Beauty Through the Eyes
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Socrates — καὶ ἱδρὼς καὶ θερμότης ἀήθης λαμβάνει· δεξάμενος γὰρ τοῦ κάλλους τὴν ἀπορροὴν διὰ τῶν ὀμμάτων ἐθερμάνθη ᾗ ἡ τοῦ πτεροῦ φύσις ἄρδεται.
And sweat and a strange heat take hold of him; for receiving the effluence of beauty through his eyes, he is warmed in the place where the wing's nature is watered.
The soul that catches sight of a beautiful face begins to suffer strange things. Socrates describes what is physically happening: beauty is pouring into the lover and waking the buried roots of his wings.
This is the palinode's physiology of falling in love, and it is startlingly literal. Beauty is not merely seen; it is <em>received</em> (<em>dexámenos</em>) as an <em>aporrhoḗ</em> — an 'effluence,' a stream of particles given off by the beautiful body. The word is borrowed straight from Presocratic physics: Empedocles explained all perception by <em>aporrhoaí</em>, effluences flowing off objects and fitting into the pores of the senses. Plato takes this hard, materialist physiology and makes it the mechanism of love. The beloved radiates; the lover drinks the radiance in through his eyes (for the Greeks, sight was itself a kind of reaching-out and touching); and the effect is <em>heat</em> — sweat, an unaccustomed warmth. The first symptoms of love are, precisely, Sappho's symptoms (fragment 31: 'a subtle fire runs under my skin, cold sweat holds me'), which Socrates has already confessed he learned from her (235c).<br><br>And then the horticulture. The heat is felt 'where the wing's nature is watered' (<em>árdetai</em>) — <em>árdō</em> is the gardener's verb for irrigating a seedling. The whole grand myth of the soul's wings, the machinery of the ascent to the Forms, turns out to run on rain and sap: beauty is the water, the wing is a plant, and the itch and swelling the lover feels is a bulb sprouting under the skin of the soul. This is Plato at his most daring — welding a mystical psychology of transcendence onto the plainest facts of a body in the grip of desire, so that the soul's flight toward the eternal and the sweat on a young man's brow are, exactly, the same event. Love is where physics becomes metaphysics without a seam.
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