Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic by Marina Berzins McCoy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic by Marina Berzins McCoy Nickolas Pappas McCOY, Marina Berzins. Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. viii + 355 pp. Cloth, $95.00 —This major study of the Republic combines traditional and original approaches to illuminate how the dialogue teaches, how it argues, and generally how it philosophizes. The book covers the entirety of Plato’s Republic (with emphasis on the earlier sections), finding throughout how Plato’s characters reason by means of images and how Plato’s readers might do the same. An introduction and nine chapters develop the book’s themes and apply its techniques. Chapter 1, really a methodological introduction, revisits the old question: Given Plato’s critique of imagery and literary devices, how should a reader respond to his image-laden writing? But McCoy seeks to go beyond the standard responses to this question, which confine Platonic “imagery” to passages formally framed as stories or announced to be figurative. Myths and anecdotes alone will not do justice to the way that image-thinking pervades this philosophizing. For McCoy, image includes the paradigmatic case, the illustrative example, and the analogy. These are implicated in the Republic’s thinking, too; so image-thinking encompasses much more of the Republic than treatments of the old question have assumed. Images in poetry do stifle philosophizing. The difference in Platonic imagery, according to McCoy, consists in its inspiring the reader to pursue images actively and tangle with them in pursuit of philosophical understanding, rather than to absorb them passively. In book 1, the significant images are “paradigms” of justice that guide the thinking of Socrates’ interlocutors. Socrates brings the interlocutors to reexamine these imaginatively effective sets of assumptions, then works with Glaucon and Adeimantus to go beyond such paradigmatic images. Another species of image guides the positive view that Socrates develops in response to Glaucon and Adeimantus. The analogy between city and soul, underappreciated as image and as example of how to think with images, enmeshes the philosophical reader in meditation on the soul, how it can be known, and how far a city might resemble a soul. McCoy joins those interpreters who deny the literal tripartition of the soul in order to highlight the way in which this analogical argument too amounts to active image-thinking. [End Page 397] These investigations take up chapters 2 through 4. In the two following chapters, McCoy looks at the Republic’s proposed cities, while the two chapters after those treat the middle books’ images of the good. The final chapter covers both the best city’s decline to become the worst, and the concluding myth about the afterlife. Chapters 5 and 6, about the Republic’s cities, reinforce those proposed cities’ status as images by comparing them with cultural images of Plato’s time. The “city of sows” in book 2 shares features with the primitivistic fantasy that Athenian women enacted annually in the Thesmophoria. It is a fascinating suggestion and well informed about Athenian religious practice; but one might point out other enactments of the primitive that Plato could be drawing upon, like the gymnasium practices (oil rubbed on bodies, leaf-garlands like camouflage) that simulated precivilized hunting. Plato had more than one representation of archaic life available to him. In chapter 6 the apparent innovations of Republic 5—above all gender equality—are said to share with comparable proposals in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen the comedic function of criticizing institutions while leaving themselves open to criticism. This is a tricky middle ground between the interpreters who treat these innovations as Plato’s own and those who dismiss them as “ironic.” McCoy’s adept examination of the intertextuality in book 5 grounds her reading. She rightly refers to the many comments on laughter and ridicule in these pages, although she could have said more about those Socratic rejections of risibility that weaken her interpretation. McCoy passes from politics to metaphysics: the forms in general, and specially the form of the good, as represented in books 6 and 7 with figures of the sun, the divided line, and the cave. Chapters 7 and 8 take on passages more typically...