To See, Touch, Kiss, Lie Together
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Socrates — ἐπιθυμεῖ δὲ ἐκείνῳ παραπλησίως μέν, ἀσθενεστέρως δέ, ὁρᾶν, ἅπτεσθαι, φιλεῖν, συγκατακεῖσθαι.
And he desires — much as the lover does, but more faintly — to see, to touch, to kiss, to lie down together.
The beloved, now caught by his own counter-love and mistaking it for friendship, begins to feel the very desires he once only received — the same as the lover's, Socrates says, only fainter.
Having discovered his own counter-love and shyly renamed it 'friendship' (255d), the beloved now begins to <em>want</em>, and Socrates lists the wanting with a jeweler's precision: 'to see, to touch, to kiss, to lie together.' It is a four-step staircase, and it descends — or ascends, depending which way desire is travelling — from the safest sense to the most bodily: sight, the sense the whole palinode privileges as beauty's proper gate; then <em>touch</em>; then the kiss; then the shared couch. The beloved feels all four, Socrates says, 'much as the lover does (<em>paraplēsíōs</em>) but more weakly (<em>asthenestérōs</em>)' — his answering love a true but fainter thing, exactly as it was called an <em>eídōlon</em>, a reflection, at 255d. The mirror gives back the same image, dimmer.<br><br>The tenderness of the passage is that Plato treats the beloved's awakening desire without a trace of contempt — it is real love, growing, and the boy is right to feel it, even if he cannot yet name it. But he plants a quiet danger in the second verb. <em>Háptesthai</em>, 'to touch,' is one of the most charged words in the dialogue, because Plato uses the very same verb, in its compound <em>epháptesthai</em>, for the mind's <em>contact with the Forms</em> (249c, 253a) — the intellectual 'grasp' of reality. Touch stands at both ends of the ladder of love: the hand reaching for a body, and the soul reaching for the truth. Which is why this moment is the hinge on which each lover's fate turns. The desire to see, touch, kiss, and lie together is not evil — it is the raw pull that, rightly steered, becomes the reach toward Beauty itself, and wrongly steered, becomes mere consummation and the loss of the wings. The next pages (256a) will show the fork: whether the charioteer can hold these four desires in reverent check, or whether the dark horse drags all of them down to the bed. Everything the palinode has built waits on what these two do with a longing this specific, and this human.
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