Recollecting Beauty
Read the full text in our reader
ὅταν τὸ τῇδέ τις ὁρῶν κάλλος, τοῦ ἀληθοῦς ἀναμιμνῃσκόμενος, πτερῶταί τε
Seeing beauty here, the soul remembers beauty itself — what it saw before it was born. For Plato this is what all learning is: not taking in something new but recovering something the soul once knew and lost. He stages the same claim in the <em>Meno</em>, where an untaught slave boy is drawn step by step into a geometry proof, as though it had been in him all along.
Most souls, after descending into bodies, forget what they saw in the great circuit. But a few retain a trace — a capacity for recognition. When they see something beautiful on earth, something happens: not just pleasure, but a shock of memory. The wings begin to stir.
The word is <em>anamnēsis</em>, recollection, and it hides a tension Plato turns against the poets elsewhere. Its root is the same one under <em>mimēsis</em>, imitation — the mere copying he distrusts in art. The philosopher imitates too, but upward: using the beautiful thing in front of him to call back the original it resembles. What moves the soul is recognition, not information.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 249d in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 249d — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/249d/