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bcde“I do know that very well,” he said.
“Then you also know that they make additional use of visible forms, and make
their arguments about them, even though they’re thinking not about these but about
those things these are images of, since it’s in regard to the square itself, and its diagonal
itself, that they’re making those arguments, and not in regard to the one that they draw,
and likewise in the other cases; these very things that they model and draw, which also
have their own shadows and images in water, they are now using as images in their turn,
in an attempt to see those things themselves that one could not see* in any other way
than by the power of thinking.”
“What you’re saying is true,” he said.
“The latter, then, is what I meant by the intelligible form, and it’s for the inquiry
about it that the soul is forced to make use of presuppositions, not going to the source,
because it doesn’t have the power to step off above its presuppositions, but using as
images those things that are themselves imaged down below, in comparison with which
these images are reputed to be of preeminent clarity and are treated with honor.”
“I understand,” he said; “you’re talking about the things dealt with by geometrical
studies and the arts akin to that.”
“Then understand me to mean the following by the other segment of the intel-
ligible part [D]: what rational speech itself gets hold of by its power of dialectical
motion, making its presuppositions not sources but genuinely standing places, like
steppingstones and springboards, in order that, by going up to what is presupposi-
tionless at the source of everything and coming into contact with this, by following
back again the things that follow from it, rational speech may descend in that way to
a conclusion, making no more use in any way whatever of anything perceptible, but
dealing with forms themselves, arriving at them by going through them, it ends at
forms as well.”
“I understand,” he said, “though not sufficiently, because you seem to me to be
talking about a tremendous amount of work; however, I understand that you want to
mark off that part of what is and is intelligible that’s contemplated by the knowledge
that comes from dialectical thinking as being clearer than what’s contemplated by
what are called arts, which have presuppositions as their starting points. Those who
contemplate things by means of the arts are forced to contemplate them by thinking
and not by sense perception, but since they examine things not by going up to the
source but on the basis of presuppositions, they seem to you to have no insight into
them, even though, by means of their starting point, they’re dealing with things that
are intelligible. And you seem to me to be calling the activity of geometers and such
people thinking but not insight, on the grounds that thinking is something in between
opinion and insight.”
“You took it in utterly sufficiently,” I said. “Along with me, take it too that for the
four segments of the line there are these four kinds of experiences that arise in the soul,
active insight for the highest and thinking for the second, and assign the names trust to
the third and imagination to the last, drawing them up as a proportion and holding that,
in the same manner these experiences have their shares of clarity, the things they’re
directed to have corresponding shares of truth.”
“I understand,” he said, “and I go along with it and rank them as you say.”*A geometrical line is understood as having no breadth, and a plane figure as having no depth. A
drawing in the sand, a shape cut out of some flat material, or even any appearance in our pictorial imagina-
tions must falsify what it images if it is to image it at all.