The Thinker 129
along to get along. Socrates will not do so: he is always ready to off er
his perceptions, no matter how unpleasant or unpop u lar they may
be. He never trims his truth and never backs down. Socrates: the
man (is he maybe the only man?) who doesn’t lie.
But Plato does more. Plato seeks the Truth in its absolute form,
and when he feels he has found it, he declares it to the world. The
Republic is the culmination of a rich life’s hard and joyful intellec-
tual work, and it declares its ambitions openly. This is how it is! If
you would know what justice and virtue and beauty genuinely are,
then read these pages. And who is to say that Plato is not right?
Twenty- fi ve hundred years have passed, and we still cannot get him
out of our minds—he has, in fact, done much to create our minds.
To think is to Platonize, to Platonize is to think.
But others will come along (one hopes) and attempt to do better,
or to do for themselves, what Plato did. Their road will be diffi cult,
as the thinker’s always is. More than likely they will begin in pov-
erty and isolation; as time passes they’ll be shouldered aside by the
ambitious and the guileful. They’ll be mocked by those who live
only in the Self and only for the things of this world. The power ful
and the adept will laugh at them. But even early on, as they enter
the fi rst phase of their lives as thinkers, they’ll have one of the
greatest satisfactions a human being can have: they won’t lie. They’ll
follow Socrates, and they’ll look out at the world, and with what-
ever mix of irony and sweetness and exasperation, they will describe
it as it is to them. When others trim and sidestep, they will have the
satisfaction of voicing honest perceptions. For what do they have to
lose? They are already poor. They have no wish to ascend in the
world. We all should go about speaking our truth with the confi -
dence of boys who are sure of a dinner, Emerson says. But how few
of us do— even when our dinners are assured for the rest of our days.
Not lying, telling the truth, creates a sense of inner well- being that
is like nothing else. Candor is to the spirit what a hard physical