Plato’s Tragicomic Ascent

Bibliographic Data

ID8135299
AuthorsLouis A Ruprecht (Georgia State University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume17
Issue2
Pages156
Publication date2026-01-29
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel17020156
OpenAlexW7126034250
LanguageEN
References cited24

This article explores the richly visual vocabulary characteristic of the Platonic corpus. Focusing on Plato’s linkage of seeing and knowing, it will explore a two-fold paradox: first, that the soul’s ascent is consistently depicted as a painful matter by Plato; and second, that it customarily involves some emphatically bodily mechanics. These textual and rhetorical details may, in their turn, call for a significant re-thinking of several truisms regarding Platonic spirituality and “Platonic love.” Four revisions follow. First, Platonic philosophy was not radically dualistic. Second, it was not aggressively rationalist, and secularist, informed by a blanket opposition to myth, to poetry, and to religious images. Third, it aspired to illumination without breezily claiming to bathe in that light. And fourth, it embraced and ennobled the ecstatic transport vouchsafed to embodied creatures by eros, that subtle species of desire that was, if not divine, then surely sublime

Creatures · Embodied cognition · Opposition (politics · Rhetorical device · Rhetorical question · Vocabulary · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies

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