Beauty Alone Is Visible
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Socrates — ὄψις γὰρ ἡμῖν ὀξυτάτη τῶν διὰ τοῦ σώματος ἔρχεται αἰσθήσεων, ᾗ φρόνησις οὐχ ὁρᾶται… νῦν δὲ κάλλος μόνον ταύτην ἔσχε μοῖραν, ὥστʼ ἐκφανέστατον εἶναι καὶ ἐρασμιώτατον.
For sight is the sharpest of the senses that come to us through the body — yet by it wisdom is not seen (it would arouse terrible loves, if it offered so clear an image of itself to the eye). But now beauty alone has been given this lot: to be the most manifest, and the most worthy of love.
Why does beauty, of all the eternal realities, have the power to seize us? Socrates gives the reason: it is the one Form that reaches us through the sharpest of the senses — the only reality we can see.
This is the linchpin of the whole theory of love, and one of the most consequential sentences Plato ever wrote. The palinode has claimed that beauty starts the soul's flight back to the Forms — but why beauty, rather than justice or wisdom or any other eternal reality? The answer is here: <em>beauty alone is visible</em>. Sight is the 'sharpest' (<em>oxytátē</em>) of the bodily senses (<em>aisthḗseis</em> — the word that will become 'aesthetics'), and of all the Forms, only Beauty reaches us through it. The others are just as real, just as glorious — but they have no image that meets the eye. And then the extraordinary, almost vertiginous aside: <em>if</em> wisdom (<em>phrónēsis</em>) could be seen the way a beautiful body is seen, 'it would arouse terrible loves' — <em>deinoùs érōtas</em>. Imagine catching sight of Justice itself, or Wisdom, shining with the clarity a lovely face has. We would be destroyed with longing. Mercifully, or cruelly, we can't; the moral Forms are invisible.<br><br>So beauty carries a unique and double-edged privilege: it is the one Form that shines <em>forth</em> — <em>ekphanéstaton</em>, 'most manifest,' the root of 'epiphany' — into the visible world, and therefore the only sensible thing that is also a direct summons back to the real. This is why falling in love can be the beginning of philosophy: the lover, jolted by a beautiful face, is being shown the perceptible edge of eternity. But it is exactly why beauty is so dangerous, and why the whole drama of the two horses matters. Because beauty is <em>ekphanés</em> AND <em>erasmiós</em> — visible <em>and</em> desirable — it can be read two ways: as a window onto the Form, which lifts the soul, or as a body to be seized, which drops it. Beauty is the single point where the eternal touches the eye; what you do at that point of contact is everything. The <em>Symposium</em>'s ladder of love and the Christian and Romantic traditions of beauty as the visible splendor of the divine all descend from this one claim: that of all the faces of reality, only Beauty is one we can see.
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