A Voice Won't Let Me Leave
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Socrates — καί τινα φωνὴν ἔδοξα αὐτόθεν ἀκοῦσαι, ἥ με οὐκ ἐᾷ ἀπιέναι πρὶν ἂν ἀφοσιώσωμαι, ὡς δή τι ἡμαρτηκότα εἰς τὸ θεῖον.
The dialogue pivots here, on a voice. As Socrates makes to cross the river, his daimonion — the divine sign that has checked him all his life whenever he is about to do wrong — stops him cold. He thinks he hears a voice, from this very place, forbidding him to leave until he has purified himself, because he has committed some offense against the divine. And now he understands what it was: the speech he just gave, slandering love, was a sin against a god. He is not free to walk away from it. He must atone — and the atonement, we are about to learn, is a second speech that unsays the first.
This is the turn. Socrates was about to leave when his familiar sign stopped him — a voice, from this very spot, that will not let him go until he has purified himself. He realizes his speech against love was an offense against the divine, and he cannot depart until he has atoned for it.
Everything after this is set in motion by a single word: aphosiōsasthai, to 'make expiation,' to purify oneself of an offense against heaven. Socrates's daimonion — the inner voice that, he says elsewhere, only ever forbids, never commands — has stopped him, and he reads the stop as a verdict: his cold speech against love was a hamartia, a sin, against the divine. This reframes the whole second half of the dialogue. The palinode that follows is not, in Socrates's understanding, a cleverer argument offered to win a debate; it is a religious act, a rite of purification owed to a god he has blasphemed. Plato is doing something remarkable here. He casts the most exalted philosophy in the Phaedrus — the myth of the soul's wings, the vision of the Forms, the whole account of love as the soul's memory of the divine — as an act of piety, a man cleansing himself before heaven by taking back a lie. The truth about love, the frame insists, is not neutral information; getting it wrong is an offense, and getting it right is a kind of worship. The daimonion's refusal to let him leave is the hinge: it turns the exit into an altar.
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