The Poetics of Phantasia: Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics by Anne Sheppard

Author:Anne Sheppard [Sheppard, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-13T06:00:00+00:00

In this passage Plato’s use of a variety of what we might call ‘framing’ techniques to introduce the characters of his dialogues is presented as a procession32 of Socratic interlocutors, according to which Socrates and his interlocutor(s) may be presented either in person or in three possible types of narrated dialogue: through someone who has heard them discussing, or through others who have learned of the discussion from those who actually heard Socrates, or through others who have learned of it from narrators of this second type. The author draws an explicit parallel with the levels of the Neoplatonic universe – ‘In this too he is evidently again imitating the order of reality’ – and sets out how each level in the Neoplatonic universe offers images of the level above it. He declares that the first way of presenting the characters in a dialogue is analogous to the intelligibles. Two of the three types of narrated dialogue are then reiterated: one is analogous to the objects of discursive thought, while the other (presentation through those who have learned from those who actually heard it) is analogous to the objects of perception. The remaining way of presenting characters (through others who have learned of it from the narrators of the second type) is not mentioned in the reiteration but presumably would correspond to the ‘images of the objects of perception, like the images produced by painters’ or the shadows and reflections of the Divided Line which once again lies behind the way in which the Neoplatonic scheme of reality is presented here.33

Plato’s modes of presenting conversations are divided up in the same way in Proclus’ commentary on the Parmenides but here with explicit reference to phantasia as well as to eikōn, paradeigma and analogy. The Parmenides opens with an elaborate framing of the conversation between Parmenides, Zeno and the young Socrates which forms the bulk of the dialogue: Cephalus is telling Glaucon and Adeimantus what he heard from Antiphon who was reporting the conversation as he heard it from Pythodorus, who was actually present at the encounter between Socrates, Zeno and Parmenides.34 Proclus treats this series of nested frames for the dialogue as a set of four conversations parallel to four levels in the universe:

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