Philosophy in Dialogue: Plato's Many Devices

1. Plato's Book of Images Nicholas D. Smith

3 3 1 Plato’s Book of Images Nicholas D. Smith The things they mould and draw, which have shadows and images of themselves in water, these they treat in turn as images, seeking those Forms which can be conceived only in thought. Republic 510e1–511a1 Plato’s Republic is a book of images. Its most famous image, perhaps, is the image in which he has Socrates compare all human beings to prisoners in a cave. But the Republic is also the locus classicus of that most famous image of the ship of state, whose brave ruler is compared to the ship’s captain (488a1–489c7; see also 389c4–d5). The book itself begins with a somewhat spooky image reminiscent of the heroic katabasis or descent.1 And indeed, considerably more imagery of various kinds can be found throughout the Republic.2 There is, however, something at least a bit unnerving about all of this imagery. Plato’s own most famous view of image-makers is notoriously negative: Neither will the imitator know, nor opine rightly concerning the nobility or vulgarity of his imitations. . . . On this issue, then, as it seems, we clearly agree that the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning of what he imitates, and that imitation is not serious. (602a8–9, 602b6–8) Does Plato’s own condemnation of image-makers amount to a selfcondemnation ? In book 5, the reader is warned that those who trade in images rather than the realities they image may be likened to those who sleep and merely dream (476c2–8). Is it, then, that Plato intended his Republic simply to lull us to sleep and false dreams, like Descartes’ malin genie ? 4 N I C H O L A S D . S M I T H It will not come as news to hear that the Republic has been read in many, sometimes radically, different ways. On the basis of worries such as those I have already expressed, some interpreters have argued that we should understand the Republic as a kind of self-deconstructing comedy,3 whose arguments and specific prescriptions should not be understood as spoudai`o~. This very radical understanding of the work, however, confounds the way the work has been read since antiquity—book 2 of Aristotle’s Politics plainly suggests that if Plato had intended his Republic as a joke, his best student didn’t “get it.” Throughout most of the history of interpretation of this text, as far as we know of it,4 the Republic has been understood as a serious work of political philosophy.5 In this essay, I suggest a somewhat different way of understanding Plato’s greatest work. In the view I propose, Plato’s work is intended neither as humor (though it is sometimes funny) nor as a straightforward blueprint for political reform, but as an educational work, whose educational methodology is best understood in the light of the discussion of mathematical methodology that we find in the work itself. In brief, the Republic presents the reader with a series of images that are not at all intended in the imitative way Plato disparages in book 10, but to be used as images that provoke thought (diavnoia), in much the same way as Plato describes the proper use of images in the quotation with which I began.6 The Uses and Abuses of Images As I said in the introduction, Plato compares cognitive contact with images with dreaming, and for the most part the comparison is not at all intended to be favorable. But not all dreams are mere phantasms (see 599a2): in book 7, he has Socrates credit those engaged in mathematical studies with “dreaming about what is” (533b8–c1), for although their reliance on assumptions and images prevents them from achieving the “clear waking vision” of the Forms only dialecticians can achieve, their method does allow them to make some contact with the really real (533b6–7). In fact, we sometimes find that Plato prefers to compare this use of images not to being asleep and dreaming, but to the process of awakening from doxastic slumbers: This, then, is just what I was trying to explain just now, about things that are provocative of thought and those that are not, where provocative things are those that lead to perceptions that are at the same time 5 P L A T O ’ S B O O K O F...