Plato is solving a problem he himself created. The argument works only if you accept that the soul arrives trailing knowledge from elsewhere — a prior realm of pure forms against which every imperfect earthly instance is measured and found wanting. It is an elegant solution, and it is a departure. Homer's figures do not recollect the eternal; they perceive, and what they perceive presses into them. The middle voice holds: something is undergone, not retrieved. Plato replaces that undergoing with an ascent-logic — what the soul truly knows, it knew before embodiment, and learning is the labor of climbing back toward what the body obscured.

Notice what this move costs. If knowledge is recollection, then the new thing encountered — the strange face, the surprising grief, the desire that has no precedent — becomes evidence of something already possessed and temporarily mislaid. Experience becomes confirmation rather than encounter. The soul is not opened by what it meets; it is reminded of what it already, elsewhere, more truly is. That grammar has been extraordinarily durable. The therapeutic traditions that promise you will "reconnect with your true self," the spiritual practices that frame awakening as return — they are running the same logic, descended almost without modification from this argument in the Phaedo.