The trap is in the word "recover." Not learn, not receive — recover, as though knowledge were a buried treasure awaiting excavation rather than something the soul might need to build painfully from friction with the world. Plato here makes suffering optional: if understanding is already there, always and eternally possessed, then the whole mess of not-knowing is merely surface disturbance. The geometry lesson with the slave boy is elegant precisely because it makes the soul's difficulty vanish. Ask the right questions, and what was always yours returns.

This is where the pneumatic preference announces itself most clearly. Anamnesis — unforgetting — is a spiritual solution to a soul problem. It says: beneath your confusion lies a pristine interior untouched by time and body and wound. The body remembers nothing; the immortal part was never absent from the truth. No descent required, only the right interlocutor applying the right pressure. What the passage quietly cancels is the possibility that ignorance might be real, that the soul's not-knowing might be generative rather than temporary, that something new — genuinely new, never before possessed — might arrive through the very suffering that recollection promises to dissolve.