Plato and the Platonic Tradition: The Image Beyond the Image

Abstract

Plato’s thought, from his metaphysics to his poetics, is unthinkable apart from his theory of the image. Images occupy the center of Plato’s universe for the same reason that imitation does: Platonic metaphysics rests on the assumption of an image that is copied in successive stages, each suffering a derogation from the original Form or idea (shape, image). The phenomenal world is a (bad) copy of an original image. Art and poetry are necessarily caught up in the same metaphysical process of imitation (mimēsis) and copy, producing images that lie at an even farther remove from the original Forms. There would seem to be no escaping the image in a Platonic world.1 Or is there? The idea of a Form is paradoxical in any number of ways, but the most salient and relevant of these is the question why Forms are called Forms at all. If they are shapes or images, what do they look like? But even to put the question in this way is to open up a Pandora’s box of problems. Surely Forms cannot “look like” something else in the sense of resembling a more perfect image, else we would encounter a vicious regress, with each step leading to another image that prompts the same question: What does it look