PLATO’S BOOK OF IMAGESseriously: like Plato’s mere dreamers, traditionalists mistake the likeness
for what it is like.
In my view, readers of the Republic are supposed to fi nd it, and all
of its contents, provocative. It is intended to stimulate thought—to raise
questions much more than to settle any of them. Plato offers us some-
thing like a vast “thought-experiment” under various hypotheses—the
assumptions upon which his arguments are founded, assumptions that
could only be fi nally secured if they could be linked directly to the Good
itself, which plainly Plato does not do in the Republic, and which he al-
most certainly could not do with words in any case, for words are but
images of thought. With the aid of many images, which we are to take
seriously, but not so seriously that we forget the distortion inherent to
them, we are drawn up toward those realities accessible only in thought,
and we are drawn down from our hypotheses to conclusions that often
trouble us and provoke us into further dispute. That Plato’s book of
images has impressively succeeded as a “provocative” is amply demon-
strated by the extent to which we continue to debate its meaning—and
its merits—even today.
Notes
- See Charles Segal, “ ‘The Myth Was Saved’: Refl ections on Homer and
the Mythology of Plato’s Republic,” Hermes 106 (1978): 330; Eva Brann, “The
Music of the Republic,” Agon 1 (1967): i– vi, 1– 117; Bruce Rosenstock, “Rereading
the Republic,” Arethusa 16 (1983): 25– 46. - See Helen Bacon, “Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition,” presidential
address of the American Philological Association, De cem ber 1990; George Olaf
Berg, Metaphor and Comparison in the Dialogues of Plato (Berlin: Mayer and Muel-
ler, 1906); Pierre Louis, Les Metaphores de Platon (Paris: Société d’Édition “Les
Belles Lettres,” 1946); Jean-François Mattéi, “The Theater of Myth in Plato,” in
Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings, ed. Charles L. Griswold Jr. (New York and
London: Routledge, 1988): 66– 83; Richard Patterson, “Philosophos Agonistes: Im-
agery and Moral Psychology in Plato’s Republic,” Journal of the History of Philosophy
35 (1997): 327– 54; D. Tarrant, “Imagery in Plato’s Republic,” Classical Quarterly
40 (1946): 27– 34. - See Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York and
London: Basic Books, 1968), 380– 81; Diskin Clay, “Reading the Republic,” in
Griswold, Platonic Writings, 19 – 33; John H. Randall, Plato: Dramatist of the Life
of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 167– 70; Leo Strauss,
The City and Man (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964),
50– 62. Such interpretations have, of course, met with heavy resistance. See, for
example, George Klosko, “Implementing the Ideal State,” Journal of Politics 43
(1981): 365– 89; M. F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of