In Praise of Plato's Poetic Imagination PDF
Preview In Praise of Plato's Poetic Imagination
In Praise of Plato’s Poetic Imagination In Praise of Plato’s Poetic Imagination Sonja Tanner Lexington Books a Division of roWMan & LITTLeFIeLD PUBLISHerS, InC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK Published by Lexington Books a division of rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of The rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com estover road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tanner, Sonja, 1972– In praise of Plato’s poetic imagination / Sonja Tanner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBn 978-0-7391-4338-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBn 978-0-7391-4340-7 (electronic) 1. Plato. 2. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title. B395.T17 2010 184—dc22 2009053718 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of american national Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, anSI/nISo Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of america Contents Prologue vii Introduction 1 1 a History of the ancient “Quarrel”—The Philosophical “Side” 19 2 on the “Side” of Poetry in the ancient “Quarrel” 59 3 Imagination in the Sophist 89 4 The Pharmacological Structure of the Imagination 129 5 The Unity of Form and Content in Platonic Dialogues 177 6 Imagination and the ancient “Quarrel” 207 Bibliography 233 Index 243 v Prologue Whether we know the language or not, in a sense we all speak Greek.* It was Greek thinking that began to elucidate the dialectical nature of thought—as logos—out of which come concepts and oppositions that generate meaning in many of our own languages. From the Greeks we have learned to speak of dif- ferences between originals and images, Forms and particulars, eternal and mor- tal, the rational and irrational, being and becoming, and the ontological and the ethical. Based on our understanding of Plato through aristotle, Platonists and others, we carry on a tradition of privileging one half of these dichotomies (namely the originals, Forms, the eternal, reason, becoming, and ontology) over the other. The immutable, the Forms, the rational—these are to be focused on. This is what philosophy proper should attempt to understand. Simultaneously, we forget that any such privileging is itself ethically founded. Such privileging supports ideologies of domination.** Thereupon we feel justified in sacrificing particulars for the sake of what we see and worship as the Form. We are able to denigrate one gender, ethnicity, or time because we see it as more irrational, for the sake of the other. Further, we believe that the delineations we make in such classification are simply ontological, and there- fore true. If our systems of classification and privileging are not simply factual, then our understanding of the world and our place in it are also compro- mised. We proceed on the assumption that the strands of logos can be disen- tangled, and that one can be studied to the exclusion of the other. and yet we vii viii Prologue continue to do philosophy on the very grounds and in the very languages that have enabled such ways of thinking. returning to the Greeks has the potential to further mire us in the same ways of thinking we attempt to counter, but equally, such a return is of vital importance if we are ever to move beyond such ideologies. This book is a return to one of the most influential and best known amongst Greek thinkers, the one that most people can name even without having studied philosophy. as such, it is hardly unique. and though I have alluded to grand possibilities in another return to the Greeks, its potential is but for far more modest and far less lofty goals. nonetheless, being clear about such goals gives definition and purpose to the book and situates it within a larger project. notes * The “we” in this statement refers to Western cultures. I do not mean to attribute universality to Greek thought or to its legacy. If the image of Platonic dialogues this book sketches is accurate, however, it is interesting to note how insights such as the unity of opposites mark a coincidence of ancient eastern and Western thought. ** This phrase is adopted from Long (2004). Introduction This work is an attempt at raising questions that will contribute to a produc- tive understanding of not only Platonic thinking, but of our own. It aims at disturbing what we often see as clear delineations between such concepts as self and other, original and image, and form and content. I hope to effect such a disturbance by examining the role of what may be an unlikely and seldom referred-to suspect in Platonic dialogues—the imagination. The “discovery” of the imagination has been attributed by some to aristo- tle, and indeed, Plato writes fairly little explicitly on eikasîa and phantasîa.1 as Butcher describes it, “The Greek imagination of the classical age is under the strict control of reason, it is limited by a sense of measure and a faculty of self-restraint.”2 But perhaps imagination is not the sort of thing which ratio- nal exposition is most adept at elucidating. Perhaps imagination eludes the grasp of strictly rational procedures. If so, it is likely to exceed the rational restrictions operating within any work—whether dialogue or book. The aim here is not in any way to control or to pin down imagination. It is not ulti- mately subject to control, and doing so would be once again to privilege rea- son, understood in a narrow sense, over imagination. nonetheless, language is flexible enough to permit at least an adumbration of images of the imagina- tion, leaving open the possibility of writing about the imagination by way of its very products. at the same time, its very products—images, metaphors, and myths—illuminate the role of imagination in Platonic dialogues. Such 1
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