Beholding Justice Itself
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Socrates — ἐν δὲ τῇ περιόδῳ καθορᾷ μὲν αὐτὴν δικαιοσύνην καθορᾷ δὲ σωφροσύνην καθορᾷ δὲ ἐπιστήμην, οὐχ ᾗ γένεσις πρόσεστιν.
This is the vision the whole ascent was for. Borne along by the revolving heaven, the soul at last looks upon the true realities — and Socrates names them one by one, each with the same reverent verb: it beholds Justice itself, beholds Temperance, beholds Knowledge. The word 'itself' is doing enormous work. What the soul sees is not a just action, or a wise law, or a piece of knowledge about some changing thing, but Justice as it simply is — single, eternal, unchanging — and the same for Temperance and Knowledge. These are Plato's Forms, the perfect originals that everything down here only imitates. And Socrates is careful to say what they are not: not the knowledge 'to which becoming belongs,' nothing caught up in the flux of the world we live in. Up here, above the sky, the soul feeds directly on reality — and this feast, once had and then half-forgotten, is what every soul spends its embodied life trying to remember.
At the summit the soul sees what it came for. Carried round by the heaven's revolution, it beholds the realities themselves — Justice itself, Temperance itself, Knowledge itself — not justice or knowledge as they appear in the changing world of becoming, but the eternal Forms of which all earthly instances are only copies.
This is the metaphysical center of the Phaedrus and of Platonism itself: the vision of the Forms. The soul, before it fell, actually saw them — and the little word autēn, 'itself,' is the whole doctrine in miniature. It beholds not a just deed but 'Justice itself,' autēn dikaiosynēn: the single, eternal reality that every just thing in our world merely resembles. The same for Temperance, for Knowledge, for all the Forms. And the crucial negative: these are not touched by genesis, becoming — not the changing, perishable knowledge and justice we handle down here, but their unchanging originals, belonging to being rather than to the flux we live in. Everything follows from this. Our embodied life is lived in genesis, among copies and shadows; the soul has forgotten the being it once saw; and learning, for Plato, is really recollection — anamnēsis — the soul remembering what it beheld before birth. Now watch how this grounds the account of love that is the palinode's whole point. Of all the Forms the soul once saw, Socrates is about to single out one that is different: Beauty alone has the privilege of shining out visibly in the world of becoming, catchable by the eyes. Justice and Temperance have no earthly glow; you cannot see Justice itself in a face. But Beauty you can. So beauty, glimpsed in a beautiful beloved, is the one thing on earth that can strike the fallen soul like lightning and make it remember this whole lost heaven. Love is the recovery of the vision described right here, triggered by the one Form that never stopped being visible.
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