From the Beginning to Plato

380 PLATO: ETHICS AND POLITICS
some, but not all, of the courage and imagination needed to flesh out his picture
of a class of rulers unlike any rulers he knew.
VI
Though they can be allowed no monopoly on altruism, philosophers must be
extraordinarily motivated to serve others if they are to merit the power that Plato
would place in their hands. At the heart even of his social philosophy lies the
theory of Forms. Within both personal and civic relations he expects these to be
not distracting but inspiring.
In the Phaedrus Socrates makes an extraordinary linkage between Forms and
faces. Of all the Forms, Beauty offers the clearest image of itself to our sight, so
that ‘it is the most apparent and the most loved’ (2250d3–e1). We then read that
the lover would offer a sacrifice to the boy ‘as to a statue and a god’ (251a6–7),
as if a boy, unlike a god, could be both. He is clearly in a state of deep
confusion, and we should not be too quick to insist that what he really sees in the
boy is the image and not Beauty itself. In (and not merely while) looking at him,
he is ‘carried back’ to the Form (250e2–3): passionate seeing is infused by
unconscious recollecting. When he turns his attention from body to soul, the
same confusion recurs. He now recollects not a Form but a god, i.e., at least a
mode of apprehending and realizing Forms. But gazing at the boy without
grasping that he is remembering a god, he naturally credits the boy with the gifts
that he in fact owes to the god and transmits to the boy; mistaking material for
model, he supposes that he is imitating the boy even as he transmutes him
(252e7–253b1). The confusion is salutary, for it inspires the generosity (b7–8)
that does indeed make the lover godlike: it is through finding the boy ‘equal to a
god’ (255a1) that he becomes himself ‘possessed by a god’ (be). Appropriately
within his defence of a higher madness, Socrates is allowing that the Forms can
produce a moral revolution, replacing conventionality by authenticity (252a4–6),
through metaphysical bewilderment.
The same transition from inspiration by a body to displacement of interest
from body to soul was already an emphatic feature of the ladder of love in the
Symposium. The omission there of any mention of recollection, a theme that
Plato was developing about the same time in the Phaedo, can only be understood
as a sacrifice for the sake of simplicity and unity of presentation. Alternately
extending and raising his view, the lover shifts his interest from one body to all
beautiful bodies, to one soul, to the practices and laws that mould all beautiful
souls, to the branches of knowledge, and so to the most cognizable of all
beauties, the Form of Beauty itself (210a4–e1). The Form is explicitly grasped
only at the end, but must be supposed to have been exercising a subliminal
influence from the beginning. The lovers of sights and sounds in Republic Book
V, who not only lack but are incapable of knowledge of the Form, are fixated on
a plurality of beauties (476b4–c4, 479e1–2). Though they doubtless use the
general term ‘beautiful’, they are effectively nominalists and not realists about