IN PLATO’S IMAGEdialogues about human limitation and the role of vision. Gadamer, in Dialogue
and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 99– 100ff., enumerates and explains
four means of communicating a thing, none of which guarantees that the thing
will then be “known”: the word or name of a thing (onoma); the explanation or
conceptual determination of a thing (logos); the appearance, illustrative image,
example, or fi gure of a thing (eidolon); and the knowledge or insight itself of that
thing. Gadamer is then careful to warn us that we must not see these four ways
as an ordered ascent, culminating in knowledge of the good. All attempts to
see them as such “are completely mistaken” (111). Ultimately, pure knowledge
or the “life of pure theory” is not attainable for humans. Of the third means of
communication, Gadamer says, “Examples, of course, are one of the necessary
media in which true knowledge is presented” (115), and he further argues for
the need for all four types: “For they all serve to make one more ‘dialectical,’
to educate one’s vision for the thing itself” (122). Our human limitations are,
according to Gadamer in another work, “an essential characteristic of man’s
humanity” in light of which “Plato always sees man’s existence... which means
that he presents them as defi ned by the process of going beyond them. Man is
a creature who transcends himself” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical
Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, trans. Robert M.
Wa llace [New Haven: Ya le Univer sit y Press, 19 91], 4 – 5). See also Aryeh Kosman,
“Silence and Imitation in the Platonic Dialogues,” in Methods of Interpreting Plato
and His Dialogues, ed. James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1992), which has close links to this section.
- See also, for example, Meno 84a– b; Theaetetus 210c.
- This position is argued in detail by Luce Irigiray, “Sorcerer of Love: A
Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech,” trans. E. Kuykendall, in Femi-
nist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy Tuana (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994), 181– 95. - I have translated filosofou`nte~ as “lovers of wisdom” instead of Lamb’s
“followers of wisdom” and I have rendered e[rw~ as “eros” rather than “love.” - Socrates claims specifi cally at Symposium 201e that Diotima questioned
him, and at 203b Diotima embarks on a long story (Makrovteron mevn, e[fh,
dihghvsasqai). - Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in Plato’s Dialogues (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995), 118. See his full discussion of Aristo-
phanes’ speech at 111– 37. - Fowler’s translation uses “fi gure,” but I have used “image” in order to
be consistent with all the translations of the same cognate elsewhere in this
chapter. - Charles L. Griswold Jr., Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986), 144: “The gods of this myth do seem to be (among
other things) idealized human types who serve the crucial purpose in the story
of helping articulate the notion that we are imperfect in specifi c ways.” Gris-
wold also sees in Phaedrus “the possibility of refl ection on its own status qua
written work. This is in keeping with the view that the written word is an ‘image’