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The mirror analogy in Book X of Plato's Republic (596c-e) helps Socrates formulate the conception of mimesis used to make the initial argument that the painter is an imitator and his works are inferior, being three times removed from truth and reality. The metaphysical argument, as I will call it, includes what seems to be a simple analogy between painting and holding a mirror to the world (596a-598d). But the analogy is not a simple one. It provides a visualizing mechanism that helps Glaucon to conceptualize the hierarchical schema of form, artifact, and image upon which the metaphysical argument is built, preparing the way for the key distinction that Glaucon makes between appearance and reality. It conjures up the idea that the mirror holder is a sophistic know-it-all who can "make" all things, and places painters in the same class as sophistic mirror holders.
In my reading of the mirror passage, three imaging devices are constructed. I call both analogy and metaphor "imaging devices," since they have similar rhetorical and educational functions in helping Glaucon arrive at conclusions that Socrates wishes him to accept. First is the analogy that focuses on the resemblance between images created in mirrors and in paintings. Socrates leads Glaucon to understand what it is that the painter "makes," and to deduce its inferior ontological status. The second imaging device is also an analogy, related to the first, that compares a painter, without qualification, to a mirror holder who turns the mirror round and round, pretending to "make" all things. This shows that Socrates's mirror holder is not an innocent, anonymous someone. The third imaging device is a metaphor. The idea that a mirror makes images is transferred to the art of painting: painting is holding a mirror to the world. The idea that mirror holders claim to know more than anyone could possibly know is transferred to painters, who belong to the same class of imitators as mirror holders. Painters are sophistic mirror holders.
In my view, the mirror analogy and its imaging devices give Socrates a dialectical advantage that he would not otherwise have. The metaphysical argument is a dialectical one, and it depends heavily on Glaucon's receptivity to the model of the mirror. The painter is classified as...