Image and Argument in Plato's Republic

Marina Berzins Mccoy

Description

Although Plato has long been known as a critic of imagination and its limits, Marina Berzins McCoy explores the extent to which images also play an important, positive role in Plato's philosophical argumentation. She begins by examining the poetic educational context in which Plato is writing and then moves on to the main lines of argument and how they depend upon a variety of uses of the imagination, including paradigms, analogies, models, and myths. McCoy takes up the paradoxical nature of such key metaphysical images as the divided line and cave: on the one hand, the cave and divided line explicitly state problems with images and the visible realm. On the other hand, they are themselves images designed to draw the reader to greater intellectual understanding. The author gives a perspectival reading, arguing that the human being is always situated in between the transcendence of being and the limits of human perspective. Images can enhance our capacity to see intellectually as well as to reimagine ourselves vis-à-vis the timeless and eternal. Engaging with a wide range of continental, dramatic, and Anglo-American scholarship on images in Plato, McCoy examines the treatment of comedy, degenerate regimes, the nature of mimesis, the myth of Er, and the nature of Platonic dialogue itself.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Poetry and the Republic

2. Visioning and Reenvisioning Justice

3. Paradigmatic Argument and Its Limits

4. Narrative, Poetry, and Analogical Strategies of Argument

5. Images of Justice

6. Image, Argument, and Comedy in the Ideal City

7. The Image of the Sun

8. The Divided Line and the Cave

9. Images of Imperfection

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ancient philosophy
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479149
• Langue: English

Extrait

Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic
SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Anthony Preus, editor
Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic
Marina Berzins McCoy
Cover art: Still Life—Violin and Music, 1888 by William Michael Harnett The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Marina Berzins McCoy, author
Title: Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic / McCoy, Marina Berzins, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479132 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479149 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Poetry and the Republic
Chapter 2 Visioning and Reenvisioning Justice
Chapter 3 Paradigmatic Argument and Its Limits
Chapter 4 Narrative, Poetry, and Analogical Strategies of Argument
Chapter 5 Images of Justice
Chapter 6 Image, Argument, and Comedy in the Ideal City
Chapter 7 The Image of the Sun
Chapter 8 The Divided Line and the Cave
Chapter 9 Images of Imperfection
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the many people whose assistance with this book helped to improve it. Nickolas Pappas read much of the first half of the manuscript and provided beneficial feedback on the project as a whole. Jacob Howland, Anne Marie Schultz, and Bill Wians gave invaluable responses to the material on Glaucon and Gyges’s ring. Thanks to Franco Trivigno, who gave commentary on the section on comedy and the “three waves.” Jill Gordon, Christopher Long, Arthur Madigan SJ, Rachel Singpurwalla, Nicholas D. Smith, and Jason Taylor all gave constructive commentary on various parts of the manuscript, and conversation with Cristina Ionescu helped me to think through the project and its contours early on. Thanks to Max Wade for developing an index. I am also grateful to the Ancient Philosophy Society, and to the faculty at Emory University and St. Francis Xavier University for comments and discussion at lectures I gave related to the book. A conference at the University of Toronto hosted by Lloyd Gerson also helped me to consider more deeply Platonic dialogue form and its methodology. A writing retreat sponsored by Boston College’s Mission and Ministry Program assisted at a critical juncture in the project. I am especially grateful to Dean Gregory Kalscheur SJ for a funded yearlong research sabbatical that provided ample time to write. Thanks to my editor, Andrew Kenyon, who was a pleasure to work with. I appreciate his generosity and dedication to the project. Thanks also to Diane Ganeles and Dana Foote for their careful preparation of the manuscript.
Several students at Boston College assisted with the development of this book. Research assistants Drew Alexander and Lydia Winn deserve special thanks for their painstakingly careful work, and both Benjamin Miyamoto and Tyler Viale provided valuable assistance in earlier stages of research. The many students who took a semester-long course on the Republic over the years also helped me to understand the dialogue better. Although it has become a truism that we learn from our students, it’s still also simply true. Thanks also to John McCoy and Mary Troxell, who offered moral support and encouragement in the course of writing the book.
A few sections of the book were previously published: “Myth and Argument in Glaucon’s Account of Gyges’s Ring and Adeimantus’s Use of Poetry,” a chapter in Logoi and Muthoi , edited by William Wians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), forms part of chapter 4 . An abbreviated version of “The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation in Plato’s Republic ,” a chapter in Plato’s Animals , edited by Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015) is part of the beginning of chapter 5 . “Freedom and Responsibility in the Myth of Er,” Ideas y Valores special issue of Plato and Socratic Politics 61, no. 149 (September 2012), is part of the last section of chapter 9 . Thanks to State University of New York Press, Indiana University Press, and Ideas y Valores for permission.
Introduction
P lato’s Republic abounds with imagery. The dialogue opens with Socrates’s words “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus” (327a). 1 This language of descent is reminiscent of Odysseus’s descent into Hades in Homer’s Odyssey and of the tradition of katabasis poetry more generally. 2 The main argument of the dialogue models the soul on the city, which itself is imagined distinctly from any real, concrete city. In the middle of the dialogue, Socrates describes the forms in terms of the sun and a divided line. The philosopher is freed from his chains in a cave and forced to climb a rugged path to discover the outside world, only later to descend again to rule (514a–20d). 3 The book concludes with the myth of Er, which speaks of souls who are ascending and descending (614b–16b). Throughout the dialogue, there are numerous citations of poetry from Homer, Simonides, Aeschylus, Pindar, and references to comedy. Even the Platonic dialogue itself is an image of Socrates and his friends, gathered together and discussing the nature of justice, a discussion that never took place except in the imagination of Plato and his readers.
At the same time, Socrates is highly critical of images at numerous points in the Republic . He tears down the Homeric tradition of poetic education; argues that the mimēsis of bad men is morally destructive; explains that artistic and poetic images are thrice removed from the truth; and places images at the very lowest section of the divided line, in contrast to noēsis and hypothetical reasoning. 4 Socrates criticizes mimēsis more generally, and even banishes poetry from the ideal city. And yet images are central to the arguments within the dialogue. We might ask, for example, what difference it makes that Socrates uses an image of the city as a “paradigm” for the soul, and how we understand Socrates’s conclusions about justice as a result. Or if Homeric images are an insufficient form of education, why does Socrates use other images to describe the forms? Why do stories such as the noble lie or myth of Er form part of Socrates’s own argument? While some commentators have argued for a more sophisticated interaction between philosophy and poetry in the dialogue, more can be said about how images function as part of argument in the Republic . 5
On the one hand, simply to regard Socrates’s arguments against the problems inherent in imagery as ironically undermined by Plato’s authorial use of images would be insufficient. Socrates is forcefully critical of traditional poetry, especially Homer, and its educational role in the formation of citizens. On the other hand, Socrates’s frequent use of images suggests that imagery has a significant part to play in philosophical practice despite its limitations and dangers.
One solution to the difficulty is to argue that the use of images plays a rhetorical role. For example, James Kastely has recently argued that the dialogue educates in a preparatory way those people who are unprepared to undertake the more difficult work of dialectic, which alone counts as true philosophy. On this view, Platonic imagery functions as a species of rhetorical argumentation but not philosophy. 6 Other authors have argued that contrast between the dialogue’s imagery and its arguments are instances of Platonic irony or that the dialogue should be read as developing its ideas over the course of its ten books. 7 While poetry may stand in tension with philosophical practice, philosophy cannot and should not free itself of images entirely. Each of these positions has its merits and helps us to better understand the subtleties of the dialogue.
What has been less widely explored is to describe how images form a part of philosophical argument in the Republic . Indeed, image making is central to the dialogue’s argument at nearly every turn, and not only in rhetorical or pedagogical ways. That Plato uses particular images—such as the image of the ship as a model for the state—is not disputed. What is not often sufficiently recognized is that the main philosophical arguments of the text about central matters such as justice or the nature of the forms are highly reliant on images. Through examining the use of imagery in arguments, we can learn better how Plato philosophizes with images, and thereby something more about how Plato understands philosophical language itself. For Plato, the aim of philosophical language is not merely to create reality through words, as do the poets, nor to manipulate reality for the sake of power, as do the sophists. Rather, philosophical language seeks to disclose the nature of being in the process of its bei