Lecture on Plato's Republic

[The following is the text of a lecture delivered, in part, in

Liberal Studies 310 by Ian Johnston on November 4, 1997. This
document is in the public domain and may be used by anyone
for any purpose, in whole or in part, without permission and
without charge, provided the source is acknowledged, released
November 4, 1997]

For comments or questions, please contact Ian Johnston

Introduction 
In this lecture I want to consider, all too briefly, a very
important element in Plato's Republic, namely, what he has to
say about art, artistic representation, poetry, and the
connections between these common activities and the political
and moral order he is exploring in his famous thought
experiment. For the sake of this lecture, I would like to use the
term poesis (meaning making) to refer to all common forms of
artistic creativity in the visual and plastic arts, music, drama,
poetry, and prose fiction. 

If you have grasped to some extent what Plato is saying about

knowledge and about the theory of metaphysical reality which
he is advancing, then much of what he has to say about poesis
will be easy enough to grasp. Even if you do not immediately
agree with Socrates, you will at least recognize some of the
basic reasons why he is making certain claims and
recommendations. 

And yet, even though you might see these connections, it is

not unlikely that you will emerge from the Republic more than
a little perplexed about where this book stands in relation to
some important questions we might like to raise about art and
its relation to education, politics, and the moral life. At times
the text sounds extremely firm, dogmatic even, about how
poesis must be dealt with cautiously, with a full awareness of
the dangers of its powers; at other times, however, we
recognize clearly that in this dialogue Plato himself again and
again reverts to poesis--both in the construction of the
dialogue itself (which is a fiction, after all) and in many of its
most famous parts (the Ring of Gyges, the Allegory of the
Cave, the Myth of Er, to name only the best known). 

Before seeking to explore this apparent confusion somewhat, I

would like to stress at the outset the importance of this
question. For among all its other astonishing contributions to
Western Culture, the Republic is our first and, some might
argue, our greatest text of literary theory and theory of
criticism. This text not only takes very seriously the question of
the relation of poesis to the political community but explores it
in a way that for centuries defined the arguments about the
issues. Plato, as it were, puts the issue on the table and
provides the vocabulary which shapes the debates. Even today
(I will argue) most of us are firm Platonists in the way we deal
with some questions raised by this topic. 

It is important to stress this point about the importance of

reorienting the discussion, by reminding us all of a point which
is made repeatedly in Liberal Studies, that is, that the
significance of a text does not always (or even usually) lie in
the success of its particular recommendations. What is more
important in many respects is the way a text reorients our
priorities and redefines how we should think about a particular
issue. The greatest thinkers are not necessarily those who
come up with new answers; they are those who redefine the
problems and offer a direction for us to follow in dealing with
them. 

In our reading so far, the texts have dealt with poesis but the
issue has been largely unproblematic. For the Ancient
Israelites, certain forms of art were simply forbidden by a
divine commandment, and the forms applauded and
encouraged, like the forms of all other aspects of life, are
clearly those which maintain the faith by singing the praises of
the Lord, sustaining the narrative of His chosen people, or
building things essential to their historical purpose. The most
important forms of creativity here seem to be music and song. 

In Homer there is a recurring celebration of art, but it is not

seen as anything we need to discuss or debate. It is there to
celebrate the deeds of great heroes and divinities or as a
manifestation of the excellence of the owner of the art (like
Menelaus) or to foster enjoyment among those who
contemplate it. There is no sense in Homer that poesis is
something that needs defining or critical evaluation. What
makes a work of art good is self-evident--it moves those who
are exposed to it to admiration. 

In the text of the Republic, for the first time, the contribution of
poesis to the political development of the community and to
the individual well being of the individual lies at the heart of
the argument. And ever since, in one way or another, our own
concerns about the role of art, about methods of evaluating it,
and about its various contributions (for better or worse) to our
individual and collective lives have been decisively shaped by
the discussion of it in The Republic. 

Poesis as an Imitation 
Plato discusses poesis in some detail at least twice in The
Republic--once in Book III, where the main concern seems to be
the influence of drama on the guardian classes. There the main
issue is the deleterious effects of imitation upon someone
viewing an actor impersonate an unworthy character. The more
complex and interesting discussion takes place near the end of
the text, in Book X. Here the analysis of art explores its
epistemological status, that is, its relationship to knowledge. I
propose in my discussion to conflate these two discussions to
see if there is something we might call a Platonic conception of
poesis emerging from the text of the Republic. 

Let me begin with a quick summary of a position commonly

attributed to Plato in The Republic. I want to take some time
later to discuss why this summary might be seriously
inadequate, but whatever the views of art established by this
text, the following remarks are obviously a part of the issue (if
not, as many people might maintain, the whole thing). 

The thought experiment in The Republic proposes that reality

is unchanging perfect ideal truth manifested in the world of the
forms. It is intelligible but not sensible. We have to think our
way to the truth in a certain very difficult way. We have no
easy and direct access to it through our immediate sense
perceptions of everything around us, all of which is an
imperfect imitation of that higher truth. Since, according to
Socrates, poesis is an imitation of the world around us--of the
people, objects, places, and sounds in the world--then poesis
must be an imitation of an imitation, a third remove from the
truth. Hence, poesis is, in this analysis, highly unreliable, and
we need to overcome our liking for it by recognizing its
dangerously seductive character. 

This point is clearly established in one of the most famous

phrases from Book X of the Republic where the text speaks of
the ancient war between poetry and philosophy. This
dichotomy between poetry and philosophy puts into play the
notion that if we are interested in the truth of things, then
there is an appropriate way to explore routes to that truth--the
way of philosophy, as outlined in the education program of the
thought experiment. Poetry, by contrast, is a false direction.

One way to interpret what Socrates is saying in Book X and

elsewhere in the text is to claim that he is trying to insist that
lovers of the truth and seekers after the good life must
abandon a traditional language (the language of poetry, whose
essence is metaphor) and embrace a new language (the
language of philosophy, whose essence is reason as
manifested in geometry). This point becomes explicit in Book X
when Socrates leads the discussion into a preference for
understanding things through calculation (that is, through
mathematics) rather than through the language of poetry.
Since poetry is "wizardry" which depends upon the deceiving
nature of our sense impressions aroused by the metaphorical
powers of language, we are far better advised to rely upon a
different way of coming to understand things, a less
emotionally charged and far more precise denotative style. 

Now, I suspect that in some ways for Plato's contemporaries

this aspect of The Republic was among the most radical
notions in the entire text. For these strictures on poesis are
demanding a radical restructuring of traditional thinking about
poesis. The text makes this clear in the repeated attempts to
dethrone Homer. Socrates ridicules the trust people have in
Homer, because Homer is obviously ignorant about the truth of
most of what he is writing about. In taking on Homer directly,
Socrates is taking on the entire tradition Homer represents--the
tradition which insists that poets, far from being misleading
distant imitators of the truth, create works which embody that
truth. 

Let me dwell on this point a moment. In what sense could a

poem be said to embody a truth of the world? Briefly put, I
think we can see a work of art, like a poem or a statue, as an
attempt to mediate between the mystery of life and the
emotions of the people by the way in which the work of art
shapes the sensuous particularity of experience into an
emotionally coherent totality. The work of art, as it were,
interprets through metaphor and story the relationship
between ourselves and the unknown, linking, as often as not,
the divine with the world familiar to us. As such, poesis can
play an enormously important role in shaping and preserving
the community's understanding of itself in relation to the entire
cosmos, and it is thus not surprising that the preservation,
editing, and creation of poetic works are often (perhaps
usually) linked directly to the religious elements in those
communities who still rely upon poesis to coordinate the
people's understanding of themselves. 

Any attempt to redefine our access to the mystery of life, of

the sort that the thought experiment in the Republic proposes,
is faced with the task of redefining the importance of poesis.
And if Socrates is serious in emphasizing to us that access to
the truth requires a turning away from sense experience and
the difficult and lengthy acquisition of a new language, part of
that project must involve a critical evaluation of the traditional
ways of dealing with reality, which have been largely by poesis.

Socrates attacks traditional poesis (especially Homer) in a

number of ways. One is to question Homer's language, to
demand that we inspect the logic of Homer's language and
metaphors as imitations of the world. In stressing the extent to
which some of Homer's details bear little resemblance to the
sensible world around us, Socrates mocks those who claim that
Homer can be a source of reliable information. His intention
clearly is to discredit the major traditional exemplar of poesis,
whose guiding influence on Greek thought was decisive. The
purpose is not so much to provide a thoroughgoing or even fair
debunking of Homer. It is to call into question the value of
traditional ways of expressing in metaphorical language (the
essence of poetry) our understanding of things. 

In examining this element of Plato's argument, you might do

well to remember those passages in Thucydides in which he
talks about how one of the major casualties of war is language.
Thucydides stresses how in war words change their meanings,
taking on whatever the proponent of a particular view point
wants them to mean. Words become unreliable, ironic to the
very core, and incapable of portraying the truth. Thus, the
traditional values shaped by a traditional language no longer
are commonly understood and acted upon in the same ways. 

Thucydides is here giving evidence for one of the oldest

sayings about war: "In warfare the first casualty is the truth."
So if we need any contextual background to understand better
what Socrates is suggesting here, we need look no further than
to the fact that warfare, and especially civil warfare, does more
to corrupt traditional language and the various poetic
narratives with which that language is most closely associated
than anything else (think of the "pacification" programs in the
Vietnam War, the "resettlement" programs in World War II, the
"ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, or all the "Crusades for Peace" in
various times). And it is an interesting historical fact, which we
will see next semester in the work of Thomas Hobbes, that one
of the first demands of a post-war period frequently is a
demand that people clean up their language, removing from it
as much of the ambiguity and deceit as possible in place of the
shared clarity of denoted language, the language of what
Socrates here calls "calculation." 

To this objection to poesis on the ground that it is a

misrepresentation of the truth of things, Plato adds a second
obvious objection which arises from his psychology of the
human soul. Poesis, by its very nature, must appeal to and
arouse the most dangerous part of the human personality, the
sensual part. Since, at the very best of times, the human
psyche is in a state of tension, any incitement to the lowest
part of it (the emotions) threatens psychological harmony and
thus the balance necessary to virtue and happiness. Hence,
poetry not only corrupts the understanding by misrepresenting
the truth of things; it also destabilizes the individual human
psyche, encouraging various kinds of unwelcome destructive
and self-destructive feelings and actions. 

Plato and Censorship 

One solution presented by The Republic is very well known:
poesis must be strictly censored. While we may honour poets,
like Homer, we escort them to the borders and tell them that
we have no place for them in our ideal community. We have a
different understanding of the truth and a different language
for exploring it than that made available though poesis.
Though we honour poetry, we don't want it. 

Many of us will, I suspect, immediately dismiss this treatment

of poesis as unduly harsh. I would, however, like to make a
suggestion for us to think about before we decide that Plato is
just too rigorous and unsympathetic to poesis for his
recommendations to matter much. 

For it is clear, whether we have thought about this clearly or

not, that many of us instinctively agree with Plato's text here in
our understanding of and evaluation of artistic works. When we
evaluate something as good or bad, we often have immediate
recourse to a system of judgment which measures the contents
of the work (what we might call the vision contained in the
work) against some standard of how life ought to be, that is,
against some moral ideal. I'm not saying that we are in the
position of philosopher kings and queens who have full insight
into the truth. Still, we often expect art to live up certain ideal
standards, and we deplore art that does not. 

For example, consider a common response to pornography.

Why on earth would anyone object to it? Well, there are two
widespread objections, both recognizably linked to what is
presented in the Republic. The first is that pornography upsets
the emotional equilibrium of the psyche and can lead to anti-
social or self-destructive acts. I know there is much dispute
about the empirical evidence for such a claim. Nevertheless
the argument is a common one. 

The second objection to pornography is more interesting. It is

that pornography corrupts the understanding. Routine
depictions of women as slave objects or sexual toys or mere
extensions of male penis power, it is argued, violate a true
understanding of intelligent and mature sexual relationships,
no matter what immediate conduct emerges. Even something
relatively mild, like, say, Playboy, fosters an immature and
fundamentally incorrect view of the appropriate relationships
between men and women. When we make criticism like this, it
strikes me that we are making a claim something like the one
Socrates establishes in the Republic, that there are certain
standards of truth to which art must be held accountable and
that we must move against forms of poesis which, however
popular (and precisely because they are so often very popular),
corrupt the understanding of what is truly important. 

Such modern statements about pornography are seeing art, as

Socrates suggests, as an imitation of something. The moral
purpose of art, if it is to have such a moral purpose, comes
from its connection to some higher order ideal, and we are thus
thoroughly justified in criticizing or perhaps even censoring art
which corrupts this ideal. It is not enough to say, as some
might, that, well, the art is a very good depiction of the way
things are (e.g., there are a lot of depraved sexual practices
going on and this work is simply copying those). What matters
is the extent to which the art contributes to our understanding
of something more, something higher, something of value. 

We treat violence on television or in films in much the same

way when we object to it. We cannot say that there is no
violence in the world, that the films are misrepresenting the
sensible world around us. What we can say is that art ought
not to encourage the view that such violence is a way of life.
We make the case that the most appropriate understanding of
the relationship between violence and peacefulness is violated
in such art (no matter what the conditions of the world around
us are). 

This approach to the understanding of art, which derives most

importantly from The Republic, is traditionally called the
mimetic or the imitation theory of art, and it is the longest and
most important tradition in the history of artistic criticism,
especially with literature. Although it is not in fashion so much
these days, it still is, as I have suggested, a very frequent
common-sense reaction from those who want art to link itself
to the understanding of some higher order truth. 

I mention (and stress) these points, because it's too easy just
on the basis of the text's treatment of Homer to dismiss the
entire position in this book about the evaluation of art and the
importance of censorship. While we might not recommend
what Socrates suggests the philosopher king should do so far
as poesis is concerned, we do need to understand the theory of
artistic criticism which underlies and prompts such
recommendations. That theory, it strikes me, is far more
interesting and influential than this or that treatment of any
particular artist or this or that recommendation. 

Plato as an Apologist for Art 

Now, the summary position I have briefly sketched out above is
frequently taken as all that there is to be said about the
Republic's treatment of art. First-time readers tend to
remember the suspicions and the prohibitions, overlooking that
there's a lot more in this text than that. 

For it's clear that in this text poesis is very highly valued. There
are a number of specific recommendations about how poesis
must be an essential part of the educational process for all
citizens. If Socrates here is inviting some people to turn away
from the world of sense experience, he is also quite candid that
most people cannot do that. Thus poesis remains an essential
means of educating the majority of people in the polis to be
healthier, happier, and more moral beings. 

For Socrates realizes that we cannot all escape the sensuous

particularity of the world; nor should we always attempt to do
that. Becoming a mature citizen, fulfilling one's potential,
requires that we grow up surrounded by beauty. We learn to
recognize the importance of the higher order truths of life and,
above all, we learn to desire and love them, only through a
process which begins in recognizing and loving the particular
beauty available to our senses. Works of poesis, more than
anything else, can awaken and sustain that desire. 

Socrates's point here is an important one. We begin our moral

and emotional growth in the sensible particulars all around us.
If when young we do not love our own bodies, our own families,
our own immediate surroundings--if we do not see them as
beautiful and care about them--then our moral and
psychological growth is stunted. Hence, we need to pay
attention to the artistic quality of the environment of the
growing child. Love of the all-encompassing principles of life--of
the divinely good--must originate in a very particular love: my
body, my room, my home, my neighbourhood. And poesis is
the appropriate way to awaken and sustain that desire. 

Socrates's main point here is that we must strive to develop

beyond this love of the sensuous particular. Someone whose
growth focuses permanently and exclusively on the love of his
own body, his own family, or his own immediate surroundings
to the exclusion of everything else becomes a moral cripple,
fixated on the immediate sensible particular. If we must begin
with sense experience, we must not remain fixated there. Most
of us as parents pay considerable attention to the aesthetic
quality of the infant's bedroom. We do that, I suggest, precisely
for those reasons which Socrates adumbrates here. I think we
would have reason to worry if, as the infant grew up, she did
not transcend her fascination with and love of those
decorations and extend her desire for beauty and love more
widely than to the Dr Seuss wallpaper. 

Socrates makes it clear that most people will be unable to

complete the full growth into an awareness of the forms and to
achieve a love of the truth. Because of their ignorance of the
truth, they must be persuaded that the truth is important and
that it is right that those who have an understanding of the
truth exercise control in the city state. Here again poesis
comes into play in the form of the Noble Lie, a fiction
deliberately shaped to encourage people, through the power of
art, to love and desire a good which they themselves can never
hope finally to reach in the only way possible, through the fully
educated intelligence. 

To us this idea smacks, no doubt, of propaganda. Whether it is

or not, it has always been an important principle in our culture
that much of poesis, especially the public art, symbolize the
best and brightest of our hopes about ourselves. We do not
have philosopher kings who have attained full knowledge of
the truth, and so we are deeply suspicious of those who would
make their vision the shaping force in artistic creation.
Nevertheless, it remains true that much of the art from the
past which we most celebrate--the cathedrals, frescoes,
statues, music, epic poems, and so on--was sponsored and
written very much in the spirit of this idea: that poesis serves
the highest vision of the truth; its success is measured in terms
of that vision; and its enormous public value comes from the
service it provides for those who have no access to the divine
truth. 

Again, if we find this view objectionable (and I'm sure many of

us do), we might reflect on the fact that in the approximately
two hundred years since alternative views of poesis have taken
over from the traditional mimetic interpretation of poesis, we
have experienced an enormous multiplicity of styles and
subjects in art, a removal of almost every barrier in the way of
total artistic freedom of expression, and an almost total
relaxation of any forms of official or unofficial censorship, a
development prompted by, among other things, a reaction
against the notion that art imitates anything or that its
excellence can be measured by anything outside itself. Our
enormous emphasis on originality of expression at the expense
of an imitation of anything outside the work has transformed
the nature of art, the function of the artist, and the appropriate
methods we use to evaluate poesis. 

I think it is undeniably true that, for all the richness this has
added to the forms of art and the freedom of the artist and to
important other freedoms, it has contributed directly to a
dramatic decline in the public importance of art. To the vast
majority of people in our cities, the work of many modern
artists says nothing at all. It holds up no sustaining vision of
moral meaning, and the total absence of "official" evaluative
criteria which might encourage us to see some art as more
worthwhile than others simply means that much of our
freedom of artistic expression rests upon the fact that we don't
need to censor art, because no one bothers with it any more,
other than rich speculators. If Plato sounds too censorious for
our tastes, it may be because for him art is much more
important than it is for us. Those areas of art which dominate
popular culture (e.g., films, television) still arouse in many of us
a desire for standards, an urge that is recognizably Platonic in
origin. 

Hence Plato's views of poesis are much more ambivalent than

the first position I sketched out above might indicate. If
Socrates in the text often sounds unduly suspicious about the
power of art to mislead and upset the psyche, he is also
repeated endorsing poesis as an essential part of the life of the
polis.

In fact, after reading the Republic I am tempted to make a

totally illegitimate but interesting biographical speculation that
Plato is one of those writers for whom a careful scrutiny and
control of art and the language of art are vitally important
precisely because he personally understands and responds to
the power of poesis. For it is not necessarily the case that
someone who advocates what Socrates does in the Republic is
an insensitive Philistine, dourly condemning all artists. On the
contrary, it strikes me as far more likely that Plato sets forth
Socrates's position here fully aware of the effect art has upon
his own sensibility. This speculation is, as I have mentioned,
merely that. And perhaps my estimate of Plato's personality in
this matter is strongly coloured by my sense that Dr. Johnson,
the greatest critic in the history of English literary criticism,
was marked by an imagination so susceptible to the power of
poesis that it led him to propose in his criticism principles not
unlike those advanced by Socrates in the Republic. 
Poesis in The Republic 
Before I conclude, I wish to say a few things about a point I
mentioned at the very start. We need, as we read the Republic,
to bear in mind that it itself is a fiction, perhaps one of the
noblest lies ever written. Unless we believe that Plato wishes to
condemn his own work out of hand, we must be careful not to
take some of Socrates's more emphatic strictures about art
entirely at face value as all that needs to be said. 

Furthermore, it is clear that the development of the argument

in the text relies heavily on fictions. In fact, the best known
parts of this text, things that will remain with you long after
you have forgotten the particular details of this or that
philosophical argument will, I suspect, be those moments when
Socrates, in order to amplify a point or work his way out of a
potential logical problem, launches a story: the Ring of Gyges,
the Allegory of the Cave, and the Myth of Er. These stories are
justly famous (and enormously influential) for precisely those
reasons that Socrates discusses--they help to awaken or
reawaken in us, who have no clear insight into the highest
truths, a desire to search them out or, if not that, at least come
to a better understanding of what such a search might entail
and of the value of such an endeavour. 

In fact, if we want to understand the enormously important

formative influence of Plato's conception of a Noble Lie, we
might look no further than the Allegory of the Cave or the Myth
of Er. These fictions are vitally important contributions to The
Republic, not because they establish a philosophical proof of
anything, but because they awaken in the reader an
understanding of what Socrates's true aim is here, to celebrate
for us a new way to live one's life as a search for the beautiful
and the good. Like the Apology and the Phaedo, which
recounts the last conversations of Socrates immediately before
his death, The Republic is, first and foremost a celebration of
the philosophic life. And Plato knows that to celebrate that life
most fully, the seductive charms, the "wizardry" of poesis, are
essential, in spite of the fact that they are potentially
dangerous.