Abstract
What imagination is cannot be answered apart from understanding its conceptual topology, the articulated framework of basic phenomena and concepts that govern our thinking about it. The first step is to understand how the image (as object), then imagination (as psychological power), developed from the problematic of being and appearance. The pre-Socratic thinker Empedocles of Agrigentum thought that we experience things by virtue of image-bearing particles they emit. Plato (428–347 B.C.E.), in his dialogue the Meno, criticized this kind of hypothesis and emphasized instead the human ability to apprehend and work with images, in particular mathematical images. In other dialogues, above all the Sophist and the Republic, he developed an ontology of images and their emergence, and as corollary he took the first step toward a psychology of imagining. Careful explication of it shows the falsity of the widespread conviction that Plato thought images were ontologically deficient. The Republic presents a grand vision of a cosmos in which the good images itself not just in intelligible forms or ideas but at every level of being. The good does this according to knowable, mathematical proportions, and the human soul has the power to know these levels, both in themselves and as figures or images of other levels. The most typically human form of imagining for Plato is the making of logoi, words in discourse that represent the world and its things. The underlying Platonic conceptual topology provided the basis for all future investigations of imagination.
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Notes
- 1.
None of Thales’ writings survives; what he and other early philosophers wrote and thought is recorded at second hand in the doxographic tradition, that is, in the accounts of later writers reporting about them—usually centuries later. For no philosopher preceding Plato do we have any fully intact works. The authoritative collection of the fragments reporting their words and stories about them can be found in Diels and Kranz 1974 [1903]; a usable selection with English translation and commentary is Kirk and Raven 1957.
- 2.
Tradition sees Anaximenes either as a younger contemporary of Thales or as belonging to the next generation.
- 3.
Condensation and rarefaction do not have necessarily atomistic implications. If matter is continuous rather than divided into units, rarefaction would be like stretching out a volume of matter in three dimensions, condensation the opposite.
- 4.
“Imaginary” used in this sense indicates a way—even a system—of imagining (including a large store of interrelated images) that is characteristic either of an author or of a social group. It is also a name for a kind of conceptual topology.
- 5.
Quoted from Kirk and Raven 1957, 117, substituting “unlimited” for apeiron.
- 6.
Logos eventually came to have as part of its ordinary meanings “mathematical ratio” and “reason,” but in Heraclitus’ era it still had the primary sense of “speech,” “words combined into an account.” Not until very late in antiquity could it be used to mean “individual word.”
- 7.
Diels and Kranz 1974 [1903], B60.
- 8.
It is important to resist the facile interpretation that Parmenides exaggerated the significance of a merely apparent contradiction of terms, since that is to underestimate from the outset the status both of terms or words and of contradiction. The verbal contradiction needs to be thought through rather than swept aside.
- 9.
“Knowing and being are the same” is a common translation of Fragment 3 of “On Nature.” Kirk and Raven 1957 renders it (in continuity with Fragment 2, but noted as independent), “the same thing can be thought as can be,” but they also remark that very literally construing the syntax would produce “the same thing exists for thinking and for being.” Two alternatives that sound more alien in English are “knowing and being are with respect to the same” and “the same is for knowing and for being.” Notice, then, that the most literal rendering and other plausible alternatives to the simpler and more familiar “knowing and being are the same” do not assert any simple identity between knowing and being. The more-literal translations are more easily assimilated to Heraclitus’ position.
- 10.
At least one aspect of Parmenides’ position can be easily interpreted as consistent with common sense: “being” is something that is not subject to degree. What is, is, and to treat it otherwise is the foundation of nihilism. So, for example, an extreme reductionism that denies reality to appearances insofar as they are “really” something else is nihilistic, insofar as it denies being to appearance. This greatly expands the ranks of the traditions of nihilism! Severino argues that Western thought has been and continues to be thoroughgoingly nihilistic precisely because everyone agrees that change is real and requires some kind of annihilation—of form, quality, orientation, position, or the like—and the emergence of something else that did not exist beforehand. See especially Severino 1982, 19–61, an essay that first appeared in 1964.
- 11.
Taken in this strong sense, this ancient rationalism claiming descent from Parmenides violates his basic stricture, because it understands mind as sovereign over being rather than coordinated with it.
- 12.
Another image-bearing particle, the eidōlon, was introduced a century and a half later, in the atomism of Epicurus. In Homer’s Iliad the word is used of the soul of Patrokolos when he appears to Achilles in book 23. Similarly, in book 4 of the Odyssey it is used of the dream figure of Iphthimē when she appears to her sister Penelopē. The eidōlon is not the person but a phantom–double of the person. We will see the term play an important role in Plato’s Sophist (Sect. 4.4, below).
- 13.
Empedocles conceived macroscopic things as proportioned mixtures of the elements. The effluences were conceived not as indivisibles (i.e., atoms) but as tiny replicas that bear in themselves the same proportions of the elements as the macroscopic thing that emits them.
- 14.
- 15.
This observation holds just as much of light waves or photons as it does of effluences. That is not to criticize light waves or photons, but to point out that the structure of attempted explanation is similar. Centuries of research, observation and experiment, and theoretical differentiation have in fact made the contemporary understanding of physical processes, vision, and the like much more strongly supported than the effluence theory ever was or could have been.
- 16.
A resurrected Socrates might similarly object, for example, to those who want to account for thinking in terms of ion cascades across synaptic gaps in neural networks, without first talking about what makes thinking distinctive or about what all kinds of thinking have in common.
- 17.
One obvious difference between “color” and “red” is that at some level the only way to define red is to give samples. Concreteness and abstraction are of course relative. “Fruit” is more concrete than “food,” while bananas, apples, and mangoes are more concrete than “fruit.”
- 18.
The point is relative rather than absolute: if I claim I can imagine an equilateral triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, and an octagon quite clearly, but disclaim the ability with a heptagon, a nonagon, a decagon, etc., it means that I am not simply making extravagant claims but also implying that I have a way of discriminating success from failure.
- 19.
There are further questions, such as whether each person has a unique style of doing things (not generally, I would say), or whether style is flexible and occasional (almost certainly—especially among those who are the greatest masters of style). Deeper reflection on these matters might fruitfully commence with a reconsideration of Heidegger’s understanding of attunement (Stimmung, often subjectivistically translated as “mood”) as a mode of being found in place (Befindlichkeit, ordinarily subjectivistically translated as “state of mind” or “disposition”). See section 29 of Heidegger 1927. To my knowledge the most sophisticated conception of styles and their role in (scientific) experience and knowing is J. W. von Goethe’s theory of Vorstellungsarten, ways of (re)presenting things, which he developed while writing histories of different sciences he actually practiced himself; see Fink 1991, 115–125.
- 20.
This is not to say that no geometrical conversation at all would be possible, however.
- 21.
Rosen 1983. As so often happens with Plato, details and basic circumstances of the dialogue suggest or reinforce themes that occur in it. The leader of the dialogue is from Elea, the city of Parmenides, who claimed that being and thinking are one; and although the stranger from Elea seems to be a practitioner of Parmenidean reasoning, he also grants that they must “kill” the doctrine of “father Parmenides” in its most literal and radical form. One of the consequences of this parricide is that images can be ascribed reality. Other details also strongly corroborate a more than incidental importance of the theme “image and original”: there are two men present named Socrates (one a young man, the other the old philosopher); Socrates the elder tells the Stranger that when he was young he was present at a dialogue with the old Parmenides; and when Socrates the elder urges the Stranger to ask questions of the young Theaetetus, the latter says if he needs help he will call on his friend Socrates the younger, since (emphasizing how alike they are) “he’s my age and exercises with me and he’s used to sharing lots of tasks with me.”
- 22.
The method is not always applied in a precise way. In particular, it is not always clear that the division of the field into two is exhaustive. But in essence it is a binary method based on dichotomous contraries, and thus it has an at least superficial relationship to the binary logic on which computer algorithms are based.
- 23.
The divisions leading to the definition begin at 219A and end at 221C. The last step is more complicated than one might expect: the kind of day–fishing in question is “done with a hook, not to just any part of the fish’s body but always to the prey’s head and mouth, and pulls it upward from below with rods or reeds” (220E–221A). This suggests that, at least at the end, they are rushing to judgment. But just at the end?
- 24.
They provide a summary of their six attempts as follows (231D–E): the sophist is (1) “a hired hunter of rich young men,” (2) “a wholesaler of learning about the soul,” (3) “a retailer of the same things,” (4) “a seller of his own learning,” (5) “an athlete in verbal combat, distinguished by his expertise in debating,” and (6) someone who “cleanses the soul of beliefs that interfere with learning.” The last definition corresponds to the longest discussion, which borrows least from the example of the angler; it begins with the isolation of a kind of art (which is the point where the angler definition began) that they had not previously considered, the art of dividing or discriminating things into different kinds—like combing, carding, and sifting. The Stranger does not call attention to the sudden appearance of a tripartition of the original starting point, nor to the fact that this new kind of art would include the method of division itself!
- 25.
The Stranger described the sophist at 234C as having the art of making spoken eidōla, so the question now is which of the two subkinds the sophist immerses himself in. Note that although the method of division is an improvement over Meno’s listing of instances to understand a kind or eidos, it is perhaps not all that much of an improvement. One begins with something grasped in an approximate way—an angler or a sophist—and then tries to determine into which of two contrary classes the thing fits. The classes are themselves understood only approximatively and so add to the ambiguities.
- 26.
“Icon” and “phantasm” have the virtue of being cognate to the original Greek words. “Icon” is a relatively unproblematic rendering. “Phantasm” has a more complex history; after Aristotle it became the generic term for what English names “image.” “Phantom” is a possible cognate rendering that would suggest more strongly the inadequacy of the phantasma to that which it images—it is, for example, used in Allan Bloom’s translation of the Republic—but it has its own problematic associations. Below I will use “phantastic art” for technē phantastikē; for phantasma I will use either “phantasm” or “simulacrum,” a Latin word that conveys the pejorative sense of a likeness’s falling short of what it tries to resemble.
- 27.
This shortcoming is partially reversed near the end of the dialogue, beginning approximately at 263D, as an extension of the discussion of the true and the false.
- 28.
Technically this might not violate the stricture if one distinguished between external and internal proportions, with only the latter counting as proportions of the thing. But then there would be internal problems to be reckoned with: for example, if a sculpture reduces an object’s height, width, and depth by half, the surface area is reduced by three quarters, and the volume (and weight) by seven eighths. Some strictly determinable proportionality holds for each characteristic, but not the same proportion for each and every one.
- 29.
There might, however, be certain perceptual color effects produced by having a larger or smaller expanse to work with, so an artist might have to vary the colors somewhat in a smaller statue to produce the same effects as in a larger one. That would, of course, mean that the image was a simulacrum rather than an icon.
- 30.
In the 235D discussion of the icon as maintaining proportions the word is not logos or analogia but summetria, which means due proportion in the sense of having a common measure.
- 31.
This seems to be one of the key lessons of the Sophist. The method of division works well enough for defining things that are already clearly apprehended, but for objects that are more vaguely conceived it can be much harder to know what distinctions to make. Moreover, often enough the interlocutors discover that a division that seemed clear-cut is not. In the initial division of arts into the productive and the acquisitive, for example, mimēsis (later renamed eidōlon– or image–making) is included as a part of production, but later it becomes either a third kind of art coordinate with production and acquisition or superordinate to production. It is worth recalling here that, in the middle of the dialogue, the interlocutors see that the most abstract divisions of all (like being and not–being, motion and rest, sameness and difference) interparticipate with one another in complex ways that have to be determined by special and insistent inquiry. This interparticipation is a way both of seeming and being.
- 32.
264A–B. Technically, it is a definition of appearance rather than imagination: “So since there is true and false speech, and…thinking appeared to be the soul’s dialogue with itself, opinion the conclusion of thinking, and what we call appearing [phainetai] the mixing together of sense perception and opinion, it follows that since these are all akin to speech, some of them must sometimes be false.”
- 33.
This is not to say that there is no temporal aspect possible in the “static” medium of painting. Consider the dynamism of painting of the European Baroque, or, more subtly, the ravages of time or the weight of the impending future apparent in portraits by Goya.
- 34.
These matters cannot be settled from the philosopher’s reading and viewing chair, of course, but from that chair it can be easier to hit upon relevant questions and concepts with dispassion than from other, more partisan places.
- 35.
A practice that extends to the individual Ideas, for instance the Good, the Beautiful, the True: a practice that I shall in general not follow after this paragraph.
- 36.
Aristotle’s writings are cited here using the Bekker page–column–line numbers.
- 37.
By “Platonic background” I do not mean the “definition” of imagination as “sense perception with opinion,” but rather the conceptual topology of an ontologically grounded human psychology against which such a definition makes sense.
- 38.
The significance of such hypothesizing, which is both an intellectual and an imaginative act, will become evident in book VII, in the last phase of explaining the nature of the good by using the sun, a geometrical line, and a cave allegory as images of the good.
- 39.
A “polis in words” or “in speech” is how they refer to the city they are designing at several points in the dialogue, especially when the question arises of whether such a city could ever be realized. It is Socrates who calls the phases of the argument “waves.” After sketching out the structure and education system of their ideal city, they have to revise the plan when they address the status of women and children in the city (the second wave), and again when they ask to what degree the city must be based on knowledge rather than opinion (which leads to the third wave, in which the kings must be philosophers). But there are, implicitly, smaller waves as well: for instance, in the second book they conceive first an idyllic community of herders and farmers, which is rejected by these urban youth as too unexciting. That leads very quickly to an “overheated” city, very much like Athens, with the eager pursuit of international commerce to feed refined appetites for commodities and pleasures. That leads in turn to what later they call the actual first wave, a city divided into those who produce things, those who police the citizenry, and those who govern. This is a city that, at least according to the end of the third book, is based on a “noble” lie: on the claim that roles in life must be assigned to citizens according to their genetic natures (according to whether bronze, silver, or gold flows in their blood, making them eligible for, respectively, productive occupations, the military/police force, or leadership/guardianship). Unfortunately, whether they notice or not, the very problem that led them to demand that Socrates justify justice returns in the “ideal” city: the triumph of what might be merely apparent justice over real justice. The rest of the dialogue is proof that Plato’s Socrates does not fail to notice the irony of this development, and gives the lie to interpretations that he advocates the tyranny of knowledge or pseudoknowledge.
- 40.
This is a traditional moral objection to acting in stage plays. One way to call into question the distinction between the kinds of narrative would be to show that it does not really reduce the risk, since even direct narration invokes a certain distance from the original and indirect narrative involves a degree of mimesis. This is in any case a problem intrinsic to images and imaging: how close does the appearance of an image of something bring us to the real thing the image brings to mind?
- 41.
Of course it is more efficient to have each person do what he or she is best at. But the ethical and political problem they fail to consider is that if we specialize too much we may disproportion ourselves by developing only one talent, to the neglect of others essential to good, just human being. The problem had already emerged in book I, when Socrates asked whether shepherds look after their own interests or the interests of their sheep. Socrates said they must do both; they have to acquire two arts, not just one. But in the second book they promptly forget this, and it is fateful (one might even say fatal) for their undertaking. It is the consequences of this unanalyzed step, which Socrates implicitly criticizes throughout, that has misled some commentators to portray Plato and his master as advocates of totalitarianism.
- 42.
At 409B–E Socrates discusses the need for judges to acquire knowledge of badness in others; at 484C–485B he says that the true guardians must have both knowledge of things and experience of them, and that the lover of wisdom prefers holding on even to knowledge of contemptible things. This is an extension of a theme that receives its first lengthy development beginning at 437A, that knowledge extends to contraries or opposites: that is, one knows the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, by the same standard. And that theme is ultimately subsumed in the thesis that what is, as well as what is known, “rolls around between opposites.”
- 43.
This prepares the way for the second of the three major episodes of book X: between (1) the competition for truth of philosophy and poetry and (3) the story of what happens in the afterlife (the myth of Er) comes (2) the “proof” that the human soul is likely to be immortal because it can, through philosophizing, consort with what is eternal.
- 44.
At 484C–D Socrates parenthetically mentions painters, “looking off…toward what is truest, and ever referring to it and contemplating it as precisely as possible.” So much for the notion that poets and artists must be several times further away from the truth than philosophers! By this comment (and similar ones throughout) I am not ridiculing Plato for inconsistencies but pointing out how this master philosopher–artist constantly challenges us to subtle reading and thinking. An inconsistency may seem like a grave philosophical sin; but, as Aristotle knew, it is more fundamentally an invitation to think about different respects in which the conflicting statements might agree.
- 45.
One might argue that Socrates’ use of scenario–images is itself developmental, moving from metaphor and allegory to analogy (for the audience at least), from an inexplicit but felt similarity to a more clarified and articulate elaboration.
- 46.
The connection between logos used to mean speech on the one hand and proportion on the other is more intimate than first appears. The basis of speech is a relation between things that is expressed in statements like “S is P”: to predicate one thing (the predicate, P) of another thing (the subject, S) is to express this relation. The mathematical logos or ratio is conceived similarly. A ratio is a proportion between two (whole) numbers, two line segments, two surface areas, or two other like things. Whereas we think of the ratio of a to b (where a and b are any numbers) as just another number, ancient Greeks conceived it as essentially a relation between two things of the same kind. If a is a line length and b a line length, “a:b” stands for the logos or proportion of those two lengths. Two areas, c and d, can similarly be related in the logos “c:d.” But a line length cannot be put directly into proportion with an area except by way of an extended proportion or analogia. If line a is half the length of line b and area c half the area d, we can express this in the analogia a:b::c:d; and by rules of manipulating proportions one can say that a:c::b:d. We mimic this algebraically by saying that if a/b = c/d then we can multiply each side of the equation by the fraction b/c to get a/c = b/d. The difference is that we think of all these fractions as being the same kind of thing, numbers, so that no reconciliation of kinds is necessary. For the Greek understanding, however, a line length compared to an area is not a kind but a relation between (different) kinds; it has no absolute value, but can only be reexpressed by other, analogical relations between the kinds.
- 47.
Or rather of seeming: as Arendt was fond of pointing out, doxa belongs in the realm of the dokei moi, “it seems to me” (Arendt 1978, 77).
- 48.
The Greek word theōria seems to have arisen within such a network of concerns. In the classical period and long thereafter theōria was conceived as a kind of intelligible viewing. Any propositional network of the kind we typically call theory thus presupposes, from the Greek perspective, a field or fields opened by the concerned consideration, and the consideration is itself the aboriginal theory. The notion of conceptual topology enables us to gain a more articulate and focused grasp of the backgrounds and foregrounds that are intrinsic not just to ancient theory but also to theory in the modern sense of the term.
- 49.
For a discussion of the significance of these movements, see Wood 1987.
- 50.
Socrates initially says nothing about how the line should be oriented, although near the end of book VI he and Glaucon refer to the section with the forms as “above,” though without any discussion of why things should be pictured this way. In the imaginary of Western thinking, imagination must be lowest, and the forms highest: it is the configuration commensurate with the elevated dignity of reason.
- 51.
The education outlined in books II and III occupied eligible young men (and ultimately young women) until the beginning of military service, around age 20. The higher education that is described in the last half of book VII takes place in six stages, with 2 years devoted to each of the lesser studies (arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy, and harmony) and 5 years to the culminating dialectics. That takes them to age 35, when they begin 15 years of community service in administrative and policing responsibilities. At age 50 those who have proved themselves most worthy become true guardians of the city. From that point onward their governing responsibilities are no longer continuous; when their wisdom and decision-making ability is not needed, they spend their time as they wish—presumably in the contemplation of the very highest things, the ideas or forms.
- 52.
See 619B–D, discussed in Sect. 4.6, above. I reiterate: those who take the city in words as Plato’s definitive vision of the best kind of city need to think more about irony as a virtue and about whether Plato understands philosophizing as they do.
- 53.
Thus, once again, a “just” or “good” city that denies any of its citizens the best possible knowledge of the just and the good would be in truth an unjust and evil city. I hope the reader has already drawn a further conclusion: that Plato plays these ironic games precisely because he is letting Socrates carry out the early demand of the young men, that he prove the superiority of justice to injustice even in a city where people think that what is unjust is just and vice versa. The city in words they have devised is precisely that city.
- 54.
Or “occupied with these things.” The word is a past participle used as a noun, pragmateuomenon. It implies not just thinking about these things but also dealing with them in all aspects of living.
- 55.
Bloom translates pistis as “trust,” but translators typically use “belief” instead. That too much intellectualizes the relationship to the things and artifacts of the world unless we qualify it as “belief that things are as they show themselves.” “Trust” is the first English equivalent given in the standard Greek–English dictionary of Liddell–Scott, and it nicely expresses our basic relationship with the things of the world: we trust that they will behave in the way that such things do. For example, I trust that the chair that appears before me will support my weight and not collapse, or prove to be a phantom, when I sit on it. As for eikāsia: in the Sophist the technē eikastikē is the art of icon making, the making of images (eikōnes) proportional to the originals, and could be rendered as imagination in that icon-making sense; here in the Republic, it is nature that produces shadows and images in proportion to the original object, and we have the power (called eikāsia) to see those things—shadows, reflections, painted images—not simply as realities but as realities imaging other realities from which they derive. It is a perceiving that allows us to see both the thing that the image is (a shadow, a reflection, a painting) and its reference to something that exists elsewhere, in another format or plane.
- 56.
Because the more abstract an account is, the more intellectually sophisticated the audience must be. We will see in a moment, however, that the philosopher’s education sketched out in book VII does not move to ever greater abstractness but rather toward an ever more comprehensive concreteness.
- 57.
The next section will address what this equality might mean. In much of the older literature it is interpreted as something Plato must unfortunately have overlooked—“unfortunately” because the equality subverts the symbolic representation of increasing reality and clarity (of vision and understanding) as one moves from the visible to the intelligible realm. For a brief (chiefly negative) discussion of these claims, see Pomeroy 1971. Pomeroy believes that the division of the line is according to the Golden Section; that would intriguingly relate the length of the whole line to all the parts. If the proportion were golden, the whole length of the line would be to its longer part as the longer part is to the shorter; put arithmetically, if A and B are the lengths of the parts after the first division, with A larger than B, (A + B)/A = A/B. There is no specific evidence in the dialogue to justify the correctness of this specific interpretation, however.
- 58.
The ideas are the first section, the mathematicals the second, physical objects the third, images the fourth.
- 59.
Whether this qualification implies that at the highest level reasoning transcends all imaging will be discussed below.
- 60.
The context makes it clear that Socrates has in mind the stereotypes that the image makers of the cave hold in front of the projector light to cast shadows on the wall. Since we have already traversed the path from the cave to outside the cave, we understand that the image makers’ eidōla are shaped in imitation of things outside the cave, though not necessarily as accurate representations; they are little ideas, little eidē, used to project shadows. Some of the shadows may well maintain proportions not just to the stereotypes/eidōla but also to the originals, so they may be either icons or simulacra, in the Sophist’s terms. My choice of “imaging stereotypes” for the stereotypes/eidōla is intended to hold open these possibilities and to avoid the derealizing connotations of other translations.
- 61.
In the first instance we might have to make the good itself a new “level,” rather than the source and motive power, of the line. But would that not amount to destroying the very logic of the image–cascade of the good?
- 62.
He does not, however, bring up beauty, although he set it in parallel to the good at 531C. That evocation and its immediate suppression are, perhaps, a reminder that there are questions of the nature of appearance that are being left tacit.
- 63.
This approach is not subject to the objection that it fetishizes knowledge as presence. It is quite the opposite: a recognition that we cannot know beyond what we have engaged (and not just seen), that what we bring to mind escapes and becomes impresent almost as quickly as it appears, and that however deep our engagement with things, there are always further aspects to be considered, some very remote, some near but inapparent because they have been beneath notice. When considered Platonically rather than Platonistically, “presence” is not total illumination but chiaroscuro, light–dark, with atmospheric perspective (the blurring of things at a distance) and an uncertain horizon.
- 64.
This is a fairly precise description of what happens in the Meno.
- 65.
At 533A: “And, if I could, I would show you, no longer an image [icon] of and speaking about such things, but the very truth, as it seems [phainetai] to me.”
- 66.
This combines themes from the Republic, the Sophist, the Phaedo, the Meno, and the Symposium.
- 67.
I am alluding to Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of the socially instituted imaginary; see Castoriadis 1994.
- 68.
“Lower” and “higher” have to be used with discretion and even irony, since they are too easily interpreted nihilistically—e.g., “sense perception and imagining are as nothing with respect to intellection”—and since they apply literally only to the cave rather than to the image of the sun or of the divided line.
- 69.
See note 62, above, on the tacit relationship between the good and beauty.
- 70.
At 530C–D, just as he is about to present harmony as the second discipline (besides astronomy) that studies motion, he says that “motion presents itself not in one form but several, as I suppose. Perhaps whoever is wise will be able to tell them all, but those that are evident even to us are two.”
- 71.
I am not suggesting that any other conception of rationality (e.g., Eastern) is an alternative, nor even that one can easily or simply categorize thinking by region.
- 72.
One of the most bizarre testimonies of this was the decision of Plotinus to postulate in human psychology a second, rational imagination that duplicates the contents of ordinary imagination without any trace of materiality. The ascending philosopher thus leaves behind the taint of sense and matter and retains only their intelligible forms. See Sect. 6.1, below.
- 73.
In fact the whole presentation also represents itself: that is, Socrates uses metaphors, analogies, and images—different levels of representation—to represent the good as representing itself at different levels. Since the explanation–representation shares in the character of the very thing it is explaining–representing, it is technically a symbol, or, in the sense understood by Orthodox Christianity, an icon.
- 74.
If there is a second, square-bracketed date, it indicates the year the work first appeared in its original language.
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Sepper, D.L. (2013). Plato and the Ontological Placement of Images. In: Understanding Imagination. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_4
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