Quotes About Self-evidently

my main objection to Mr. Graham's analogy was the implication that this 'dignity' was something one possessed or did not by a fluke of nature; and if one did not self-evidently have it, to strive after it would be as futile as an ugly woman trying to make herself beautiful.

Plato's distinction between lovers of opinion and philosophers is a distinction between those who embrace present particulars just as they self-evidently are and those who instead recognize absent universals as what makes particulars into what they are. The implicit link between philosophy and emancipation is clear here. Emancipation is nothing if not the refusal to rest content with what is merely present.