120 Ancient Ideals
understands that what he thought was real isn’t. The images he
saw in front of him are mere shadows cast by objects passing before
the fi re at the back of the cave. This life is all illusion, all a show. He
understands that what most people live their lives for amounts to
nothing: they do not possess the Truth; their two is not the real
two; their three not the real three. He is able to look at all the pris-
oners locked into their seats and see how they suff er. It is to this
point that Socrates arrived. He broke away from the chains that
bound him, and by his questioning he understood the nature of the
illusions that enchanted his fellows. And for this, naturally, they
hated him.
But other than pointing to their illusions with his incessant ques-
tioning and declaring that the images on the screen were nothing
more than that, images, there was not a great deal that Socrates was
able to do. (At least Socrates as he is depicted in the early dialogues,
when Plato renders him as he presumably was.) His irony and ig-
norance served him brilliantly at the moment of death, but he never
really created a doctrine as to how to live. At the end, he was still in
the cave, though he was by far the freest individual living there. Only
Socrates could move at his ease among the benches, only Socrates
could get back and look over the machinery of illusion that created
the fantasia that mesmerized his fellow Athenians.
Socrates saw that all his fellow citizens could apprehend were
individual items, single objects that they regarded according to
how much use they might be. They were ruled by their desires.
Someone who only cares about what he can do with this or that
object does not care what it has in common with all other objects of
its sort. All he cares about is whether he can profi t from the item or not.
Objects are only real to him if they can satisfy a desire. The objects
passing in the cave are a parade of discrete items— rather than ele-
ments in a dra ma, say— because most people look at l ife as a sequence
of things that they can or cannot use. Socrates sees this and sees