Iconologies: Reading Simulations with Plato and Nietzsche

cognitive mode. Indeed Socrates asserts that as the levels of cognition are ascended, with the character of "clearness" and "precision," so do their objects "...partake of truth and reality." Unfortunately, just as the "Good" itself was left unexplained as a causal principle in the sun eikon, so is that unhypothetical first principle also left unexplained here, in the divided line. Most importantly, however, for the divided line eikon, eikasia has operated to seal the breach between the realm of the visible and the intelligible, in function of its referential character. If we have been led to the realm of the eidos, it is at least asserted that the ideas themselves adumbrate a unifying cause and grounding principle. We are left with a considerable paradox, nonetheless. It is only this unifying principle which can ensure, which can be the guarantor of eikasia, which brought us to this point in the first place. If eikasia is the function which assures the identity of transition through the various levels, and leads us to that grounding principle, how may that grounding principle be invoked, in turn, to justify eikasia (assuming that the unhypothetical principle is ultimately truth and reality) -such that the ideas themselves are "offspring" of the good, are metaphysically grounded at all? Seemingly, either the first principle -the Good -is not represented by the line, and the difference between thought and understanding or intellect would thus be of degree, of progressive abstraction (as the difference between eikasia and pistis and their objects -seems to be), or we are confronted with an insurmountable circularity. In which case, and ironically, Glaucon's response to Socrates' summary account of the divided line eikon is remarkably consistent: "I understand"(511e 7). What, finally, can be said about L'Éminence grise behind the baroque of the Platonic eikones? The intelligible is claimed to be united with the sensible. This is effectively asserted in the divided line by the formal identity between sections two and three, i.e., between "pistis" and "dianoia" -by the simple expedient that Socrates had constructed the two sections proportionally, in the first place. Since the latter is dependent on the image of the former for its content, there is no epistemological need for a doctrine of "participation" at all -i.e., of the Platonic metaphysics. In this case, level four, "noesis" could be accounted for by a progressive abstraction of the contents of dianoetic thought, so as to construct abstract "ideas" or "essences" of virtually anything (and with somewhat different imperatives in mind, this is precisely what the Aristotelian and Cartesian traditions did). Their "reality," however, consists in their significance, their purely symbolic status. Because the intelligible order is itself discursive, symbolic, one can claim to talk about the sensible order easily enough: and the eikastic function of reference is effectively invoked to permit just this. One can speak about the world, i.e., it makes sense, because language is asserted to refer to it. In the same way that Descartes "supposed some order [i.e., a mathematical order], even among objects that have no natural order of precedence" (l985: 120) for his project of unifying the sciences, so the Platonic account assumes that the symbolic order of language (argument, speech: logos) renders the world "intelligible." Effectively, reference and signification are sublated -through the agency of eikasia. To the extent that the "ideas" are held to be the "offspring" or "children" of the good," i.e., that they are metaphysically grounded forms, which exist in themselves, and which "participate" in things, all the while pointing to the good -to the real and true -to this extent Platonic realism demands that the "ideas" testify to their provenance, that they refer to their transcendent ground of Being. That the discursive sun eikon gets replaced by the visual divided line eikon, and that the eikastic function is incorporated as the very dynamic of the line, however, argues against the plausibility of such a provenance -relying as it does, on the naturalistic prejudice of reference (what Husserl would later mean by "the natural attitude" of consciousness). Quite simply, the ideas are asserted to be such "offspring" of being, even before the sun eikon is framed: "Anyhow, receive this interest and child [both: 'tokos'] of the good itself...." "We both assert that there are," I said, "and distinguish in speech, many fair things, many good things, and so on for each kind of thing."