Pure, Clear, Unmixed
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Diotima — αὐτὸ τὸ καλὸν ἰδεῖν εἰλικρινές, καθαρόν, ἄμεικτον, ἀλλὰ μὴ ἀνάπλεων σαρκῶν τε ἀνθρωπίνων καὶ χρωμάτων καὶ ἄλλης πολλῆς φλυαρίας θνητῆς, ἀλλʼ αὐτὸ τὸ θεῖον καλὸν δύναιτο μονοειδὲς κατιδεῖν; ἆρʼ οἴει, ἔφη, φαῦλον βίον
to see Beauty itself pure, clear, unmixed, and not full of human flesh and colours and much other mortal nonsense, but able to behold the divine Beauty itself, single in form? Surely you do not think, she said, it a paltry life
Diotima presses the vision to its purest point: to see Beauty itself — pure, clear, unmixed, not clogged with human flesh and colours and much other mortal nonsense, but to behold the divine Beauty itself, single in form. Surely, she asks, you do not think it a paltry life — the sentence completes in 212a.
This is the sharpest expression of Platonic transcendence, and it can read as a repudiation of the body — yet the frame is erotic throughout: it is the lover, carried up by desire, who at last sees this, and the seeing is described as beholding (katidein) and being with (from 212a) the beautiful, the language of erotic union transferred to the Form. The purity is not coldness but consummation: desire finally meets an object worthy of it, one that does not decay or disappoint. Diotima's rhetorical question — you surely don't think it a phaulos bios, a paltry life, to live thus? — is answered in 212a: on the contrary, only there, seeing Beauty with the faculty by which it is seen, does a person beget not phantoms of virtue but true virtue, and so become dear to the gods and immortal. The vision is not escape from life but the only life fully worth living.
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