 Those optimistic moments are not easy to sustain. To make beauty effective for learning Plato needs to rely on its desirability (as foregrounded in Konstan 2015) while also counting on the soul’s ability to transfer its desiring from the visible to the intelligible (see Philebus 65e). Plato is ambivalent about visual experience. Sight may be metaphorically like knowledge, but metonymically it calls to mind the ignorant senses (Pappas 2015, 49).