The Power of a Beautiful Image in Plato and the Poets: Infatuation or Transcendence?

It is increasingly recognized in the literature that Plato’s critique of the poets for their use of images in no way implies that philosophy can dispense with images. How, after all, could one fail to note that even the Platonic dialogue most unsparingly critical of imitation is not only itself a work of imitation but accomplishes its central philosophical work through images (think of the Sun and the Cave)? The starting point of any discussion of the topic must be the fact that Plato’s relation to images, and thus also to the poets in whom he sees the masters of images, is deeply ambivalent. What I wish to show is that this ambivalence is rooted in the ambivalence that characterizes images themselves on Plato’s account, an ambivalence that especially comes to the fore in the beautiful image. Such an image is ambivalent in that by its very nature it both produces satisfaction with itself, is desirable in itself, and points beyond itself, leaving one unsatisfied. In examining this ambivalence I will focus on three texts: 1) The critique of the Lovers of Sights and Sounds in Republic V as only resembling philosophers; 2) The positive role for philosophical transcendence of the beautiful image in the Phaedrus; 3) The contest between Agathon and Socrates in the Symposium. What we learn from the latter text in particular is that the beautiful image can be more than an image only when it ceases to satisfy. In the end, it is an emphasis on the ‘erotic’ character of images, and thus on their ambivalence between possessing and lacking that of which they are the images, that distinguishes the philosopher from the poet