The Realm of Mimesis in Plato: Orality, Writing, and the Ontology of the Image

188 Pages·2022·2.24 MB·English

by  Mariangela Esposito

The Realm of Mimesis in Plato
Brill’s Plato Studies Series
Editors
Gabriele Cornelli (Brasilia, Brazil)
Gábor Betegh (Cambridge, United Kingdom)
Editorial Board
Beatriz Bossi (Madrid, Spain)
Luc Brisson (Paris, France)
Michael Erler (Würzburg, Germany)
Franco Ferrari (Salerno, Italy)
Maria do Ceu Fialho (Coimbra, Portugal)
Mary-Louise Gill (Providence, USA)
Debra Nails (Michigan, USA)
Noburu Notomi (Tokyo, Japan)
Olivier Renaut (Paris, France)
Voula Tsouna (Santa Barbara, USA)
volume 13
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bpss
The Realm of Mimesis
in Plato
Orality, Writing, and the Ontology of the Image
By
Mariangela Esposito
leiden | boston
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2452-2945
isbn 978-90-04-53311-0 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-53454-4 (e-book)
Copyright 2023 by Mariangela Esposito. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic.
Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for
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This tablet shouts aloud
terrible, dreadful words.
Where can I run to, where
can I escape this crushing weight, this pain?
I’m dead. I am destroyed.
This song, the writing’s voice
is venom to my eyes.
Euripides, Hippolytus (vv. 971–977)
∵
Contents
Abstract ix
Acknowledgements x
Premises xi
Introduction 1
1 The Critique of Writing in Plato’s Works 5
1 “I Have Discovered a Potion for Memory and for Wisdom” 6
2 “If the Author Is Really Serious, This Book Does not Contain His
Best Thoughts” 18
3 “If a Man Has Nothing More Valuable Than What He Has
Composed or Written” 31
4 “Nothing More Valuable” 39
5 “He Will Sow Gardens of Letters for the Sake of Amusing
Himself” 47
2 The Critique of Orality in Plato’s Works 49
1 Orality and Vocality 50
2 Myth and Philosophy 64
3 The Arts and the City 70
4 Hermeneia and Responsibility 80
5 Image-Making 87
3 The Ontology of the Image in Plato’s Works 94
1 Eidos and Eidolon 95
2 The Ontology of the Pseudos 101
3 Mirrors and Paidia 108
4 Shadows and Dialectic 117
5 Beauty and Wonderment 128
Conclusion 137
Afterword 143
Bibliography 148
General Index 159
Index Locorum 170
Abstract
Plato lived at the cusp of an anthropological paradigm shift, very similar to
the one we have been experiencing for a few decades. As we experience the
progressive erosion of literacy in favour of digitalisation, Plato’s dialogues wit-
ness the transition from orality to literacy, both with their contents and with
their literary style. Located in the blind spot of this transition, the dialogues
are living contradictions: they are written dialogues, partly literary, partly oral;
this contradiction informs also one of the most vexed issues of the history of
Platonic interpretation, the relationship between orality and writing in the
dialogues.
This monograph is a contemporary philosophical inquiry into the complex
issue of the relationship between Plato’s respective criticisms of orality and
writing. The main aim of this study is to argue that this relationship, often
read as a straightforward opposition, is instead grounded in a more ontologi-
cal level of analysis, as is exemplified by the ontology of the image which ap-
pears throughout the entire Platonic canon. An analysis of the structure of this
ontology will show that both Plato’s criticism of orality and the criticism of
writing are inessential, and in fact have more points of convergence than diver-
gence. The theme of mimesis is the central thread of this work, which I treat as
the “mechanism” that progressively reveals the continuity and co-dependency
of the orality/writing opposition and the ontology of the image (itself based on
the co-dependency between eidos and eidolon).
The work offers an open-ended conclusion that suggests the possibility of
further inquiry into the Platonic conception of beauty: the various occurrences
of beauty in Plato’s works demonstrate a singular relationship between eidos
and eidolon which overcomes the mimetic mechanism and points to an erotic
conception of life and philosophy.
The afterword, which closes the work, aims to show the relevance of this
study to a broader understanding of some of the contemporary phenomena
which challenge our ways of analysing, communicating, and elaborating on
the visual world into which we have anthropologically shifted.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof Michael Breen and Dr Catherine Kavanagh who pro-
vided me with the conditions to complete the research for this work, and who
gave me a great amount of creative freedom and professional trust.
I would like to thank Prof Daniele Guastini, mostly for our interpretative
disagreements on Plato’s ontology which partially informed the last chapter of
this work. I also owe a debt of gratitude to his guidance during the time spent
in Rome, at La Sapienza University, under his co-supervision.
I would like to thank Dr Cyril McDonnell, Dr Alessandro Stavru and
Dr Eugene O’Brien for their intellectual generosity and genuine interest in this
work.
I would like to thank Prof Gianluca Garelli for our uninterrupted philosoph-
ical dialogue over the last fifteen years.
Lastly, I would like to thank Dr Susanna Mati and Dr Omar Abu Dbei for
their critical and supportive observations on the nature and destiny of this
work, but mostly, for their friendship.