Republic

Of course. And since they are two, each is one. That also. And in respect of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and all the ideas or forms, the same statement holds, that in itself each is one, but that by virtue of their communion with actions and bodies and with one another they present themselves everywhere, each as a multiplicity of aspects. Right, he said. This, then, said I, is my division. I set apart and distinguish those of whom you were just speaking, the lovers of spectacles and the arts, and men of action, and separate from them again those with whom our argument is concerned and who alone deserve the appellation of philosophers or lovers of wisdom. What do you mean? he said. The lovers of sounds and sights, I said, delight in beautiful tones and colors and shapes and in everything that art fashions out of these, but their thought is incapable of apprehending and taking delight in the nature of the beautiful in itself. Why, yes, he said, that is so. And on the other hand, will not those be few who would be able to approach beauty itself and contemplate it in and by itself? They would, indeed. He, then, who believes in beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it—do you think that his life is a dream or a waking? Just consider. Is not the dream state, whether the man is asleep or awake, just this: the mistaking of resemblance for identity? I should certainly call that dreaming, he said. Well, then, take the opposite case: the man whose thought recognizes a beauty in itself, and is able to distinguish that self-beautiful and the things that participate in it, and neither supposes the participants to be it nor it the participants—is his life, in your opinion, a waking or a dream state? He is very much awake, he replied. Could we not rightly, then, call the mental state of the one as knowing, knowledge, and that of the other as opining, opinion? Assuredly. Suppose, now, he who we say opines but does not know should be angry and challenge our statement as not true. Can we find any way of soothing him and gently winning him over, without telling him too plainly that he is not in his right mind? We must try, he said. Come, then, consider what we are to say to him, or would you have us question him in this fashion—premising that if he knows anything, nobody grudges it him, but we should be very glad to see him knowing something—but tell us this: Does he who knows know something or nothing? Do you reply in his behalf. I will reply, he said, that he knows something. Is it something that is or is not?