Image

Use in the book

The plural εἴδωλα describes the other things called friends for the sake of the first friend, qualified by ὥσπερ, “as it were.” Socrates fears that these images may deceive the speakers about what is truly a friend.

The word belongs to a comparison within the inquiry. It invites a distinction between derivative and final objects of concern, but it does not by itself settle that secondary friends are wholly unreal, or supply a developed theory of Forms. Keep the comparative qualification visible.

Places to read

1. 219dὥσπερ εἴδωλα ἄττα ὄντα αὐτοῦ — Being, as it were, certain images of it.

Use in the book

The atomist report explains sight through incoming images. The interpretation of Homer compares the dead with reflections in mirrors or water: likeness and movement remain, while graspable solidity is absent. Porphyry explains soul’s presence in Hades through its presiding over a dark image capable of being in a place. These accounts assign the image different material and explanatory statuses.

Places to read

1. I.52.1Incoming images explain visual experience.
2. I.49.50.11Reflections illustrate likeness without graspable solidity.
3. I.49.55.1An image mediates the soul’s relation to Hades.

Translation in this edition

“Image” is not automatically “illusion” or “mental picture.” The entry keeps eidōlon distinct from the faculty of imagination.

Use in the book

In the whole-body mirror passage, images enter through all the senses: an echo can be an image of a voice, and touch has images of its own. The vocabulary belongs to Joubert’s speculative account rather than to a modern theory of sensory transmission. In the Fontanes note, images support conception and explanation but cannot legitimately perform every work of judgment and conclusion. The contrast prevents a blanket equation of image with either knowledge or illusion. It also matters for reading the painter account of imagination: clothing in images gives something a perceptible figure without, by itself, demonstrating it.

Places to read

1. I, p. 367, entry 8, ¶2Images include the auditory and tactile, and the entire body becomes a mirror.
2. II, p. 732, entry 6, ¶1Conceiving by images is separated from judging by them.
3. I, p. 282, entry 3, ¶1Imagination clothes the bodiless in figures and images.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains image rather than narrowing the term to mental picture. Affections in the bodily account includes states and effects upon a person, not just fondness; “they say” qualifies the echo comparison.

Use in the book

The divine image is the strongest expression of created human dignity. Its defining resemblance is neither facial nor bodily: the soul can know, love, enjoy, and communicate goodness. In I.67 likeness makes friendship possible, because the soul is both lovable and disposed to love. Its excellence belongs to a relation with its maker rather than to isolated self-sufficiency.

III.61 draws an important limit. God cannot make a second God; the utmost creature is God’s image. This creature contains things as a mirror and communicates itself as a sun. Thus receiving and giving are complementary aspects of likeness. To become the image fully is to exercise the bestowed capacities, not merely possess them unused.

Places to read

1. I.19The image lies in the soul’s powers, inclinations, and principles rather than facial features.
2. I.67Likeness grounds reciprocal love and eternal friendship.
3. III.61The image is the highest creature, distinguished from a second God.

In this edition

Likeness and similitude name the same representative relation here. Claims of resemblance should not erase Traherne’s explicit distinction between God and creature.

Use in the book

Aëtius judges that Empedocles gives more support to perception by images than to perception by rays because he accepts effluences. That inference connects incoming material from objects with a recognized category of ancient optical explanation. It does not say that every effluence preserves an object's full outline, carries a miniature visible scene, or travels through empty space.

The distinction is especially important beside A88's mirror account. That report describes outflows gathering and being compacted at a reflecting surface, but does not call them eidōla. A reader may compare the two notices, yet should not fill the mirror mechanism with unmentioned image-theoretical machinery. The lexical entry records what the doxographer calls the interpretation and why he prefers it, while leaving the physical structure of the proposed image underdetermined.

Places to read

1. A 90 (testimony)Aëtius. Prefers an image interpretation because Empedocles accepts effluences.
2. A 88 (testimony)Aëtius. Offers a material account of reflection without using the term eidōla.

Translation in this edition

The source-critical task is to distinguish an interpretation of Empedocles from an exact quotation of his terminology. A90 supplies the former; the edition prints no accompanying Empedoclean verse containing eidōla.

Use in the book

The call to glorify images is immediately joined to wandering and multiplied sensation expressed through music. These are headings for development, not a finished aesthetic system. Their juxtaposition suggests that experience becomes richest when one medium or encounter opens onto others.

Later in Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, the cuckold's suffering is traced to pride, mistaken reasoning, and love diverted from God to creatures. The worshipping animal has chosen the wrong idol. This diagnosis exposes possessive attachment but remains within a passage that also calls for violence against women; the aesthetic celebration cannot sanitize that adjacent cruelty.

Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX makes the theatre's chandelier a leading actor, showing that the eye may organize the event around brilliance, pattern, and changing scale. Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV's plan to classify engravings gives the image-cult a material counterpart: collection and arrangement. Vision is both excited receptivity and work of ordering. Neither the lyrical declaration nor the practical list alone defines the relation.

Places to read

1. Mon cœur mis à nu XCIGlorifier le culte des images — A projected celebration treats visual attachment as devotion.
2. Mon cœur mis à nu XCIma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion — The passion is made a marker of personal origin.
3. Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIXlumineux, cristallin, compliqué, circulaire et symétrique. — The chandelier concentrates distinct visual properties.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu CXIVClassement de gravures (deux jours). — Images also require patient material organization.

Translation in this edition

‘Worship of images’ brings culte into the same religious field as adorer and idole elsewhere. ‘First passion’ chooses a temporal sense for primitive, avoiding an implication of crude or undeveloped taste. The edition keeps the separate sentences about wandering and multiplied sensation; note 83 does not turn their proximity into a named doctrine of Liszt.