Key Arguments

• Socrates explicitly asks whether ‘there is or is there not an absolute justice’ and then mentions ‘an absolute beauty and absolute good’, to which Simmias assents.
• He extends this to ‘absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything’.
• He establishes that Simmias has never ‘behold any of them with your eyes’ nor ‘reach[ed] them with any other bodily sense’.
• He argues that the ‘nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures’ is made by one who orders his ‘intellectual vision’ to form ‘the most exact conception of the essence of each thing which he considers’.
• He claims that ‘he attains to the purest knowledge of them who goes to each with the mind alone’, excluding all bodily senses from the act of thought.

Source Quotes

That is true. Well, but there is another thing, Simmias: Is there or is there not an absolute justice? Assuredly there is. And an absolute beauty and absolute good?

Assuredly there is. And an absolute beauty and absolute good? Of course. But did you ever behold any of them with your eyes?

Certainly not. Or did you ever reach them with any other bodily sense?—and I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything. Has the reality of them ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs? or rather, is not the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made by him who so orders his intellectual vision as to have the most exact conception of the essence of each thing which he considers?

Or did you ever reach them with any other bodily sense?—and I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything. Has the reality of them ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs? or rather, is not the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made by him who so orders his intellectual vision as to have the most exact conception of the essence of each thing which he considers? Certainly.

Certainly. And he attains to the purest knowledge of them who goes to each with the mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight or any other sense together with reason, but with the very light of the mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each; he who has got rid, as far as he can, of eyes and ears and, so to speak, of the whole body, these being in his opinion distracting elements which when they infect the soul hinder her from acquiring truth and knowledge—who, if not he, is likely to attain the knowledge of true being? What you say has a wonderful truth in it, Socrates, replied Simmias.

Key Concepts

• Well, but there is another thing, Simmias: Is there or is there not an absolute justice? Assuredly there is.
• And an absolute beauty and absolute good? Of course.
• but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything.
• Has the reality of them ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs?
• is not the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made by him who so orders his intellectual vision as to have the most exact conception of the essence of each thing which he considers?
• he attains to the purest knowledge of them who goes to each with the mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight or any other sense together with reason

Context

Building on his critique of the senses, Socrates introduces the realm of ‘absolute’ entities and argues that genuine knowledge of these essences belongs to the disembodied or least‑embodied operation of mind.