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139 Chapter Three Breaking In Reversal and Reality, Or, How Socrates, as the Real Image of the Good, Fulfills the Sun, the Line, and the Cave Images by Overturning Them The Overburdened Image An image is volatile by nature. It is not simply a thing lying next to other things, because its own reality does not simply belong to it but lies in part elsewhere. We look through a photograph of a loved one as much as we look at it, in the sense that our attention moves to the person that we know and doesn’t come to a stop at the colored shapes on the surface. An image is in a decisive way what it is not. In this respect, we ought to think of an image not primarily as an object, but as a task to be accomplished: it has a goal beyond itself that must be reached, and it is itself constituted by the movement toward this goal. Plato captures precisely this inner tension of images in the Phaedo, where he describes them not primarily as things but as actions, using the verbs ὀρέγεται and προθύμεται, meaning “to reach out toward” and “to be eager for” (Phd., 75b). Images are a kind of movement, or better, a striving, since this movement is quite indeterminate. But if images are a movement or a task, we must at once acknowledge that the task is, at least in one respect, an impossible one. What images strive for and long to be is something that they necessarily, constitutionally, “fall short of” (ἔστιν δὲ αὐτοῦ φαυλότερα), for if they did not they would thereby cease to be images.1 1. To be sure, it is also the case that if they merely fell short of their goal, they would also cease to be images. They are thus not merely movement, we might say, but at the same time possess an inherent rest. In this they display a paradox similar to that of reason or love, the poverty and fullness of mediation. We will develop this point in the coda. 140 breaking in: reversal and reality Now, if images in general are an impossible task, this is much more the case for those meant to represent the good, the “reality” of which lies not only beyond images, but beyond everything at all. It is no surprise, then, that Plato’s idiom becomes especially elusive the moment he enters upon this core problem in the Republic. As is well known, Socrates shows a profound reserve regarding the idea of the good, which lies “beyond being” (509b). Gadamer points out that Plato never refers to the good in the neuter form eidos , but only in the feminine form idea, which emphasizes more the looking toward it than the look of the thing itself.2 Indeed, Socrates balks at talking “about things one doesn’t know as if one does know” (506c), and refuses to attempt the sort of definition for goodness that he has given for the virtues (506d). Such reticence is not merely rhetorical, but seems to be compelled by the very nature of the good.3 As Rafael Ferber observes, that which makes intentionality (i.e., the relation between the mind and being), possible, must necessarily be itself “atentional,” or else we would fall into an infinite regress .4 Transcendence, as we have seen, is the very essence of the good, because of its connection with the “in-itself” being of things. As Voegelin puts it, “concerning the content of the Agathon, nothing can be said at all. . . . The transcendence of the Agathon makes immanent propositions concerning its content impossible.”5 At the same time, however, Socrates does not simply abandon the good to sheer inaccessibility, but speaks of it as an object 2. Gadamer, The Idea of the Good, 27–28. Friedländer makes a similar observation. Plato: An Introduction, 16–18. Cf. Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 3, 24, and vol. 2, 283. Jaeger suggests that “eidos” refers to “types,” whereas “idea” points to the unity underlying a multiplicity. Monique Dixsaut claims that Plato uses the term “idea” precisely when he wants to avoid the term “eidos,” which seems in these cases to represent a definable essence. Platon et la question de la pensée, vol. 1 of Études Platoniciennes (Paris: Vrin, 2000), 126–27. 3. There are some—particularly the Tübingen school—who insist that nothing but prudence kept Plato from discoursing directly on the nature of the good. For a recent representation of this view...

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