What Plato said about beauty: the shiver is memory

You have felt this in front of something beautiful. A face, a piece of music, a landscape, a page. A tightness with no name, as if that thing reminded you of a place you have never been. Most of us treat this tightness as a detail of taste, something that passes. Plato takes it seriously, and in the Phaedrus he gives an explanation that sounds strange and that almost no one forgets after hearing it: this tightness is memory.

A speech that seemed sensible

To reach beauty, the Phaedrus begins with a speech that rejects it. A young man named Phaedrus brings a text by the orator Lysias, and the thesis is provocative: it would be better to give yourself to someone who does not love you than to someone who does. The lover is jealous, unstable, loses his head. The other is calm, practical, reliable.

Socrates answers with a brilliant speech against love, delivered with his head covered by his cloak. As he is about to leave, he is stopped by his inner sign (the daimónion, which we discuss in Socrates' daimonion never commanded, only restrained). Then he makes a retraction with his face uncovered. It starts by turning Lysias's argument inside out. Lysias's reasoning was that the lover is mad, and so it is better to avoid him. That would only hold, Socrates replies, if all madness were an evil. But there is a madness that comes as a divine gift, and through it, he says, come the greatest goods (Phaedrus, 244a). There is the madness of the prophet, that of the rites that purify, that of the poet seized by the Muses. And there is the highest of all, that of the one who loves.

Notice how convincing Lysias's thesis was. It was sensible in the way a calculation is sensible: it protected you from suffering, and it also protected you from rising.

The soul that had wings

To explain why love is this madness, Socrates tells the most famous myth of the book. The soul is like a winged chariot, with a charioteer and two horses, one that obeys and another that pulls downward. What matters here is what comes next. Before being born, souls followed the gods across the sky and contemplated the Forms. Then they fell, lost their wings and forgot (Phaedrus, 248a-c).

This is the recollection we spoke of in Recollection in Plato: recognizing what you never saw. To know is to recognize. And here Socrates says something that changes our relation to the beautiful.

The only Form that can be seen

Of the things the soul saw up there, justice, temperance and wisdom leave almost no visible trace down here. You do not point your finger at justice the way you point at a face. But beauty leaves one. It is the only one of those realities from up there that still reaches the eyes, the most visible and the most lovable (Phaedrus, 250d).

This changes beauty's place. In this passage of the Phaedrus, it stops being an ornament of the world and becomes the point where what the soul once knew still offers itself to the eyes. To see how the tradition later treated beauty alongside truth and goodness, read Truth, goodness and beauty: the transcendentals.

The shiver, the heat, the feathers

So when someone sees a truly beautiful face, something physical happens. Socrates describes shivers, sweat, heat, a kind of fever, and says it is the soul remembering. The feathers of the wings, which were dry, begin to sprout again (Phaedrus, 251a-c). It hurts and delights at once, like the ache of teeth coming through.

The image is bodily, and it is worth noticing. For Plato, beauty does not pass first through the idea and only afterwards through the body. It passes through the body, and it is the body that gives the warning. The shiver is the first news, and the soul is the one who reads it.

The tightness with no name

Now go back to the beginning. That tightness you feel before a piece of music or a landscape, as if it recalled a place you never visited, is exactly what the text is describing. For Plato, this tightness is memory. The soul is recognizing something it has seen and the body has never seen, and that is why it seems to come from nowhere.

You may have doubts about souls that fly, and still recognize the experience. What the text offers is an explanation for something almost everyone feels and almost no one can name.

The love that does not possess

From this comes the consequence for love, and it is the most surprising part of the passage. Love, when it is true, is not the desire to possess that face. It is the desire to return to where the face points. The beautiful face works as an indication, and the one who follows it does not want to keep the signpost.

That is why the true lover does not drag the beloved downward. The two rise together. What the Phaedrus describes is love as partnership in the ascent, and never as possession. It is the same love the Symposium speaks of, by another road. There, the ladder that leads from love for one body up to Beauty itself is told in The Ladder of Love: What Diotima Teaches Socrates and What Having a Platonic Love Means, According to Plato. Here, the first rung, felt from the inside, in the shiver.

When beauty deceives

The Phaedrus is not naive about this. Lysias's own speech, with which the dialogue begins, was a very well written text: beauty of form in the service of a thesis that does not hold. There is a beauty that leads and a beauty that merely persuades, and the book shows both. The second half of the dialogue deals precisely with the difference, and it has its own article: Plato's rhetoric: leading souls or only convincing?.

Beautiful within

The dialogue ends with a small gesture that sums up the rest. Before returning to the city, Socrates and Phaedrus pray to the god of the place, who is Pan (Phaedrus, 279b-c). They ask to be beautiful within, and for what they show outwardly to match what they are within. These are few lines, and almost everyone skips them, but they sum up the whole book: a beauty that shows itself outside, asking to agree with the one inside.

A note on the passages: the references in parentheses are the Stephanus numbering, which locates each passage of the Phaedrus in any edition you have at hand, and the wording varies from one translation to another. To see the whole dialogue in the order in which it unfolds, start with Plato's Phaedrus: summary and how to read it.

Continue: Plato's Phaedrus: summary and how to read it · Plato's rhetoric: leading souls or only convincing? · I forget everything I read: what Plato says about it · What is hasty generalization?
Source class: Fedro, de Platão