What about someone who believes in beautiful things but doesn’t believe in the beautiful itself and isn’t able to follow anyone who could lead him to the knowledge of it? Don’t you think he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state? Isn’t this dreaming: whether asleep or awake, to think that a likeness is not a likeness but rather the thing itself that it is like?

In Book 5, Socrates explains what distinguishes the lover of sights and sounds, the pseudo-intellectual, from the true philosopher. The lover of sights and sounds takes the sensible objects around him for the most real things, not recognizing that there is a higher level of reality in the intelligible realm. In particular, he goes around talking about beauty, billing himself as an expert on beauty, and yet he does not even realize that there is such a thing as the Form of the Beautiful, which is the cause of all sensible beauty.