The Chariot of the Soul

In the Phaedrus, Plato compares the soul to a winged chariot drawn by two horses and guided by a charioteer. The charioteer is reason; one horse is noble, well-bred, and obedient (answering to spirit), the other crooked, unruly, and earthward-pulling (answering to appetite). The image gives the tripartite soul vivid, mythic form and explains why the inner life is so often a struggle.

The fall and the wings

Once, the myth says, souls journeyed in the procession of the gods around the rim of heaven and beheld the Forms — Justice, Temperance, Beauty — in their full splendor. But the unruly horse drags the chariot down; the soul loses its wings, sinks, and is bound into a mortal body, retaining only a clouded memory of what it once saw. The wing, Plato says, is the part of the soul most akin to the divine, nourished by beauty, wisdom, and goodness.

Love regrows the wings

Earthly beauty re-awakens the buried memory through recollection, and the rush of love is precisely the painful, joyful regrowing of the soul's wings as it strains back toward the vision of the Forms. The myth thus binds together Plato's psychology, his epistemology, and his account of love as the soul's path of return.