archetype: he can empirically build the rules for beauty by making constant
comparisons and observations, thus building a clear pattern or model for
the soul in a manner unachievable by a blind man. Visuality serves as a
metaphor for the broader concept of empiricism. Like vision, data enables
information. Yet without insight, neither suffices for the apprehension of
truth. Socrates explains this through the allegory of the cave, in which
humans fettered to materiality mistake shadows on the walls for real
objects. Concluding the narrative, Socrates proposes that the released
captives gain the ability to view truth not by looking at it directly, but
through stages that involve looking at shadows and reflections of the real.
As the philosopher is one who is always“in love with learning which helps
to reveal that reality which always is, and which is not driven this way and
that by becoming and ceasing to be,”the guide from the cave toward the
eternal Real is the philosopher.^8 The stages of revelation enabled by
philosophical guidance resemble those encountered by the Sufiinitiate
on the path to enlightenment. In contrast to Socrates’cynical observation
that the philosopher would get slaughtered if he ventured to return to the
cave (foreshadowing his own demise), al-Ghazali’s spiritual rather than
political motivations obviate any discussion of a potential threat from
enlightenment.
Like al-Ghazali, Socrates indicates the pitfalls of the image, condemning
painting as twice-removed imitation. Suggesting a hierarchy valorizing the
ideal (such as the idea of a couch) above the manifestation of the ideal
object in its physical form (such as the couch as made by a carpenter) above
the imitation of the manifestation (such as the painting of a couch), he
disparages imitation as false. He says it is as though somebody walked
around with a mirror, with which you could create“the sun and the
heavenly bodies, soon create the earth, soon create yourself, other living
creatures, furniture, plants.”^9 If we read Plato’s rendition of Socrates as a
straightforward instruction manual on the ideal city, a technocratic world
of philosophers who eschew empiricism and the arts, dwelling only in the
cave of their minds, then the analogy of painting-as-mirror favors anicon-
ism. Yet the dialogue quickly turns to discussing Homer as the imitator of
imitators. By analogy, it indicts its own judgment. Likewise,The Republic
itself is Plato’s representation of Socrates’representation of a past con-
versation, and thus also, like a painting, a double imitation.^10 Unless Plato
denigrates himself as untrustworthy, the only possible resolution to the(^8) Plato, 2000 : 187 (and sections 472d, 484c–d, 514a–520a, and 532a–c).
(^9) Plato, 2000 : 315 (596d). (^10) Hyland, 1988.
134 Seeing through the Mirror