A Shellfish on the Path of Truth: Funny Images and the Modulation of Pleasure and Pain
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Until recent times, Plato’s depreciation of images has led to neglect how they feature in his texts. An interest towards the arguments against images have prevailed over noticing and assessing their actual use in his dialogues. In fact, Socrates is said to be a master in drawing images and Platonic dialogues show a great awareness of how images creep in our understanding. A positive assessment of the role of images in Plato’s texts has therefore started to spread and their use has been epistemologically justified by underlying how images are one of the steps towards truth and by connecting this ‘necessary’ but imperfect means to the finitude of human beings. Moreover, some passages have led to construe the whole Platonic fiction as a sort of image, aimed at enacting and making listeners/readers reenacting Socratic philosophein. Indeed, in the Phaedrus written texts are compared to eid?la (images) of the living discussions and the Symposium likens Sokratikoi logoi to images of excellence. This general interest for Platonic images and theory of images has therefore seen an increasing number of analyses flourish, focusing originally on their consistent and subtle use. This challenging view has, however, ignored a fundamental aspect of Plato’s use of images in his dialogues, the role of funny and laughable images. In this paper, I shall try to show how the use of funny images fits in both Plato’s theory and dialogical fiction. For this purpose, I will firstly address the structure of the emotional response to laughable images, i.e. ridicule. A mixture of pleasure and pain, ridicule proves to be equally powerful and dangerous, and it is allowed only under specific conditions. I will then investigate how both the pleasant and painful strands explain the presence of funny images in Platonic texts. Following the idea that Plato’s dialogues are images of the philosophical practice, I will consider both verbal eikones aiming at ridiculing doctrines or individuals, lowering the register, and eliciting laughter, and laughable representations of negative characters. To fully understand how and why Plato’s logoi dwells on funny images, I argue that it is necessary to find an internal and compelling reason for which he had recourse to them, which is strongly entwined with desire, good imitation, and philosophical persuasion. I will show that funny images are extensively exploited by Plato because they act on two levels: they instill through pleasure the desire for a philosophical life and they help avoid identification with powerful and seductive negative characters, like Callicles or Thrasymachus, while discarding their doctrines. By doing so, this pleasant experience contributes to associate pleasure to the playful representation of virtue; at the same time, through the representation of negative characters, pain is also correctly learnt.
Abstract
Until recent times, Plato’s depreciation of images has led to neglect how they feature in his texts. An interest towards the arguments against images have prevailed over noticing and assessing their actual use in his dialogues. In fact, Socrates is said to be a master in drawing images and Platonic dialogues show a great awareness of how images creep in our understanding. A positive assessment of the role of images in Plato’s texts has therefore started to spread and their use has been epistemologically justified by underlying how images are one of the steps towards truth and by connecting this ‘necessary’ but imperfect means to the finitude of human beings. Moreover, some passages have led to construe the whole Platonic fiction as a sort of image, aimed at enacting and making listeners/readers reenacting Socratic philosophein. Indeed, in the Phaedrus written texts are compared to eid?la (images) of the living discussions and the Symposium likens Sokratikoi logoi to images of excellence. This general interest for Platonic images and theory of images has therefore seen an increasing number of analyses flourish, focusing originally on their consistent and subtle use. This challenging view has, however, ignored a fundamental aspect of Plato’s use of images in his dialogues, the role of funny and laughable images. In this paper, I shall try to show how the use of funny images fits in both Plato’s theory and dialogical fiction. For this purpose, I will firstly address the structure of the emotional response to laughable images, i.e. ridicule. A mixture of pleasure and pain, ridicule proves to be equally powerful and dangerous, and it is allowed only under specific conditions. I will then investigate how both the pleasant and painful strands explain the presence of funny images in Platonic texts. Following the idea that Plato’s dialogues are images of the philosophical practice, I will consider both verbal eikones aiming at ridiculing doctrines or individuals, lowering the register, and eliciting laughter, and laughable representations of negative characters. To fully understand how and why Plato’s logoi dwells on funny images, I argue that it is necessary to find an internal and compelling reason for which he had recourse to them, which is strongly entwined with desire, good imitation, and philosophical persuasion. I will show that funny images are extensively exploited by Plato because they act on two levels: they instill through pleasure the desire for a philosophical life and they help avoid identification with powerful and seductive negative characters, like Callicles or Thrasymachus, while discarding their doctrines. By doing so, this pleasant experience contributes to associate pleasure to the playful representation of virtue; at the same time, through the representation of negative characters, pain is also correctly learnt.
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