From Vanity to Virtue
Socrates's wisdom calls us to ascend to Love and Wisdom in a world of fleeting distractions.
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The nature of love and wisdom
In a world obsessed with material possessions and fleeting pleasures, Socrates’ timeless wisdom calls us to ascent towards Love—the Good, the Beautiful, and Wisdom.
Socrates illuminates the nature of love and the pursuit of wisdom in ‘Symposium’ by Plato. In this dialogue, it’s the only recorded time where we hear Socrates claim to know something. He attributes this knowledge to a philosopher named Diotima, who, according to him, initiated him into the nature of Love through dialectic.
In this pursuit of Love, according to Socrates, we become true philosophers—lovers of wisdom and friends of wisdom. And we become aware of Beauty itself. Through this, we’re able to transcend hatred, anger, jealousy.
Yet when we look at our world today we are far from this. We continually exploit each other to climb social ladders. We’re fully okay with abusing and raping nature so long as our company portfolio grows. How did we let ourselves fall so far from the wisdom that once guided us?
We went awry when we turned our backs on Love and allowed ourselves to be distracted by transient things. We spend hours scrolling through social media, comparing our lives to others at dinner parties, or trying to find ways to take advantage of others’ ignorance when we could have used that time to seek wisdom to look deep within ourselves.
This abandonment of Love hasn’t happened in isolation. It’s accompanied by a fall into vanity, focusing on our selfishness at the expense of our souls.
The descent into vanity
We see echoes of this downfall throughout history, even though the wise have long warned us against the perils of vanity. Solomon, in the book of Ecclesiastes, captures this truth:
“I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”
We ignore the teachings of sages because our minds can’t admit that the ancients knew more than us.
Lao Tzu, writing in 500 B.C., was right when he said,
“Conquering others is power; conquering the self is strength. Know what is enough, and you’ll be rich.”
Our inability to understand and appreciate the Beautiful through Love leads to an insatiable desire for material possessions and fleeting pleasures.
The same arrogance that drove us to build rockets and has driven us into madness.
Every day, our minds are drawn to exploring everything but the depths of our souls—continuing the untamed accumulation of things, pursuing fleeting pleasures of meaningless sex with strangers, watching digital orgies on screens, and chasing more social points to gain status.
We falsely believe these things are the most important in life. This has led us to lose our ability for long-term thinking. Now we’re willing to abandon the little wisdom we received from our mothers for a fleeting distraction. While some might argue that the pursuit of power, wealth or social status brings happiness, these pursuits are superficial.
Consequences of abandoning wisdom
Consequently, our world spirals into untamed chaos—rumours of wars for money, nation leaders stealing tax dollars to buy homes on tax-free islands, corporations flooding rivers with toxic waste, business leaders who only care about their pay packages and not their employees, corrupt politicians who are willing to flood cities with fentanyl for share in profit.
As the world around us descends into chaos, many of us retreat into rituals and routines that give the illusion of contemplation—living our lives wrapped in a repetitive cycle of working, playing, eating, and resting, away from the madness.
We think we’re living a life of contemplation but in reality our lives are ugly—filled with malice, anger, jealousy, strife, competition, and exploitation—disconnected from true Love.
Yes, we might rest on Sundays. And during the week offer prayers during the Liturgy of the Hours, or perform our daily Puja, or read our Holy scriptures at night. But all this is rote memorization—actions done for the sake of doing—with no intention or realizations because our daily lives don’t reflect the supposed Beauty we’re contemplating.
Without genuine intentions and alignment of knowledge and action, these spiritual practices aren’t enough to initiate us into Love.
So how can we expect to glimpse the Beautiful if we’re caught up in our own mini-cycle of chaos? We can’t.
Becoming true philosophers
But there’s a way out. And it’s not more religiosity. It’s not joining politics. It’s not starting a better company. It’s not reading more history. It’s none of those things. Political reform, religious fervour, or business innovation might seem like solutions but they often treat only the symptoms, not the root.
The only way out is a return to Love. We have to make a fundamental shift in our way of life, and our way of thinking. We have to be initiated into Love as Socrates was by Diotima. That is the path out of this darkness. It’s to become lovers—to take up Socrates’ call to climb the ladder of Love and become a true philosopher. To see that we are ultimately lovers chasing Wisdom, the Beautiful, and the Good. To align our knowledge with action. To bring together and unite the multiplicity of jnana (knowledge), karma (action) and bhakti (devotion). This is how we birth virtue within ourselves.
To pursue wisdom wherever she takes us. For wisdom is a wreath for our heads and a scarf for our necks. To create and cultivate beautiful things - whether in architecture, law, art, or business.
The pursuit of Love is not just an intellectual exercise, but a way of life. As Socrates teaches, eternal happiness comes from aligning our lives with the Beautiful, the Good and Wisdom.
When we become true philosophers—not the professional kinds from academia—we begin to create a world filled with Beauty, Goodness, and Wisdom. Through this, it becomes impossible to turn our backs on Love.
Only by walking this path of Love can we heal the fractures of our world and discover what it means to live a meaningful life.
Lessons from Socrates (through Plato)
Listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Wisdom is key to living a good life. Love is a seeker of wisdom. The wise don’t seek wisdom because they have it. The ignorant do not seek wisdom because they are ignorant.
A true philosopher is a lover of wisdom. Eros is—necessarily—a philosopher; and as a philosopher, he is between being wise and being without understanding.
Many seek to live forever by birthing children or creating Trust Funds. But these are perishable ways to gain eternal life. The mortal nature seeks as far as possible to be forever and immortal. Mortal nature is capable of immortality only in this way, the way of generation, because it is always leaving behind another this is young to replace the old… For in this way, every mortal thing is preserved; not by being absolutely the same forever, as the divine is, but by the fact that that which is departing and growing old leaves behind another young thing that is as it was. By this device the mortal shares in immortality, both body and all the rest
If you want to live forever, birth virtues within yourself. But there are others who are pregnant in terms of the soul—for these, in fact, are those who in their souls even more than in their bodies conceive those things that it is appropriate for the soul to conceive and bear. And what is appropriate for the soul? Prudence and the rest of virtue; it is of these things that all the poets and the craftsmen who are said to be inventive are procreators.
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