potential deception of the image is for the viewer to retain a critical faculty
at ease with the necessary gap between representation and truth. Socrates
explains:
The thing we have to remember in all these cases is this. When someone tells us...
that he has met a man who has knowledge of all these crafts, and of all the things
each individual practitioner of them can know...the answer we should give
someone like this is that he is some sort of simpleton, who has apparently come
across a magician and imitator, and been taken in by him. He has decided this man
is an expert, because he himself is incapable of distinguishing knowledge from
ignorance or imitation.^11
The warning is not against painting, but against imitation; or not against
imitation, but against gullibility; or not against gullibility, but failure to
critique unwarranted authority. Just as this failure leads a listener to fall
prey to false rhetoric, it leads the Platonic city to almost inevitably fall to
tyranny. Although often interpreted as a prescription for the ideal state,
The Republic’s internal inconsistencies, apparent absurdities, and dialogic
structure contribute to its interpretation as a warning against epistemes
that valorize the static accumulation of information over the dialogic and
rhetorical processes of communication.^12 Plato and al-Ghazali express
similar ambiguity toward representation: the value of painting lies not in
the perfection of its verisimilitude, but in the capacity of the recipient to
remain cognizant of its distinction from truth.
The cave provides a metaphor for the relationship between hegemonic
truth and any episteme. Discussing the inability of the escaped prisoner,
enlightened by seeing the sun, to return to its darkness, Socrates explains:
“Back in the cave they might have rewards and praise and prizes for the
person who was quickest in identifying the passing shapes, who had the
best memory for ones which came earlier or later or simultaneously.”^13 The
cave peculiarly resembles a darkened room where art historians project
lantern (or PowerPoint) slides to give order to the chaos of created objects
through models of movement across time and place. The cave is the
episteme that frames the categories and operations delimiting knowledge.
The projections are the hegemonic truth that knowledge is believed to
harbor. Plato’s attack, of course, is not on a modern discipline called art
history, but on the purposes behind their projection: the ideology as it
makes men and their circumstances appear upside down.
(^11) Plato, 2000 : 317 (598d). (^12) Allen, 2013 : 186. (^13) Plato, 2000 : 222 (516d).
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali between Plotinus and the Buddha 135