as if he once knew her. Loved her. But could not reconcile that love with his philosophy. As if he could not give in to it. A power greater than himself! So he turned her into a path. A teacher of wisdom, not a woman of flesh and feeling.”
She watches me. Study my face carefully!
“You see it, don’t you? He wanted to convince himself that love was allowed. But only if it served a purpose. Only if it was useful. Only if it could be controlled.”
“But the world around him never tried to control love. It worshipped it.”
“Plato tried to rise above love. But love is not something to rise above. Egypt knew this. Rome knew this. Even parts of Greece knew this.”
She leans forward slightly, as if telling a story.
“In Egypt, love was a force of resurrection. Isis did not philosophise. She searched, mourned and acted. When Osiris was torn apart, she found his body, piece by piece, and put him back together. She breathed life into him again. She conceived a son with him, even in death. She did not retreat from love. She entered it. Drowned in it. Was consumed by it. And in doing so, she created.”
“This is not love as an idea. It is love as a force. A power that breaks the natural order. A power that binds even gods.”
“In Rome, love was fire. The Vestal Virgins kept the sacred flame burning. It was not their flame. It belonged to the city. To the people. To the gods. If it went out, Rome would fall.”
“Love was not dangerous. It was sacred. A force that sustained the world itself.”
“In Greece, love was prophecy. The Oracle of Delphi, a woman, spoke for Apollo. She did not calculate truth. She became truth. She let the god enter her, speak through her. Love, wisdom, and divinity were one.”
“In Eleusis, love was descent. Demeter did not intellectualise her grief when Hades took Persephone. She wept. She stopped the world. Crops died. The earth turned to dust. And when her daughter was returned, so was life.”
“Where Plato stepped back, others stepped in.”
She stops. Let the silence settle. The air is thick with it. Then, she speaks again.
“You wrote to me about Plato. About the moment he saw her. You want to understand it. You do understand it.”
“Plato tried to make love safe. But love is not safe. It does not sit still. It moves. It pulls. It does not belong to us alone.”
“It is not just ascent. It is return. It is search. It is longing. It is fire that never dies.”
She looks at me. Holds the moment.
“And yet, in the Phaedrus, Plato says that love is a kind of divine madness. One of the only forms of madness sent by the gods, a madness that does not destroy but transforms. It lifts the soul, makes it reach beyond itself. The lover sees the divine in the beloved and, for a moment, remembers what it was like before birth—when the soul dwelled among the gods.”
She pauses.
“Maybe he was right in this one sense. Maybe love is madness. But if it is, then we should live like that. Completely. Without hesitation.”
4. Unbroken