Three Realms in the Activity of the Image

Abstract

the duality, and to some extent, the duplicity, in our approach to the image stems from an ambiguity toward the realm of the visual itself. From Plato’s distinction between forms and shadows we have inherited an attitude toward images that remains locked in a completely unhelpful tension between truth and falsity, between what is and what only appears to be. And yet this argument that favors the veracity of the real over the illusion of the image regularly forgets that truth for Plato remains visual in nature, or at least it is a matter of light. The path to knowledge is not so much a path to truth—in the sense of the correspondence between a concept and a pre-given object—as a path toward a different way of seeing, and of seeing what shows itself. A form, the Greek word for which is eidos, refers to both essence and idea, but is also the way something looks, or how it gives itself to be seen. The close connection between an idea and the look of something is evident in the related Greek word for phantom or apparition: the eidolon, a ghostly double, or image of someone that can easily be mistaken for the real person, and from which we derive our own concept of the idol. This means that Plato’s discussion of the journey from the shadows and the flickering of the fire in the cave to the brilliance of the sun is a journey through different degrees of light, different aspects, or views, and remains a journey through the visual.