There is no hope of a cessation of evil for the states (of Hellas) and, in my opinion, none for mankind—except through a personal union between political power and philosophy and a forcible disqualification of those common natures that now follow one of these two pursuits to the exclusion of the other. The union may be achieved in either of the two ways. Either the philosophers must become kings in our states or else the people who are now called kings and potentates must take genuinely and thoroughly to philosophy.

(Republic 473)

III

Who is the philosopher? And who the king?

The philosopher, as has been truly defined, is one who loves wisdom. But then what is wisdom? Wisdom of what? I see a rose, I see a graph, I perceive an emotion, I think a thing. It could only be the knower of all these diverse manifestations of perceiving—perceptions in thought or, so to say in the objective world—he alone the wise one. If you say you see a rose—which is one sort of knowledge—then the knowing of this knowledge, or the understanding of this knowledge of the rose—is real knowledge. Hence it might not be inaccurate to say wisdom is the knowledge of knowledge. But what then is knowledge? There is a being who knows. Then what relation is there between the being who knows to the knowledge he thinks he has of the being. Here he who knows and that which knows become the same entity. Hence wisdom can now be defined as the recognition of self-knowledge. Here there is neither subject nor object. Experience is all. In that undivided existence there is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, only the recognition that everything is the all—or rather the one, not two. And differentiation is only a working hypothesis for man to exist and function in a dualist world.