PLATO’S BOOK OF IMAGESto rely on hypothesized entities for which they can offer no overarching
explanation, whereas the dialecticians can explain all of their earlier
hypotheses in the light of the “unhypothesized starting point of all,”
which is generally understood as the Good.
Socrates as Image-Maker
If my argument thus far is correct, there is a use of images that employs
the cognitive power of knowledge: the use in which images are created
and employed that recognizes them as mere images, and where their
proper use is designed to allow the thinker who uses them to gain a bet-
ter grasp of the originals they image. It is this use, then, that Plato has
Socrates associate with the mathematicians.
But what about the many images that Plato has Socrates evoke? Are
Socrates’ images introduced as images of higher things... and are they
employed in such a way as to expedite achieving a better grasp of those
higher things? I doubt that it requires much argument to establish an af-
fi r mat ive answer to t his quest ion. I a ssume it w ill be more t han adequate
simply to remind ourselves of the way that Socrates goes about answer-
ing the challenges with which he is confronted in book 2. Insisting that
the discussion of book 1 was a “glutton’s feast” (see 354b1– 2) because the
discussants had not troubled to obtain a clear understanding of justice
before taking on the subsidiary question of its preferability to injustice,
Socrates elects in book 2 to postpone the actual defense of justice un-
til a suitable understanding of justice can be obtained (see 369a5– b1).
And the way in which Socrates proposes to approach the prior question,
in this case, is by way of the image of large and small letters. And this
image turns out to be an image of a relationship between image and
original: the larger letters are used as an image of the smaller; so too the
state will be used, in the discussants’ search for a workable understand-
ing of justice, as an image of the individual person (see 369a2– 3). And a
given individual’s instantiation of justice, we fi nd out soon after this, is
itself but an image of the Form (445c5– 6, 479e3). So the construction of
the main argument of the Republic (and plainly, the most famous images
of lights in the middle books) give clear instances of a use of images that
has the same general feature that characterizes the use of images within
the mathematical studies: these images were explicitly identifi ed as im-
ages, and were used in order to gain a better grasp of higher things.
This use of images, recall, employs the cognitive power of knowledge,^10
even though it does not yield the same degree of clarity as one capable