The Power of the Wing
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Socrates — πέφυκεν ἡ πτεροῦ δύναμις τὸ ἐμβριθὲς ἄγειν ἄνω μετεωρίζουσα ᾗ τὸ τῶν θεῶν γένος οἰκεῖ.
By its nature the wing's power is to lead what is heavy upward, raising it aloft to where the race of the gods dwells.
Turning from the soul's chariot to the wings that carry it, Socrates gives the reason for their whole existence — and states the law of gravity for souls.
This is the physics of the palinode stated as a law, and it inverts the ordinary law of gravity. In the visible world, heavy things fall; in Plato's world of souls, there is a counter-force whose whole nature (<em>péphyken</em>, 'is by nature') is to carry 'the heavy' (<em>tò embrithés</em>) <em>upward</em> — the wing, whose <em>dýnamis</em>, its power or innate capacity, is precisely anti-gravitational. The body is ballast, the drag that pulls the soul down toward earth; the wing is the lift that answers it. Everything in the myth — the soul's rise and fall, its feathers growing on beauty and moulting on ugliness, love as the wing sprouting again — is an account of the war between these two tendencies, weight and lift, in every soul. The word <em>dýnamis</em> is doing quiet philosophical work: it names not what the wing <em>is</em> but what it <em>can do</em>, a latent power (the same word Aristotle will make 'potentiality') waiting in every soul to be activated by the sight of beauty.<br><br>And the vocabulary of 'raising aloft' is more than decoration. <em>Meteōrízousa</em> — 'lifting on high' — comes from <em>metéōros</em>, 'up in the air,' the root of 'meteor' and of <em>meteōrología</em>, the study of 'things aloft,' i.e. the heavens. To be a student of <em>tà metéōra</em> was, in Athens, a dangerous reputation: it was the charge leveled at Socrates in Aristophanes's <em>Clouds</em> and echoed at his trial — that he 'investigated the things aloft and beneath the earth' and so denied the gods. Plato reclaims the word. The genuine ascent to 'the things above' is not the sophist's impious meteorology but the soul's winged rise toward the very place 'where the race of the gods dwells.' The philosopher really is a student of things on high — but the height is the plain of Truth, and the study is love.
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