What Feeds the Wings
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Socrates — τούτοις δὴ τρέφεταί τε καὶ αὔξεται μάλιστά γε τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς πτέρωμα, αἰσχρῷ δὲ καὶ κακῷ καὶ τοῖς ἐναντίοις φθίνει τε καὶ διόλλυται.
Now the crucial law of the myth. The soul's wings are living things that must be fed, and their food is not neutral. On the beautiful, the wise, and the good — kalon, sophon, agathon — the plumage is nourished, grows, and flourishes; on the shameful and the bad, it withers, wastes, and rots away. There is no third option and no standing still: whatever the soul turns toward and takes in either feeds its wings or destroys them. This is Plato's whole moral psychology compressed into a single image of nutrition. What you love, look at, and desire is not a private matter of taste; it is quite literally what your soul eats, and it either grows you toward flight or molts you toward the ground.
Socrates names the food of the soul's wings. On the beautiful, the wise, and the good, the plumage is nourished and grows and thrives; on the shameful and the bad and everything of that kind, it wastes away and rots. What the soul gazes on and feeds upon determines whether it can rise or must fall.
Everything in the palinode's ethics is packed into this sentence, and it works as a claim about food. The pterōma, the soul's plumage, is nourished — trephetai, the word for feeding a child or an animal — and it grows, auxetai, on exactly three things: the kalon, sophon, agathon, the beautiful, the wise, and the good. On their opposites it phthinei kai diollytai, wastes and utterly perishes. Notice what this rules out: there is no neutral gaze, no harmless object of desire. Every single thing the soul attends to and loves is nutrition, and all nutrition either builds the wings or dissolves them. This is why, for Plato, it matters enormously what you look at and long for — not because someone is keeping score, but because the soul is a winged organism whose diet is its loves, and a wing fed on the base simply falls out. And it is the deep reason the sight of a beautiful beloved, later in the myth, is so charged. Beauty is the one of the three foods that shines out visibly in the world below, catchable by the eye. When the fallen soul sees it in a face, its starved plumage gets, for the first time since heaven, the food it was made for, and the feathers begin to grow. Love is the soul finally eating right. To desire beauty is not a distraction from the ascent; it is the ascent's first meal.
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