102 Ancient Ideals
to aim for, life fl attens out and becomes empty. The world goes a
blander shade of pale. Without ideals, life lacks signifi cant meaning.
The person who lives for desire can experience many satisfactions,
but they are temporary. There is the feeling of plea sure when the
clothes are purchased, the new home secured, the promotion sealed.
But these satisfactions do not last: every satisfi ed desire is replaced
by a half dozen more that are yet to be fulfi lled. By committing to
ideals, men and women can escape the alternating peaks and low
points that the life of desire creates and live in a more continuously
engaged and satisfying way— though this way, of course, is not
without serious dangers.
The ancient world confronts us with a third ideal, along with
courage and compassion, one that, though it burns with a singular
intensity, may not be available to all. This is the ideal of the thinker.
Plato is its great exponent and exemplar. All philosophy and all im-
ages of the phi los o pher in the West descend from him and from his
teacher, Socrates. To think seriously is to Platonize; to Platonize is
to think. “Great havoc makes he among our originalities” (633), says
Emerson of Plato, and it is so.
Plato teaches not only a grand system of thought; he also teaches
us about the life of the thinker. Like the hero, the true thinker is a
part of a small community. He is one of the few. But unlike the hero,
who is supported by his tribe or his city—as Sarpedon in The Iliad
insists that he and all warriors are— the thinker’s relation to com-
munity is fi lled with tension; sometimes it puts him at risk. The
archetypal thinker, as Plato describes him to us and as time corrob-
orates the vision, is beset with privations. He surrenders much of this
world in order to realize another. The things most men and women
live for— power, plea sure, position— mean nothing to the thinker,
except as they arise as impediments along the way. To attain his
goal, which is Truth, the thinker often has to contend with poverty,
loneliness, the dismaying weight of so- called past wisdom, the mis-