What We Reach For

On desire, its discontents, and the ladder no one warned us about.

The Problem in the Room

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from wanting too much, but from wanting the wrong things, or rather, from discovering that what you want and what you are supposed to want are not the same thing at all.

Desire discrepancy is not limited to relationship with other, it also pertains to the gap between the desire you have and the desire you are expected to perform. It shows up in bedrooms and boardrooms alike. It is the person who craves solitude but stays at the party. The one who wants intimacy but has learned, with great precision, to suppress the ask. The one who desires intellectual recognition but has been told, in a hundred subtle ways, that this particular hunger is unbecoming.

We tend to treat desire discrepancy as a psychological problem, something to be resolved through honest communication, better boundaries, perhaps therapy. It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a philosophical issue. It raises questions about the nature of desire itself: where it comes from, whether it can be educated, and whether the gap between what we want and what we reach for is a failure or a kind of wisdom.

To think about this, I want to go back, very far back, to a woman who may or may not have existed, and who nevertheless said something about desire that no one has fully improved upon since.

A Woman Who May Have Been Invented

Diotima of Mantinea appears in Plato’s Symposium, one of the great philosophical texts on the nature of Eros. The Symposium is structured as a series of speeches in praise of love, delivered at a dinner party in Athens around 416 BCE. Each speaker offers his account of desire. Then Socrates takes his turn and declines to offer his own view. Instead, he tells the assembled company what he learned from a woman. The woman is Diotima. She is described as a priestess and a wise woman who taught Socrates everything he knows about love. Socrates recounts her teaching in detail, presenting it as the most illuminating account of Eros he has encountered.

Diotima’s existence has not been verified, no other ancient source mentions her. She appears only in Plato’s text, mediated through Socrates, at a remove that makes her historicity genuinely uncertain. Scholars have debated for centuries whether she was a real person whose teachings Plato preserved, or a literary device – a philosophical ventriloquist’s puppet through which Plato expressed ideas he was, for whatever reason, unwilling to put in his own mouth.

The irony is hard to miss. A text about the nature of desire contains, at its center, a woman whose existence is itself a kind of desire: wished for, intuited, argued over, never fully secured. She is present and absent at once. She speaks, but only through a man who reports her words.

This ambiguity is not incidental to a series on female philosophers. It is the series. The history of women in philosophy is littered with figures who thought rigorously and were remembered obliquely: through the men they educated, the letters attributed to them, the silences in the record. Diotima’s uncertain existence is, in this sense, a synecdoche for the whole project. And yet: the ideas survive. Whatever their origin, they are extraordinary. So let us take them seriously.

What Diotima Says About Desire

Diotima’s central move is to redefine Eros entirely. The other speakers at the Symposium treat desire as a response to beauty: you see something beautiful and you want it. Simple enough. Diotima complicates this picture in two crucial ways.

First, she argues that Eros is not a god but a spirit, an intermediary between the human and the divine. This matters because it means desire is not itself beautiful or good. Eros is neither full nor empty, neither wise nor foolish. It is the motion between states: the reaching, the striving, the sense that something is missing. To desire is not to be deficient; it is to be alive to the gap between what is and what could be.

Love is a great spirit, and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal… He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together. – Diotima, as reported in Plato’s Symposium

Second, Diotima argues that desire is ultimately not about its objects at all. The beautiful body you desire is not what you really want. What you want, she says, is to possess the good forever. You want immortality. The beautiful body is simply the first rung on a ladder.

This is the famous Platonic ladder of love, and it is Diotima’s invention. You begin by loving one beautiful body. Then you come to see that all beautiful bodies share a beauty in common, and you love that general beauty more than any particular instance. Then you ascend to beautiful souls, then to beautiful activities, then to beautiful knowledge, until finally you arrive at Beauty itself – not beautiful in relation to anything, not coming and going, but eternally, absolutely, perfectly beautiful.

The ladder is often misread as a demotion of particular love, as if Diotima were saying that the person you love is merely a stepping stone to be discarded once you’ve used them to reach a higher rung. This reading misses something though, Diotima does not say that particular loves are illusory or worthless. She says they are the beginning of the ascent, and that without them the ascent cannot begin at all.

The problem she is solving – her version of desire discrepancy – is this: all particular desires are finite, but the hunger underneath them is not. You desire a person, a body, a moment of recognition. You get it. And still there is a remainder, an unsatisfied residue. Something was not fully reached. This is not a failure of the beloved. It is the nature of Eros itself, which is structurally never satisfied because what it is ultimately reaching for – the permanent, the immortal, the good – cannot be possessed in a finite encounter.

The Discrepancy, Clarified

Diotima gives us a new way to understand desire discrepancy that goes deeper than the familiar accounts. We usually describe the problem in terms of mismatch: my desires versus your desires, my desires versus social expectations, my stated desires versus my actual desires. These mismatches are real and worth taking seriously. Yet Diotima locates the original discrepancy not between two people or between a person and their culture, but within desire itself.

Desire reaches toward the particular: this person, this moment, this form of recognition, but it is structured by a longing for the permanent that no particular can satisfy. The discrepancy is not a bug. It is built in.

This has several striking implications.

First, it means that the experience of not being satisfied, of getting what you wanted and still feeling something unmet, is not evidence that you wanted the wrong thing, or that you are constitutionally incapable of happiness. It is evidence that you are a desiring creature, which is to say a creature oriented toward something beyond the immediate.

Second, it reframes the project of desire education. For Diotima, the task is not to eliminate desire or to discipline it into more appropriate channels. It is to learn to read desire’s own logic. It is to understand what the particular longing is pointing toward, to follow the ladder rather than stopping at the first rung.

Third, and this is the implication I find most useful, it suggests that desire discrepancy is not always a problem to be solved. Sometimes it is a signal to be followed. The gap between what you have reached for and what the reaching was really about is not necessarily a wound. It might be a compass.

What This Means Now

I am not interested in simply applying Diotima’s framework as if it were a self-help system from antiquity. Her account has real problems. The ladder is hierarchical in ways that smuggle in a contempt for the body and for particular attachments. The teleology – the idea that all desire is ultimately aimed at transcendent Beauty – can feel coercive, as if the particular loves that actually constitute a life are being conscripted into a philosophical project they never signed up for. That being said, I think the core insight survives the problems.

When we talk about desire discrepancy today, in relationships, in the quiet negotiations of what we allow ourselves to want, we tend to frame it as a problem of communication or self-knowledge. And it often is but sometimes the discrepancy is not between two people, or between the self and its social performance. It is between the particular thing you want and the depth of the wanting itself.

You want to be heard in a specific conversation; you desire to be known. You want a particular achievement, and beyond that: to matter, to leave something durable. You want a specific person’s desire and underneath that: to be real to another consciousness, to not be invisible in the world. Diotima would say: these are not separate desires. The particular is the form the deep desire takes in this moment, in this body, in this life. The mistake is to think that satisfying the particular exhausts the deeper want. It doesn’t. Recognizing this is the beginning of a different kind of desire literacy.

Not asceticism. Not detachment. The capacity to hold a particular love in one hand and the structure of longing that subtends it in the other, without collapsing the two into one another.

This is harder than it sounds and it is also, Diotima might say, what you were doing anyway: the ladder was always there, even when you didn’t know you were climbing it.

A Note on the Source

One more thing before we leave Diotima in her beautiful uncertainty. Whether she was a real woman or Plato’s construction, her presence in the Symposium performs something philosophically significant. The greatest speech in the text that Socrates considers definitive, the one that frames the whole work, is attributed to a woman. It is presented not as Socrates’ discovery but as something he learned, from someone wiser than himself.

In a culture that systematically excluded women from philosophical education and public intellectual life, this is strange. It may have been Plato’s way of signaling that this particular view required a different kind of authority; that the account of Eros as intermediary, as motion, as structurally unsatisfied, had something of the priestess in it, something of the one who stands between worlds.

Or it may have been a real woman, thinking rigorously in the margins of a tradition that would barely record her name. Either way, the ideas are hers. Or they are given to her. The gap between those two possibilities is itself, perhaps, a small instance of what she was describing all along: the reach, the rung, the remainder.