Struck Senseless by Beauty
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Socrates — αὗται δέ ὅταν τι τῶν ἐκεῖ ὁμοίωμα ἴδωσιν ἐκπλήττονται καὶ οὐκέτʼ ἐν αὑτῶν γίγνονται, ὃ δʼ ἔστι τὸ πάθος ἀγνοοῦσι.
Recollection is rare, and Socrates says why. Souls that glimpsed only a little in heaven cannot recall; nor can those who fell into bad company, turned to injustice, and drowned the holy memory. Only a few keep memory strong enough. And here is what happens to those few: when one of them catches sight, here on earth, of something that is a likeness of the realities it once saw — a beautiful face — it does not admire or enjoy. It is struck out of itself, knocked from its ordinary composure, no longer in possession of itself at all — and, most tellingly, it has no idea what has happened to it. The experience arrives before any name for it. This is Plato's account of the instant of falling in love: not a pleasure chosen but a shock undergone, the soul ambushed by a beauty it cannot yet understand.
Not every soul can remember. Those who saw little in heaven, or who fell into bad company and injustice and forgot the holy things, cannot recall. Only a few keep memory intact — and when one of these catches sight, on earth, of a likeness of the realities it once saw, it is struck out of itself, astounded, and does not even know what has happened to it.
This is the hinge where the whole cosmic myth touches ordinary life, and the verb makes it unforgettable: ekplēttontai — they are 'struck out of themselves.' Plato does not say the remembering soul is charmed or delighted by beauty; he says it is struck, hit hard enough to be driven out of its own composure, and that it does not even know what the pathos, the experience, is. Beauty ambushes. And the reason is the architecture the palinode has patiently built. Of all the Forms the soul saw in heaven — Justice, Temperance, Knowledge — only Beauty was granted the power to shine out visibly here below, in the world of copies. So a beautiful face is a homoiōma, a 'likeness,' of something the soul actually beheld before birth, and the sight of it detonates the buried memory like nothing else can. That is why falling in love feels the way it does — the astonishment, the loss of self-possession, the overwhelming sense that something enormous is happening that one cannot name. It is the soul being struck awake, ekplēxis as the first tremor of recollection. Set this against the two speeches that opened the dialogue. They analyzed love coolly, as an appetite with costs and benefits, something a sensible person weighs and manages. The palinode answers that love is not weighed at all; it strikes, from outside the will, and the one it strikes is not diminished but woken — a soul that had forgotten it once flew, suddenly and violently reminded by a beautiful thing that it did. What the first speech diagnosed as a man losing his mind, Plato has redescribed as a man beginning to get his memory back.
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