Yet another accusation from the gallery directs Socrates' inquiry in the beginning of Book VI.
Adeimantus believes the guardians they have created are monsters.
On the contrary, Socrates defends, their nobility and worth are beyond question, drawing on the parable of the pilot and his crew as an illustration. The parable opposes the wants of the majority with the authority of the truly fit leader.
The multitudes, Socrates explains, do not know what is best for them. They are to be ruled by one especially suited and trained to this end, and for the good of all. Socrates is obliged then to develop the relationship between the guardians and philosophy.
Guardians, he says, cease to be guardians when they abandon the truth, be minority or otherwise.
The final section of Book VI includes a series of wonderfully vivid and intelligible figures or metaphors that help clarify somewhat the Theory of Forms and the good.
Visibility, vision, and light are analogous to knowledge, the knower, and that which makes knowing possible, the good. The good is symbolized by sunlight, the vital means by which the sun not only sheds light on the world but nourishes that world.
Philosophy is a love of the light, an attempt to perceive and understand it in all its metaphorical manifestations. Everything else belongs to the world of the manifold, of shadows.
Finally the dialectic is the only way to ascend, as upon a staircase of ideas, to the good.
