Zeus's Followers Seek a Zeus-Like Soul
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Socrates — οἱ μὲν δὴ Διὸς δῖόν τινα εἶναι ζητοῦσι τὴν ψυχὴν τὸν ἐρώμενον· σκοποῦσιν εἰ φιλόσοφός τε καὶ ἡγεμονικὸς τὴν φύσιν.
The palinode now explains why different people love differently. Before birth, every soul followed one god or another in the great procession through the heavens, and each carries the stamp of its god ever after. So in love, each lover unconsciously seeks a beloved whose soul resembles the god he once followed. Those who followed Zeus, king of the gods, look for a Zeus-like beloved — one who is philosophical by nature and fit to lead. And when such a lover finds and falls for such a soul, he does everything in his power to make the beloved more fully what he already is: more philosophical, more capable of ruling himself and others. Love, here, is the desire to help the beloved become his own best self.
Souls, before birth, followed different gods in the heavenly procession, and each lover seeks a beloved resembling the god he once followed. Those who followed Zeus seek a beloved whose soul is Zeus-like: they look to see whether he is philosophical and fit to lead, and when they find and love such a one, they do everything to make him more so.
This passage completes the palinode's demolition of the first two speeches, and it does so on their own chosen ground. The first speech's gravest charge was that the lover keeps the beloved down — ignorant, weak, dependent, barred from philosophy — because a beloved who grows will outgrow him. Now Socrates describes the true lover doing the exact opposite. The follower of Zeus seeks a beloved who is philosophical and hēgemonikos, 'fit to lead' — and, finding him, 'does everything so that he will become such,' pan poiousin hopōs toioutos estai. Far from stunting the beloved, the true lover is his most active cultivator, laboring to make him wiser and more capable, precisely in the direction the first speech said love must forbid. The mechanism is the theology of the god-procession: because each soul bears the character of the god it followed, to love is to recognize in the beloved an image of one's own god, and to want that image perfected. The lover of Zeus loves the Zeus in the boy, and so wants the boy to become as Zeus-like as possible — kingly, philosophical, self-governing. This is why love and education, erōs and paideia, are finally the same thing in the Phaedrus. The lover is not the enemy of the beloved's philosophy, as Lysias claimed; he is its patron, its fellow-student, the one who most wants the beloved to grow wings of his own. And it answers the deepest worry too — that love makes the beloved a mere instrument of the lover's pleasure. Here the lover's whole desire is bent on the beloved's flourishing. He wants him great, not small; free, not dependent; philosophical, not kept ignorant. The love the first speeches diagnosed as possession has become, in the palinode, the most generous form of teaching.
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