The Philosopher Who Is a Lover
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Socrates — τὴν μὲν πλεῖστα ἰδοῦσαν εἰς γονὴν ἀνδρὸς γενησομένου φιλοσόφου ἢ φιλοκάλου ἢ μουσικοῦ τινος καὶ ἐρωτικοῦ,
Socrates now grades the incarnations. When a fallen soul is reborn, the life it enters is fixed by how much of the truth it managed to see in heaven — and he ranks them, nine deep, from highest to lowest. At the very top sits the soul that saw the most. But notice who that soul becomes: not a philosopher as opposed to a lover, but a single fused figure — philosophos, philokalos, mousikos, erōtikos, a lover of wisdom and of beauty, cultivated in the arts, and given to love, all at once. Plato has quietly stacked the deck. The highest human life, the one nearest to the vision, is precisely the life the first two speeches warned against: the life of the lover. And below it come the king, the statesman, the athlete, the prophet, the poet, the craftsman, the sophist, and last the tyrant — a whole scale of souls, with the erotic philosopher crowning it.
Socrates ranks the lives a fallen soul can be born into, by how much of the truth it once saw. At the very top — the soul that saw the most — is reborn not as a philosopher set against a lover, but as a single combined type: a lover of wisdom, a lover of beauty, someone musical and erotic all at once.
This little catalogue is where the palinode springs its trap, and everything turns on one pairing at the top: philosophos and philokalos, lover of wisdom and lover of beauty, named in a single breath as the same highest soul, which is also mousikos and erōtikos — cultivated and given to love. The first two speeches were built on keeping these apart: the wise, self-possessed man on one side, the erotic madman on the other, and the boy told to choose the former. Socrates has now placed them in the same body. The lover of beauty is the philosopher, because — as the whole myth has been building to say — beauty is the one Form still visible here below, and to love it rightly is not a distraction from the pursuit of wisdom but its first step, the ground floor of the ascent to the Forms. That is why the erōtikos crowns the hierarchy: his desire for a beautiful face is, rightly followed, the same upward motion as the desire for truth. And it is why the ranking descends from there through the king and statesman and athlete down to the tyrant at the bottom — the tyrant being, as always in Plato, the soul most enslaved to appetite and least able to see. The scale is a map of how much reality each kind of life remembers, and the summit belongs to the one who loves. The first speeches asked the boy to prefer the non-lover. The palinode answers by making the lover — the philosophical lover — the highest thing a human being can be.
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