The Visual Arts as Truth: Plato's Mistake

Appearances do not deceive, presuppositions do.

I hold that Socrates was mistaken or, at least, Plato was mistaken, in asserting that the painterly icon or the table is less true.  Since Plato put this in the mouth of Socrates in The Republic, I will refer to Socrates.

After questioning Glaucon, he determined three levels of the table:

1.  The table is a Form or Idea.

2.  The table the carpenter builds is one they abstracted from the Form.

3.  The table the painter draws is one they abstracted from the carpenter’s table.

Hence, the painterly depiction is less true as it is twice removed from the Idea.

I believe that the mistake Socrates made was that he understood the image as an imitation of a table.   Of course, the image is not an imitation of a table but it is an image of a table.

An imitation of the table might be a small model of it, used as a prototype in order to make a large one.  A table in a painting will function as part of the artistic composition on a flat surface--these are two different entities.

Rene Magritte illustrated this difference very well in his The Treachery of Images.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “This is not a pipe.”

An imitation of a table might be another table the carpenter builds.   What the carpenter builds, however, is part of the process of giving shape to an idea; it is neither a corruption nor a distancing of it.

Artwork or craftwork, at the least, is a re-presentation of an idea rather than imitation.  As such, it is no longer an image but is an icon, a reality in itself.

The break with the Platonic approach is this: artwork is not an imitation of an idea but the re-presentation either by psychological extension or metaphysical projection and a culmination of the artistic idea as an icon.

It is not a matter of seeing the shadow of the Form but it is the reality of the Form incarnate.

I’d say that the artist’s idea is incomplete as image until the artwork is complete as icon.