IN PLATO’S IMAGEat the present moment come to an agreement about the nature of
discourse, and if we were robbed of it by its absolute nonexistence, we
could no longer discourse; and we should be robbed of it if we agreed
that there is no mixture of anything with anything.... But if falsehood
exists, deceit exists.... And if deceit exists, all things must be hence-
forth full of images and likenesses and fancies [eijdwvlwn te kai; eijkovnwn
h[dh kai; fantasiva~]. (Sophist, 260a– c)This conception of philosophy precludes its dealing with pure being or
with the realities directly, and roots philosophy fi rmly in a mixture of
being and not-being. The boon to mankind from the mingling of being
and not-being is philosophical discourse, and the price we pay is the
possibility of deceit. But somewhere between the benefi t of philosophi-
cal discourse and the price of deceit lie images. Philosophy is described
as mixing the realms of being and not-being, so it must contain images
since it cannot contain the realities. Furthermore, by the very reasoning
used by the Stranger, it would not be warranted to assume that since
these images are not-real that they are therefore completely unreal. We
know from several instances in this dialogue that there are two kinds of
images, those that imitate reality and are ca lled true images and those
that do not imitate reality and are called false images.^17 It is more than
plausible that the true images are those that point us, in comparing like-
ness and unlikeness, toward the realities and must therefore be a proper
constituent of philosophical discourse.^18
The Timaeus sets up the entire world of human experience as an
image of some other world, after which it is patterned.^19 Timaeus then
plays on the etymological link between “likenesses” as an ontological en-
tity and “likelihood” as an epistemological category, arguing that since
humans must deal with an image or copy (eijkasiva) we must accept that
our account will only be likely (eijkov~).^20 Human limitation lies at the
root of Timaeus’ account, and he tells us that we must forever deal in
images. We “are but human creatures,” and as such we must accept our
epistemological limitations.
Since what we experience as humans is an image of reality, then it
would seem to be of paramount importance both to recognize that fact
and to understand the difference between the images and the original.
Two of the necessary conditions for turning toward the things-in-them-
selves are recognizing their existence and understanding (albeit in a
limited capacity) their difference from what we sense and experience.
These conditions would be satisfi ed through the activity of investigating
likeness and unlikeness between image and reality, and to do that one
must recognize the distinction between image and reality. As limited