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In the Phaedo he says that these are the causes to us of reminiscence; because disciplines are nothing else than reminiscences of middle dianoetic forms, from which the productive powers of nature being derived and inspired, give birth to all the mundane phenomena.
For the mathematical sciences, when properly studied, move the inherent knowledge of the soul; awaken its intelligence; purify its dianoetic power; call forth its essential forms from their dormant retreats; remove that oblivion and ignorance which are congenial with our birth; and dissolve the bonds arising from our union with an irrational nature.
It is requisite, therefore, that the dianoetic power exercising itself in these, should draw forth the principles of these from their latent retreats, and should contemplate them not in images, but as subsisting in herself in impartible involution.
Here, in the first place, as we have observed in the notes on that book, the road above between the fire and the fettered men, indicates that there is a certain ascent in the cave itself from a more abject to a more elevated life. By this ascent, therefore Plato signifies the contemplation of dianoetic objects in the mathematical disciplines.
For as the shadows in the cave correspond to the shadows of visible objects, and visible objects are the immediate images of dianoetic forms, or those ideas which the soul essentially participates, it is evident that the objects from which these shadows are formed must correspond to such as are dianoetic.
Rare jargon we made of it; talking of cosmothetie idealism or hypothetical dualism, of noetic and dianoetic principles, of hylozoism and hypostasis, and demonstrating the most undemonstrable propositions by appeals to the law of contradiction or of excluded middle.
But the aim is after all the life of the intellect, and the "dianoetic" virtues are superior to the practical. Theoretic contemplation stands far higher than practical activity.
This power also knows the universal in sensible particulars, as that every man is a biped, but it knows only the oti, or that a thing is, but is ignorant of the dioti, or why it is: knowledge of the latter kind being the province of the dianoetic power.
Whence is it then that the dianoetic power concludes thus confidently that the Proposition is true of all triangles?
But dianoetic forms or ideas imitate the intellectual, which have a prior subsistence, render the order of soul similar to the intellectual order, and comprehend all things in a secondary degree.
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