Ratio et Fides. Robert E. Wood

and grasp intelligible constants that hold anytime and anyplace their instances are found. At the sensory level we are immersed in the biological desires evoked by sensory objects; at the intellectual level we are moved by deeper desires. This determines what is truly “up” in life: our relation to the eternal, to what is beyond time. When we begin to uncover the eternal relations, we stand more and more “in the light.”

      The cave condition is not only one of being chained by nature to sensations, it is being chained by culture to opinions (the realm of doxa or “how it seems” or opinion) that may or may not be correct. Traditional doxa provides the basic measures of truth and value without itself being subjected to measure. Plato’s work attempts to find a measure beyond cultural opinion.

      4.

      But the deeper point is to get us to reflect further, because the aim is to get us to see something of what Socrates calls “the Good,” the “Sun” of the intelligible world and the ultimate aim of philosophy, the final “Up,” the “Top of the Cosmos.” He asks us to think of geometric procedure as an aid. Geometry proceeds, not only by piecemeal insights—such as we might have gained by our initial reflection upon the proportionately drawn line. If you can think back to geometry classes, you will note that geometry has already moved “up” from geometric theorems to a few axioms and postulates, and then “down” by logical deduction to prove the theorems, linking them together in a single coherent whole in the system of geometry first developed by Euclid. Socrates suggests that we could move “up” further from the few axioms and postulates. What could that mean? It means moving from the few principles of each science toward “the One,” the single principle of all intellectual development. Socrates called the Good “the principle of the Whole.” It is what generates intellectual “light.”

      To see what that might be, think of what intellectual understanding is—as distinct from sensory experience. Consider geometry again. It began as geo-metria, that is, “earth measurement.” Metric regularities were discovered by builders through trial-and-error methods. Just as they carry an assortment of tools lying randomly in their tool bags, so they carry an assortment of metric regularities “lying randomly” in their minds. But what geometric science did was demonstrate the underlying intelligible unity of the whole metric region of experience. What is most surprising is that by pure deduction one could not only unify already discovered regularities, one could deduce not yet observed regularities without even looking or needing to look! But what is most startling—and remains so—is that the demonstration takes place solely in the mind through an act of reflective withdrawal from looking at and manipulating the “outer world.” One moves “inward” and “upward” from the “outside” spatiotemporal world up to the “eternal” world of underlying intelligible coherence. There is a movement from scattered multiplicity to unified wholeness.