Plato’s Creative Imagination

Abstract

This chapter argues that in the Republic Plato envisages the fashioning of the guardian class in sculptural terms. Portrait statues of athletes and important men fed Plato’s imagination about personal and political virtue, while the lost-wax technique for cast bronze statues provided him with an ingenious way to articulate how humans might be moulded to ‘embody’ the immaterial Forms. One essential claim of the chapter is that, despite the severe criticism of mimesis in Republic Books Three and Ten, Plato was in fact engaged in constructive dialogue with Athenian material culture of the fifth and early fourth centuries. More specifically, the author argues that Plato found in the cultural/religious connotations of Greek sculpture, as well as in the technical process of the casting technique, a valuable way to conceptualize complex ideas about relations between humans and the Forms and to communicate those ideas in words. Plato’s comparison of Socrates to a ‘statue-maker’ in the Republic thus points towards the philosophical creation of a quasi-art ‘world’ that lies somewhere between the sensible, material realm and the abstract world of the intellect.