Sallis (1996) – o belo

(Sallis1996)

Now the beautiful, as we said, shone bright amidst these visions, and in this world below we apprehend it through the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight is the keenest mode of perception vouchsafed us through the body; wisdom (phronesis), indeed, we cannot see thereby—how passionate had been our desire for her, if she had granted us so clear an image of herself to gaze upon—nor yet any other of those beloved things, except the beautiful; for the beautiful alone this has been ordained, to be most manifest to sense (ekphanestaton) and most lovely of them all (Fedro 250 d-e).

With this statement Socrates   makes it clear that what, from the human standpoint, distinguishes the beautiful from all the other beings that lie beyond the heavens is not simply that in itself the beautiful shines more brilliantly for those in attendance at the divine banquet. It is not simply a matter of its shining more or less brilliantly but rather a matter of its shining in a radically different way. To men the beautiful itself shines, not simply by itself, not immediately, but only through beautiful things, only through its “earthly” images. What distinguishes the beautiful is that it shines in the region of the visible, the “earthly,” and thus renders being accessible to man in his condition of being bound to the visible through his body. [1] In the first instance, the beautiful is that eidos which is most manifest to man in his embodied condition, that eidos which shows itself as such, which shines forth, in the midst of the visible. The beautiful is that “original” which shines amidst images in such a way as to open up and make manifest for man the difference separating image from “original.” Still more fundamentally regarded, “the beautiful” names the way in which being itself shines forth in the midst of the visible. An openness to this shining forth belongs among the most basic conditions pertaining to the beginning of philosophy.