Pure Intelligence in the Attainment of Pure Truth: From Socrates (vegetarian) – Glaucon Dialogue in “The Republic” by Plato (vegetarian), Part 2 of 2

“Socrates continues with, ‘The spangled Heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other great artist, which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw them would appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he would never dream of thinking that in them he could find the true equal or the true double, or the truth of any other proportion.

In astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems, and let the Heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right way and so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.’

‘A thing,’ Socrates says, ‘which I would rather call useful; that is, if sought after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in any other spirit, useless. Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.

And so, Glaucon, we have at last arrived at the hymn of dialectic. This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but which the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for sight, as you may remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold the real animals and stars, and last of all the Sun himself. And so with dialectic; when a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.

Dear Glaucon, you should behold not an image only but the absolute truth, according to my notion. Whether what I told you would or would not have been a reality I cannot venture to say; but you would have seen something like reality; of that I am confident.’”