Trampling One Another to Rise
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Socrates — αἱ δὲ δὴ ἄλλαι γλιχόμεναι μὲν ἅπασαι τοῦ ἄνω ἕπονται, ἀδυνατοῦσαι δέ ὑποβρύχιαι συμπεριφέρονται, πατοῦσαι ἀλλήλας καὶ ἐπιβάλλουσαι,
Not every soul reaches the vision. Socrates now describes the majority — us. They all long for the heights, straining upward after the true realities, but they haven't the strength to rise, and so they are carried round hypobrychiai, submerged, drowning below the surface while the light shines above them out of reach. And because they cannot rise, they turn on each other: trampling, jostling, colliding, each soul frantic to climb over the rest and catch even a glimpse. It is one of the most unsparing images in Plato — the human race as a crowd of half-drowned souls thrashing in the current, hurting one another in a desperate, mostly failing scramble toward a truth they can dimly sense but cannot hold.
Socrates turns to the souls that cannot make the climb. All of them strain upward after the heights, but lacking the strength, they are swept round below the surface — submerged, trampling and jostling one another, each frantic to get ahead. It is a picture of the whole human throng, all reaching for a vision none can quite reach.
The image is merciless and exact, and the word that carries it is hypobrychiai — 'submerged, underwater.' The failed souls are not merely lower on the climb; they are drowning, swept round below the surface of the sea of becoming while reality shines above them like light on water they cannot break through. Every one of us, the myth says, is one of these: once a flier, now underwater, catching at most a blurred glimpse of the real 'with difficulty.' And Plato adds the cruelest true detail. Because the souls cannot rise, they trample one another — patousai allēlas — jostling and colliding in the scramble, each trying to climb over the rest. This is his picture of the human world: not evil exactly, but a frantic, half-drowned crowd, hurting each other less from malice than from the shared, thwarted longing to rise. The competition, the elbowing, the stepping-on that fills ordinary life is, at bottom, a crowd of immortal souls straining after a heaven they can no longer see. And it is against this dark background that love will shine. Beauty, glimpsed in a beloved, is the one shaft of light that reaches down into the water — the single thing on earth that can reach a drowning soul and turn its face up toward the surface it fell through. The trampling crowd is what we are without love; the soul that truly loves is the one that has stopped clawing at its neighbors and started, instead, to rise.
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