IN PLATO’S IMAGESocrates’ life mission, as he describes it in the Apology, is at its core to
“put to the proof and distinguish” knowledge from ignorance. And what
sets Socrates apart from others is not that he has knowledge, nor that he
is not ignorant, but that he is not deceived about the difference between
these two states. Socrates is not speaking in these passages simply about
the dangers of painting or poetry, but more generally about those who
are deceived about the nature of reality—the kind of deception that
the cave dwellers epitomize. They believe that all reality dances across
the cave wall in shadow. Socrates exhorts the two young men to be the
sort of people who can distinguish knowledge from ignorance (or at
least who are not easily deceived), to understand when they see imita-
tion that it is imitation, and to cast their glance from the imitation to
the original.
Socrates’ admonition of Adeimantus and Glaucon in these pas-
sages brings us back around again to the reason for the discussion of
poetry in the city in the fi rst place. The two boys relied heavily and
exclusively on the poets to support their view that the unjust life is re-
warding and fulfi lling as long as one’s injustices go unpunished. The
particular imitators on which Glaucon and Adeimantus relied to make
their case show the unjust human life to be worth living, and Socrates is
warning the young men to be wary of their own deception. They need
to investigate through dialectic, to “put to the proof,” just what the poets
say in order to fi nd out whether it is a true imitation or not.
Even if Glaucon and Adeimantus have been persuaded that the
images that these specifi c poets have created are not imitations of what
is true, they need not reject imitation per se. Instead they can take up
the multifarious and beautiful images created by Socrates which cast
their glance at the true originals. Adeimantus and Glaucon can gaze
upon the cave dwellers, the Divided Line, the image of the sun, the
analogy of soul and city, and other images in the dialogue, and they can
reconsider philosophically in light of those images whether the just life
is worth living. And since the entire discussion of the Republic has been
a dialectic investigation of what the just life is and whether it is worth
living, they are being asked to trade bad images for good ones, but im-
ages nonetheless.
The Republic, that behemoth work of education, learning, politics,
virtue, and the societal role of philosophy and philosophers, is the single
largest source of the most intricate and beautiful images Plato created.
And it too portrays images as appropriate vehicles for important philo-
sophical endeavors. Given these brief but highly signifi cant examples
from the Republic, it is diffi cult to imagine taking the criticisms that oc-
cur in that dialogue as criticisms of image-making itself. Plainly, images