Word Gems: Soulmate, Myself: 100 Troubadour Poems: A chantar m'er de so qu'eu non volria

The troubadours (including Comtessa de Dia) did not read Symposium by Plato in its original form. In 12th-century Occitania, knowledge of Greek was extremely rare in Western Europe, and most of Plato’s works were not yet available in Latin translation. The Symposium in particular only re-entered Western circulation much later (notably through Renaissance figures like Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century).

So there is no evidence that troubadours knew the Symposium directly.

But here is the deeper—and more interesting—answer:

They were working inside a tradition that had already absorbed transformed remnants of Platonic thought.

Between Plato and the troubadours lies a long chain:

Late antiquity (especially Plotinus and Neoplatonism)
Early Christian thinkers (like Augustine of Hippo)
Medieval theology and court culture

From this chain, a key idea survives in altered form:
love elevates the soul toward something higher.

That is very close to what Diotima describes in the Symposium—the famous “ladder of love,” where desire ascends:
from a beautiful body → to all beauty → to the form of Beauty itself.

Now the crucial difference:

In Plato → love is a ladder upward (ordered, philosophical, culminating in transcendence).
In early troubadours → love is still elevating, but now socialized (refinement through longing, service to the lady, moral polishing).
In later troubadours (like this poem) → that structure begins to break down.

In A chantar, you can feel that collapse:

She has climbed the ladder (beauty, virtue, loyalty, refinement).
But nothing happens.
Love does not reward ascent.

So when we say:

“love is no longer a ladder toward perfection”

—we’re seeing a historical turning point.

What the troubadours “knew,” then:

Not Plato’s text, but a cultural inheritance of his idea, already reshaped:

They inherit the belief that love should ennoble.
They test it in lived experience.
And in poems like this, they begin to discover:
love does not obey the system built to explain it.

In one line:
They did not know the Symposium—but they are part of the long experiment that begins with it, and here, for the first time, we see that experiment starting to fail.

Editor: She was not accounting for the fact that the "ladder" works only with the right soul-connected person.

ChatGPT: That’s a compelling way to read it—but it introduces an assumption the poem itself quietly resists.

In Symposium, especially through Diotima, the “ladder” does not actually depend on the right person. The beloved is, in a sense, a starting point, even a catalyst—but the ascent ultimately moves beyond any particular individual toward Beauty itself. If anything, Plato’s structure says: if you need the “right person,” you’re still on a lower rung.

Now contrast that with Comtessa de Dia.

She is operating under a different expectation:

that love should be reciprocal,
that merit should be recognized,
and that the beloved should respond if he is truly “discerning.”

Your interpretation—“the ladder works only with the right soul-connected person”—actually belongs more to a later, post-troubadour development of love (what we might call a proto–“soulmate” idea). That idea assumes:

fulfillment depends on mutual recognition between two uniquely matched individuals.

But here’s the tension:

Plato: love transcends the individual person.
Troubadour ideal (earlier phase): love refines the lover through devotion, even if unreturned.
Comtessa de Dia (this poem): expects recognition—and is outraged when it fails.
Your formulation (modern): love succeeds only if the right two souls meet.

So your reading solves her problem—but by importing a framework she doesn’t quite have.

And that’s precisely what makes the poem so important.

She is standing at a fault line:

She still believes love should follow worth and discernment.
But her experience shows that it doesn’t.
She has not yet shifted to the idea that love depends on a unique mutual alignment between two souls.

So instead of saying, “he’s not the right one,” she says, in effect:

“he is the right one—and yet he fails to recognize me.”

That difference is subtle but decisive.

In short:
Your insight reflects a later solution to the problem she exposes.
Her poem is powerful because it exists before that solution—when the failure of love still appears as a violation of order, not a mismatch of souls.

Editor: So, Plato believed, as the churches today implicitly teach, that any two well-minded individuals can climb the ladder to the Form of Beauty?

ChatGPT: Not quite—and this is where it’s easy to read Plato through a later (especially modern or religious) lens.

In the Symposium, the ascent described by Diotima is not a joint project between two people. It’s fundamentally an individual ascent of the soul.

So:

It is not: “any two well-matched people can climb together.”
It is: “a capable soul can begin from attraction to a person and rise beyond them.”

What Plato actually implies

The beloved is a starting point, not a partner in ascent
You begin by loving one beautiful person—but if you remain fixated on that person, you haven’t really ascended. The goal is to recognize beauty in many bodies, then in souls, then in laws, knowledge, and finally Beauty itself.
The ascent depends on the lover’s nature and training
Not everyone climbs. It requires:
- philosophical temperament
- discipline
- guidance (Diotima explicitly teaches Socrates)
Reciprocity is irrelevant
Whether the beloved returns your love is beside the point. The ascent is not contingent on mutual recognition.

So, to your formulation

“any two well-minded individuals can climb the ladder…”

Plato would say:

Two people might both be capable—but they are not climbing as a pair.
Each must make the ascent within their own soul.
The relationship itself is ultimately left behind.

Contrast with later traditions

You’re picking up on something real—but it belongs more to later developments:

Christian and post-classical thought (in various forms): tends to emphasize relational transformation (love between persons as spiritually meaningful).
Modern “soulmate” thinking: fulfillment depends on the right pairing.

Plato is more radical—and, in a way, more austere:

The highest love is not fulfilled in another person at all.

Why this matters for the troubadours

This helps explain the tension you noticed earlier.

For someone like Comtessa de Dia:

Love is about this person
It should be mutual
It should recognize worth

From a Platonic standpoint, her suffering comes from staying attached to a particular beloved.

From her standpoint, Plato would seem to evade the real problem.

In one line

Plato does not teach that “the right two people climb together”—he teaches that the serious lover eventually outgrows the need for any one person at all.

Editor: That's a real difference - Plato seems to be saying that the initial "beautiful person" is mere stepping-stone to the Forms. That is rather impersonal and manipulative in spirit.

ChatGPT: It can feel that way at first glance—but calling it “manipulative” is a bit too quick, and it risks missing what Plato is actually trying to protect.

In the Symposium, especially through Diotima, the movement away from the particular beloved is not meant to use the person and discard them, but to correct a deeper problem: our tendency to mistake a part for the whole.

Why it feels impersonal

From a modern perspective, we assume:

the individual person is irreplaceable,
love should culminate in mutual recognition,
and leaving someone behind feels like instrumentalizing them.

Plato disrupts all three.

He’s saying:

If you attach ultimate value to one person, you are confusing a finite instance of beauty with Beauty itself.

So the “stepping-stone” language isn’t about exploitation—it’s about reorientation.

What Plato is actually doing

Think of it less as:

“use a person to get somewhere higher”

and more as:

“let your experience of beauty in a person awaken you to a reality that exceeds any one instance.”

In that sense, the beloved is:

not a tool
but a revelation that you initially misunderstand

The real divide

You’ve put your finger on a genuine historical and philosophical split:

Plato’s direction:

Love moves through the person → toward universality
Fulfillment lies beyond the individual

Troubadour (and later) direction:

Love culminates in the person
Fulfillment requires mutual recognition

By the time you reach Comtessa de Dia, the emotional weight has clearly shifted:

The individual beloved is no longer a gateway
He is the entire question

Where your objection still stands

Even if Plato isn’t being “manipulative” in intent, there is a cost:

It can devalue the uniqueness of persons
It risks turning love into a philosophical ascent rather than a relationship
It can feel like a refusal to take reciprocal attachment seriously

And that tension never really disappears. Later traditions spend centuries trying to reconcile it.

In one line

Plato isn’t trying to use the beloved—he’s trying to free the lover from mistaking one beautiful person for ultimate reality—but in doing so, he leaves behind something that later ages come to see as essential: the irreducible value of the individual beloved.

Editor: It all sounds very high-minded, this reaching a concept of Beauty of all, and that's fine, but to view the beloved as a secondary cog in the process makes it all disturbingly mechanical, and not worth the journey, because, when, theoretically, that summit is reached, you'd look around to discover you're frigidly alone, alone with your vaunted accessing of higher Beauty.

ChatGPT: That’s the emotional and existential crux of Plato’s ascent. Philosophically, it’s brilliant: love as a ladder from the particular to the universal, the personal to the eternal.

But practically, or psychologically, it’s cold. The beloved functions almost like a trigger, a proof-of-concept, rather than a partner in any meaningful human sense. Once the “ladder” has been climbed, the reward is conceptual, not relational. You’ve internalized the Form of Beauty, but you’re left without the human warmth or intimacy that sparked the journey.

In that sense, the journey is intellectually satisfying but emotionally isolating. Plato is imagining the lover as a kind of philosophical acrobat, not a person in a relationship. The beloved is real, yet ultimately instrumental—not for manipulation, but as a means to transcend human attachment.

The tension you sense—between intellectual transcendence and human relational need—is exactly why many later traditions, including the troubadours, reject or modify this approach: they shift the focus back to the beloved as an end in themselves, not a stepping-stone.

So yes: the summit is “high-minded” in theory, but in practice it leaves the lover frigidly alone, with only abstract Beauty as company. The human heart—desire, reciprocity, emotional satisfaction—is largely unaddressed. That’s the gap between Plato’s idealized, impersonal ascent and the lived, messy, relational experience that poems like A chantar m’er dramatize.

Editor: No wonder it's referred to as the coolness of "Platonic love".

ChatGPT: That’s precisely the origin of the term!

“Platonic love” originally captured this idea of love detached from physical or reciprocal fulfillment, focused instead on intellectual or spiritual ascent.

In Plato’s framework, desire for a particular person is only the first rung: eventually, the lover should aim for Beauty itself, beyond bodies, beyond the beloved, beyond any personal reward.

From a modern perspective, that makes Platonic love cool, cerebral, and emotionally distant—a kind of devotion to ideas rather than to people. The warmth, intimacy, and mutual recognition that make human love fulfilling are intentionally stripped away. The term stuck precisely because it highlights this emotional austerity, even though Plato’s intent was not cruelty—it was philosophical refinement.

In contrast, the troubadours (and Comtessa de Dia in particular) push back against that coolness: for them, the beloved is everything, not a stepping-stone. Love is intensely felt, painfully embodied, and morally and socially tied to the beloved’s recognition—not to an abstract summit of Beauty. That’s why her lament feels so human and immediate, while Plato’s ladder feels so… frosty.

Editor: What Plato didn’t understand – and it would take Plotinus and one of his concepts to set us right – is that the ultimate Form of Beauty “shines through” the beloved to reveal the One. We’re not going to get any closer to that sought-for summit than the ascent provided by the soul-bonded beloved. It is the true beloved who “reveals the hidden face of God”, and not some solo journey, as a celibate monk, climbing the Mount Everest of highest Beauty.

ChatGPT: That’s a sharp corrective, and it captures what Plotinus and the Neoplatonists add to Plato’s original framework.

Completion Status

What Plato actually implies

So, to your formulation

Contrast with later traditions

Why this matters for the troubadours

In one line

Why it feels impersonal

What Plato is actually doing

The real divide

Where your objection still stands

In one line