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They would be crazy to abandon the idyll of their ignorant and
servile condition for the sake of freedom and knowledge. What
do they do instead?
And if he once more had to compete with those perpetual prisoners
in forming judgments about those shadows while his vision was
still dim, before his eyes had recovered, and if the time a needed for
getting accustomed were not at all short, wouldn't he be the source
of laughter, and wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came
back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to
go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill
the man who attempts to release and lead up wouldn’t they kill him?
Platon’s (Glaucon’s) answer is as follows: “No doubt about it.” (Ibid
517.4.) Knowledge requires work. Only the palsied prophets get it for
free, though they are celebrated by the enslaved masses. “Wisdom
wearies, nothing is worthwhile; you shall not crave!” says Nietzsche,
who then adds, ,,this new table found I hanging even in the public
markets. Break up for me, O my brothers, break up also that new table!
The weary-o’-the-world put it up, and the preachers of death and the
jailer: for behold, it is also a sermon for slavery (Knechtschaft).” (KSA
IV.p.258.) To paraphrase Nietzsche: only chase the dogs away from
me, the lazy hiders and the busy swine.
According to the other version of the legend of Sais, those who draw
aside the curtain covering the truth find nothing. Or perhaps they do?
Schiller is sure they do, as is Novalis. repeat: the truth punishes those
who demean it. Those are the sort of people who demand the truth
immediately, without putting in the work it demands. They are the
sort who go to fortune-tellers and seers, and they deserve what they get.
Novalis tells this story in a different way. Truth does indeed
punish the one who violates it. But how? With himself. This is ex¬
actly what happens in Novalis’s Die Lehringen zu Sais (The Novices
of Sais), in a very philosophical way. It is no accident that Novalis
once shared a schoolyard with Hegel and Schelling. The most in¬
teresting part of his work is the comment he affixed to it. I must