The soul is born in beauty and feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life. If we read Plato the way Plotinus did, and understand Psyche the way Apuleius did, and experience soul as did Petrarch and Dante, then psyche is the life of our aesthetic responses, that sense of taste in relation with things, that thrill or pain, disgust or expansion of breast: those primordial aesthetic reactions of the heart are soul itself speaking.
Psyche’s first trait, and the way we know her first, is neither by her labors, the work of soul-making, nor by her sufferings for love, nor in her oppression in lostness, the absence and deprivation of soul—these in the Apuleian tale all come later. We know her first by her primary characteristic given with her nature: Psyche is beautiful.
— The Thought of the Heart, The Heart of Beauty