“When one tries to get at what each thing is in itself,” Plato has Socrates say in the Republic, by asking the inconvenient questions, sifting through the answers, and “relying on reason without any aid from the senses,” then he has mastered the dialectic. He will stand “at the summit of the intellectual realm,” just like the man who stood on the mountaintop after escaping from the cave and saw the sun, and see “the Good in Itself” by an act of pure thought.23 Not only will he know the truth, he will be prepared to act on it. He will be ready to change the world in the light of truth and a
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