Image and Argument in Plato's Republic by Marina Berzins McCoy;

Author:Marina Berzins McCoy; [McCoy;, Marina Berzins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438479149
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2020-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Image of the Sun

The central descriptions of the forms in the Republic are images rather than exacting descriptions of the forms. Yet relatively little commentary exists on how and why images are used to describe the forms, rather than some other mode of expression.1 This question is particularly pressing in light of the criticisms of imagery that will come in Book Ten. In this chapter, I explore the use of imagery to describe the forms in the comparison of the form of the good to the sun and in the image of the divided line, while the next chapter will undertake to examine the image of the cave. Here, my task is not so much to provide an account of Plato’s metaphysics as to examine how and why Plato uses imagery to describe the forms, and why they are best described through images rather than through some sort of image-free language.

Language is a human reality and we cannot automatically suppose that language and reality immediately exist in a perfect, one-to-one correspondence. Plato’s contemporaries and recent predecessors were well aware of this fact. For example, this possibility was already countenanced by Gorgias in his essay “On Non-Being,” in which he playfully argues for a separation between language, thought, and being, such that rhetoric is free to say whatever the rhetorician likes without any necessary commitment to the truth. When Plato takes up this topic, he does so not with a naïve assumption at play that language and reality must correspond. Rather, he writes in a cultural milieu in which the sophists sought wisdom but, in many cases, detached wisdom from truth-seeking, where truth is understood to be intelligible and beyond one’s own power or creativity. For example, in Plato’s Protagoras, Protagoras describes wisdom as euboulia, something like the capacity to make prudential practical judgments that young men in the city will need to possess in order to be successful at politics (Prot. 318e–19a). Protagoras’s idea that “the human being is the measure of all things” sums up his relativistic perspective on knowledge. In the Theaetetus, Socrates presents Protagorean relativism as a form of epistemology in which knowledge is reducible to perception (Theaet. 151e–79b). While the Theaetetus rejects this view, it is also clear that the view is appealing to consider, insofar as it attends to the fact that all truth-seeking begins, and must begin, with the experience of the subject.

Although Socrates gives an account of the forms, his caveats about how he can speak about them and his expressions of his own ignorance suggest that he is not a naïve rationalist. Instead, the middle books make clear that he shows awareness of a possible gap between how we see the world and the nature of being itself. The divided line image presents a view of reality in which the world of sensible experience taken at face value is not a reliable place in which to find knowledge. The forms are the true objects of knowledge. But neither does Socrates suggest that the forms are easy to know, or that language can adequately capture them.

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