Plato and the ontological placement of images
pp. 103-184
in: , Understanding imagination, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
What imagination is cannot be answered apart from understanding its conceptual topology, the articulated framework of basic phenomena and concepts that govern our thinking about it. The first step is to understand how the image (as object), then imagination (as psychological power), developed from the problematic of being and appearance. The pre-Socratic thinker Empedocles of Agrigentum thought that we experience things by virtue of image-bearing particles they emit. Plato (428–347 B.C.E.), in his dialogue the Meno, criticized this kind of hypothesis and emphasized instead the human ability to apprehend and work with images, in particular mathematical images. In other dialogues, above all the Sophist and the Republic, he developed an ontology of images and their emergence, and as corollary he took the first step toward a psychology of imagining. Careful explication of it shows the falsity of the widespread conviction that Plato thought images were ontologically deficient. The Republic presents a grand vision of a cosmos in which the good images itself not just in intelligible forms or ideas but at every level of being. The good does this according to knowable, mathematical proportions, and the human soul has the power to know these levels, both in themselves and as figures or images of other levels. The most typically human form of imagining for Plato is the making of logoi, words in discourse that represent the world and its things. The underlying Platonic conceptual topology provided the basis for all future investigations of imagination.