Platon: Penseur du visuel (review)

Recent philosophers and cultural critics (e.g., Foucault and Rorty) have written a new chapter in the long history of anti-Platonism, making Plato the evil genius of a visual prejudice allegedly infecting the heart of Western metaphysics. Some find it contradictory that Plato expresses anti-visual thoughts but seems nevertheless deeply pro-visual; thus, his frequent use of visual language confuses his project. Others (the present reviewer included) have argued that a vision rather than a set of propositions constitutes Plato's philosophy. Although it is widely recognized that vision is an important idea in Plato's thought, little has been done to clarify the full extent and function of visual language and ideas (for which Maiatsky uses the unfamiliar term 'visuality'). Maiatsky fills this lacuna, proceeding on a basis that is explicitly historical and contextual. He argues that, while being the first to systematically thematize visuality in Western philosophy, Plato is simultaneously its "first prosecutor, defender, and judge" (16).

After a useful overview of Platonic scholarship on vision, visual language, and metaphors (16–46), the book is divided into three parts of three chapters each. "The Citizen's Look" deals with the rarely discussed political aspects of vision in Plato. Maiatsky shows here how vision provides a social bond for the city, how the play of many kinds of looks is frequent and constitutive in the city as in the dialogues, and that a complex political visuality informs the dialogues. "Seeing and Knowing" is epistemological, analyzing familiar distinctions between physical and mental vision, appearance and knowledge, and the theory of Ideas for their specifically visual meaning. "Being Seen and Being" emphasizes metaphysical and cosmological aspects of Platonic visuality.

Extended discussions of several dialogues reveal important aspects and functions of visuality. Laches (ch. 2) is "a veritable introduction to Platonic political and moral optics" (63). Phaedo (ch. 4) focuses on the soul's two kinds of vision and Phaedrus exhibits the soul's visual life and "visual dietetics." Theaetetus (ch. 6) deals with the soul's eye, vision and perception, and seeing in relation to knowing. Timaeus (ch. 7) emphasizes the cosmic significance of the demiurge's invisible paradigm, creation through imitation of the invisible, and the visible as an incentive to the invisible. The just city of the Republic (ch. 8) makes visible the invisible and, of course, centers on the grand—and visual—metaphors of the Sun, Line, and Cave.

Although there is an antinomy in Plato's visual terms and concepts, Maiatsky sees it as an inducement to synthesis rather than as an exclusive alternation. The distinction and opposition between vision and thought existed in Greek language and thought prior to Plato, with seeing already used metaphorically for knowing. Plato's innovations are to express the opposition in terms of a distinction between two types of vision, rather than between vision and something else, and to claim that the two types, though opposed, are also related to each other. Vision is ambivalent or ambiguous, since it is both an obstacle and a stimulus to true knowledge; certain things we see "make us think." The same thing goes for the invisibility of virtue that does not exclude permanent observability of its visible manifestations; and Maiatsky correctly sees that the distinction between appearance and reality is moral and political before it is epistemological and metaphysical.

Besides bringing together the many different types and levels of Plato's use of visual terms and concepts, Maiatsky recognizes that Plato's dialogues are addressed to readers at different levels, appreciates Plato's use of plausible arguments and verisimilitude, of myths and irony. He argues that the apparent antinomies in Platonic thought about vision, in fact, constitute its positive contributions to Western thinking. So, rather than visual language hindering his project, it has assisted in its accomplishment. Plato takes the existing mix of usages, introduces distinctions, and transforms a confused usage into something properly metaphoric, i.e., conscious of semantic transpositions introduced. Plato's achievement was to separate the domains of the proper and...