The Plain of Truth
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ἡ γὰρ ἀχρώματός τε καὶ ἀσχημάτιστος καὶ ἀναφὴς οὐσία ὄντως οὖσα, ψυχῆς κυβερνήτῃ μόνῳ θεατὴ νῷ
At the summit of heaven the soul sees what has no color, no shape, nothing to touch. Every word is a negation, because the thing Plato points to has none of the marks by which we know that anything is there at all. What is left when you subtract everything the senses report is, he says, what most truly is.
The souls of the gods ride their chariots in the great circuit of heaven. At the summit — at the back of the sky — they glimpse the hyperuranian place, the region beyond heaven itself. What is there? Nothing visible. Nothing tangible. Only being.
The Greek enacts it in its grammar: <em>ousia ontōs ousa</em>, "being that really is being" — the verb "to be" folded over itself three times, holding you on the bare fact of being with nothing added. Only <em>nous</em>, the mind's own seeing, reaches this place. It is the Forms in their most stripped-down form — more austere here than anywhere else in Plato, and the distant source of every later idea of a reality standing behind appearances.
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