The Platonic vocabulary is often skeptical and even antagonistic toward the uses of images. This denigration is attributed to the mutability of images, so that we could really apply this criticism to anything that changes, which would apply to all of the visible world. Among many other places in the Republic, Socrates makes the distinction clear by explaining how what we think about determines the very certainty of that thought:
Well then, consider that the truth of the soul is thus: Whenever truth and what is shine upon something, the mind attaches to this, it intellects and knows and appears to have intelligence. But whenever it attaches to that which is mixed with obscurity, that which comes to be and passes away, it has opinions and sees dimly, changing opinions here and there, and seems not to have intelligence (Republic 508d3-8). (1)
These two sides of opinion and knowledge, perishability and persistence, are, as Socrates will shortly explain, the sensible and intelligible realms. Socrates says there are two kinds of objects of the sensible realm, shadows, appearances and reflections, but then also those things of which these are the shadows, appearances and reflections. It is obvious that these mere reflections are inferior to the objects which they represent: animals, people, etc. It goes without saying, moreover, that everything in the sensible realm is inferior to anything in the intelligible realm.
Now here is the part I take particular interest in. Socrates says that all of the shadows, appearances and reflections in the sensible realm are images (τὰς εἰκόνας) of other things in the sensible realm. Because of this, they obviously have the least substantive mode of existence, and along with this, the lowest level of cognitive certainty. Yet image-language is precisely what Socrates employs, and is his own self-characterization of what he does, in the allegory of the cave. He tells us at the beginning of Book VII, as he is about to explain the cave allegory, “make an image [ἀπείκασον] of our nature in such a condition concerning education and lack of education” (514a1-2). (2) (3)
The question arises then, why are we using an image to describe a program of education the goal of which is to lead one away from images? This is especially curious because it comes right before Socrates exposition of philosophical education, beginning with arithmetic. Perhaps the allegory of the cave is a necessary propaedeutic before one begins— not to undertake such an education— but to even understand its purport and goal. Or perhaps because the uninitiated reader has not yet taken the first step to a philosophical education, he must be accommodated where he is at, in this case at the lowly level of understanding mere images, so that he can be taken where he needs to go.
REFERENCES:
(1) οὕτω τοίνυν καὶ τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ὧδε νόει· ὅταν μὲν οὗ καταλάμπει ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν, εἰς τοῦτο ἀπερείσηται, ἐνόησέν τε καὶ ἔγνω αὐτὸ καὶ νοῦν ἔχειν φαίνεται· ὅταν δὲ εἰς τὸ τῷ σκότῳ κεκραμένον, τὸ γιγνόμενόν τε καὶ ἀπολλύμενον, δοξάζει τε καὶ ἀμβλυώττει ἄνω καὶ κάτω τὰς δόξας μεταβάλλον, καὶ ἔοικεν αὖ νοῦν οὐκ ἔχοντι.
(2) ἀπείκασον τοιούτῳ πάθει τὴν ἡμετέραν φύσιν παιδείας τε πέρι καὶ ἀπαιδευσίας.
(3) Similarly in Book VI Socrates explicitly states that the ship of state metaphor, wherein the pilot is the true philosopher, gazing outside of the ship to guide the craft, is an image [εἰκών] (487e5).
I have often wondered about this. It is the glaring inconsistency in the Republic specifically, but all of Plato’s writings more generally.
It also plays into Plato’s excoriation of the poets, when he himself was self-consciously a literary master of the first order. Images and metaphor are his prime stock-in-trade.
Plato was too great of a genius for this not to have been entirely purposeful.
Your interpretation here has much to commend it. It is consistent with journey proposed in the Cave metaphor. It also reflects Plato’s, and presumably Socrates’, distrust of the written word, as outlined in the Seventh Letter.
However, I’ve also thought that there’s another viable interpretation out there, which I’m yet to fully flesh out. Perhaps the inconsistency has some ironic implication, one that more fully communicates Plato’s philosophical message. That seems to accord with other ironies in the Republic, for example the fact that the entire dialogue is a discourse of free thinking, free speaking citizens who propose what we would consider an illiberal tyranny of philosopher-aristocrats. (Or rather than Socrates’ abduction in Piraeus should be inverted into Socrates’ pilot-kingship of his abductors.)
Perhaps both interpretations are equivalent.
In any case, it is a matter of fascination and reflects the true literary and philosophical depth of the Republic.
Thanks for your article.
Hi again!
I think your point here is an important one, viz. that the treatment of images as epistemically inferior does not entail that they are epistemically worthless. This is important, among other reasons, because it suggests that when we think about the line and about where Socrates’ discourse in the dialogue falls on it, we need to account for the fact that he’s making use of images. It seems clear enough that Socrates doesn’t claim to have the non-hypothetical knowledge of the Good that he associates with the highest level of the line. That by itself seems to tell against the interpretation of his distinction between knowledge and opinion according to which we can have opinions only about changing things and knowledge only about unchanging things, since Socrates’ lack of knowledge about the Good seems to entail that he has opinions about it. But the repeated use of images makes me wonder whether we should interpret the stages of the line not in terms of casting each previous stage aside, so that once one begins to think about the intelligible rather than the sensible alone, one no longer uses images, but in terms of moving beyond mere reliance on images. After all, the mathematicians seem to rely on images, too, but they appreciate that they’re merely using the images in order to help them think about the intelligible things they represent; they don’t take the images themselves to be the objects of their thought. Why not think of images like the sun, line, and cave in the same way? After all, it’s not as though Socrates or his interlocutors are confusedly thinking that what they’re talking about is a sensible line (or a line qua line at all), or the sun up in the sky, or a cave and some people and some fire; they recognize that they’re using these images only in order to get a grasp on something else that they represent.
I’d think that the Sophist and the Statesman would be of considerable value in thinking about this question more generally. The models there seem like images in some sense or another; is what the Stranger says about models and does with them in those dialogues inconsistent with the epistemology of the Republic? I have no clear idea what the answer to that question would be.