Plato's Philosophy PDF

Chapter one PLATO (428–CA. 347 BC) It is widely acknowledged that the Greek philosopher Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy. The mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead emphasized this point when he stated that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. While this claim...

Chapter one PLATO (428–CA. 347 BC) It is widely acknowledged that the Greek philosopher Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy. The mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead emphasized this point when he stated that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. While this claim may be exaggerated, it rightly suggests that Plato gave initial formulation to the most basic questions and problems of Western thought: How can we define goodness and virtue? How do we arrive at truth and knowledge? What is the connection between soul and body? What is the ideal political state? Of what use are literature and the arts? Plato’s answers to these questions are still disputed; yet the questions themselves have endured, often in the forms and contexts posed by Plato. Plato was born in 428 bc in Athens to a family of long aristocratic lineage, a fact which must eventually have shaped his philosophy at many levels. At the age of 20, Plato, like many 35 other young men, fell under the spell of the controversial thinker and teacher Socrates. The impact on Plato was profound: he relinquished his political ambitions and devoted himself to philosophy. In a story later to be recounted in Plato’s Apology, Socrates had been hailed by the Oracle at Delphi as “the wisest man alive.” Incredulous as to the truth of this, Socrates was nonetheless inspired to devote his life to the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue. Using a dialectical method of question and answer, he would often arouse hostility by deflating the pretensions of those who claimed to be wise and who professed to teach. A wide range of people, including rhetoricians, poets, politicians, and artisans, felt the razor edge of his intellect. Socrates’ unpopularity in some circles was aggravated by his undermining of conventional views of goodness and truth as well as by his opposition to the principles of democracy. Eventually he was tried on a charge of impiety and condemned to death in 399 bc. After the death of his revered master, Plato left Athens and traveled to Italy, Sicily, and Egypt. He later returned, to found an Academy (together with the mathematician Thaetetus) in Athens. As indicated by the inscription at the entrance – “Let none without geometry enter” – geometry was foremost in the curriculum, along with mathematics and philosophy. Astronomy, biology, and political theory were also taught. Students at the Academy included Aristotle, much of whose philosophy was developed as a critique or extension of Plato’s ideas. 36 Plato’s thought was influenced by a number of pre-Socratic thinkers who rejected the physical world known through our senses as mere “appearance.” They sought to describe a reality underlying physical appearances. Heraclitus’ theory was that all things in the universe are in a state of flux; Parmenides viewed reality as unchanging and unitary. Plato was also influenced by mathematical concepts derived from Pythagoras. From Socrates, Plato learned the dialectical method of pursuing truth by a systematic questioning of received ideas and opinions (“dialectic” derives from the Greek dialegomai, “to converse”). As exhibited in his early dialogues, he also inherited Socrates’ central concern with ethical issues and with the precise definition of moral concepts. Most of Plato’s philosophy is expounded in dialogue form, with Socrates usually cast as the main speaker. The canon attributed to Plato includes thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters. The authenticity of some of the dialogues and of all the letters has been questioned. It has become conventional to divide Plato’s dialogues according to early, middle, and later periods of composition. Most scholars seem to agree that the early dialogues expound the central philosophical concerns and method of Socrates. These dialogues, which include the Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Ion, Laches, Protagoras, Lysis, and the first book of the Republic, are devoted to exploring and defining concepts such as virtue, temperance, courage, piety, and justice. Such early works exhibit a naturalist 37 tendency to seek by rational analysis a definition of the essence of such concepts, challenging and often rejecting their meanings as conferred by conventional authority and tradition. For example, in Euthyphro Socrates rejects the definition of piety as that which merely happens to please the gods; rather, an act pleases the gods because it is pious; hence the essence of piety must be sought elsewhere. In general, both Socrates and Plato reject the morally incoherent vision of the universe – found in Homer, Sophocles, and other poets – as disordered, irregular, unpredictable, and subject to the whims of the gods. One has only to think of the intolerable network of contradictions in which Achilles, Oedipus, and other legendary figures are trapped to appreciate the profound irrationality of that poetic vision, as instanced spectacularly in the arbitrary connections it posits between human and divine spheres. This irrationality will eventually inform Plato’s indictment of the whole sphere of poetry/ The major dialogues of Plato’s middle period – Gorgias, Meno, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic – move beyond the largely moral concerns of the historical Socrates into the realms of epistemology (theory of knowledge), metaphysics, political theory, and art. The style of the dialogues changes. Whereas the earlier dialogues presented Socrates in the role of a systematic questioner, he is now made to expound Plato’s own doctrines in lengthy expositions that go largely unchallenged. At this stage of Plato’s development, what unifies these various 38 concerns is his renowned theory of Forms, underlain by his increasing reverence for mathematics as an archetype or model of human inquiry. It should be said that Plato was reacting not only against the disordered and mythical vision of the world offered by the poets but also against the skepticism of thinkers such as Democritus and Protagoras, who had both effectively rejected the notion of a truly objective world existing somehow outside the human mind and independent of human interpretation. The theory of Forms, expounded systematically in the Phaedo and the Republic, can be summarized as follows. The familiar world of objects which surrounds us, and which we apprehend by our senses, is not independent and self-sufficient. Indeed, it is not the real world (even though the objects in it exist) because it is dependent upon another world, the realm of pure Forms or ideas, which can be apprehended only by reason and not by our bodily sense perceptions. What is the connection between the two realms? Plato says that the qualities of any object in the physical world are derived from the ideal Forms of those qualities. For example, an object in the physical world is beautiful because it partakes of the ideal Form of Beauty which exists in the higher realm. And so with Tallness, Equality, or Goodness, which Plato sees as the highest of the Forms. Plato even characterizes entire objects as having their essence in the ideal Forms; hence a bed in the physical world is an imperfect copy of the ideal bed in the world of Forms. The connection between the two realms can best be illustrated using examples from geometry: any triangle or square that we construct using 39 physical instruments is bound to be imperfect. At most it can merely approximate the ideal triangle which is perfect and which is perceived not by the senses but by reason: the ideal triangle is not a physical object but a concept, an idea, a Form. According to Plato, the world of Forms, being changeless and eternal, alone constitutes reality. It is the world of essences, unity, and universality, whereas the physical world is characterized by perpetual change and decay, mere existence (as opposed to essence), multiplicity and particularity. These contrasts become clearer if we consider that each Form is effectively a name or category under which many objects in the physical world can be classified. Returning to the example of the bed, we might say that there are numerous objects constructed for the purpose of sleeping on; what they have in common is a given kind of construction which facilitates this function, say, a flat surface with four legs; hence they fall under the general category of “bed.” Similarly, “Goodness” – which Plato regards as the primal Form – can be used to classify a broad range of actions and attitudes, which would otherwise remain mutually disparate and unconnected. We can see, then, that a central function of the theory of Forms is to unify groups of objects or concepts in the world, referring them back to a common essence, and thereby to help make sense of our innumerably diverse experiences. Moreover, the theory attempts to give reality an objective foundation which transcends mere subjective opinion. Plato’s theory may sound strange to modern- 40 day readers brought up on empiricist assumptions: we tend to value what is particular and unique; much of our modern science rests on accurate observation of physical phenomena; and we are trained to view the world immediately before us as real. Such thinking was entirely foreign to Plato, whose insistence that reality lies in the universal rather than in the particular profoundly influenced philosophy and theology until at least the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers began to see knowledge not as innately present in the mind but as deriving from the particulars of sense-experience. A renowned expression of Plato’s theory occurs in the seventh book of the Republic where he recounts, through his main speaker Socrates, the so-called “myth of the cave.” Socrates outlines the following scenario: Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along which a low wall has been built... See also... men carrying past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others silent. 41 Since the men are facing the wall of the cave with their backs to the opening, they can see only shadows, cast by the fire on that wall, of the people and objects which are passing behind them. When these people speak, they will hear the echo from the wall, imagining the passing shadows to be the speakers. Plato’s point is that people who have known only these shadows will take them for realities: if they were forced to stand up and turn around, they would, at first dazzled by the light coming into the entrance of the cave, be unable to see the objects whose shadows they had previously seen. Indeed, they would insist that those shadows were more real. If they were now forced to ascend the road, which was “rough and steep,” they would be yet more blinded. After habituating themselves to the new light, however, they would gradually discern the shadows and reflections of the real objects and eventually would be able “to look upon the sun,” realizing that it “presides over all things in the visible region,” and was in a sense their underlying “cause” (Republic, 515c–516c). These people, newly enlightened, would now pity those who still dwelt in the darkness of the cave mistaking shadows for reality. Plato makes it clear that the cave in which men are imprisoned represents the physical world, and that the journey toward the light is the “soul’s ascension” to the world of Forms, the highest of which, like the sun, is the Form of the Good which is “the cause... of all that is right and beautiful” (Republic, 517b–c). 42 As beautiful as this myth is, there are many problems with Plato’s theory of Forms. For one thing, he himself is never unequivocally clear as to what precisely is the connection between the realm of Forms and the physical world; the Greek words he uses can be translated as “imitation,” “participation,” and “commonness.” Aristotle pointed out that Plato was mistaken in viewing the Forms themselves as actually existing in some abstract realm, on the grounds that such a model would make impossible the subject–predicate structure of language. If, for instance, we say “this table (subject) is beautiful (predicate),” we are stating that the table possesses a quality of beauty which is a universal. To posit that beauty exists in its own right is to argue that the quality can exist independently of any object to which it is attached. Notwithstanding such difficulties, this theory underlies all areas of Plato’s thinking and is indispensable for understanding his views of art and poetry. The theory of Forms is an archetypal insistence that what we call reality cannot be confined to the here and now; that reality encompasses an organized and interconnected totality whose elements need to be understood as part of a comprehensive pattern. This idea has remained profoundly influential even into our own era. Visit the following links General questions: 1- In what way was Plato influenced by the pre-Socratic 43 philosophers? 2- WriteonPlato`smajordialoguesandonhisdialectical method. 3- ExplainPlato`stheoryoftheFormsandhowthemyth of the cave is an allegorical explanation of it. 4- WhatarethebasicproblemswithPlato`stheoryofthe forms? Plato on Poetry Plato makes comments on poetry in many of his dialogues. In the Apology, Socrates affirms that poetry derives from inspiration rather than wisdom, and he also remarks on the pretensions of poets to knowledge that they do not possess (22c–d). In Protagoras, the role of poetry in education and the inculcation of virtue is discussed (325e–326d). The Symposium talks of the motives behind poetic composition, such as the desire to embody and preserve certain concepts of wisdom and virtue (209a). The Phaedrus distinguishes between productive and unproductive inspiration (245a), as well as between the relative virtues of speech and writing. And the Cratylus discusses, inconclusively, various aspects of the nature of language, such as the connection between words and things.. Plato’s most systematic comments on poetry, however, occur in two texts, separated by several years. The first is Ion, where Socrates cross-examines a rhapsode or singer on the nature of 44 his art. The second, more sustained, commentary occurs in the Republic, some of which is reiterated in a more practical context in the Laws. In the first of these dialogues, Socrates discourses with a rhapsode (a singer and interpreter) named Ion. In Socrates’ understanding, there are basically two components of the rhapsodist’s art: learning the lines of a given poet must be backed by understanding of his thought (Ion, 530b–c). Most of Socrates’ argument concerning rhapsody addresses its interpretative, critical function rather than its musical and emotional power. Throughout the ostensible “dialogue,” Ion acts as the willing and naive tool of Socrates’ own perspective, unwittingly dragged through the implications of his own initial boast that he “of all men... [has] the finest things to say on Homer” (Ion, 530c). Characteristically, Socrates’ strategy is not to contradict this statement directly but to unfold various contexts in whose light the connections between the constituent elements of Ion’s claim very precisely emerge as absurd. Ion’s claim is strangely self-limited: he claims to recite and interpret only one poet, Homer, and to be ignorant of and indifferent to the work of other poets (Ion, 531a). Socrates demonstrates to Ion that genuine knowledge must have a comparative basis: if one can talk about how Homer excels in certain features, one must also be able to talk about how other poets are deficient in these respects (Ion, 532a–b). Moreover, Socrates points out that each separate art has its own area of expertise, its own apportioned sphere of knowledge (Ion, 537c). Hence, when Homer talks about charioteering, it is the charioteer, not the 45 rhapsode, who can judge the truth of what Homer says; similarly, the physician, the diviner, and the fisherman will be better placed than the rhapsode to judge passages that relate to their professions (Ion, 538b–539e). Ion is unable to identify any area in which the rhapsode could interpret Homer’s poetry better than the practitioners of other arts. And yet he stands by his claim that he can speak better on Homer than anyone else. How can this be so? Socrates explains that Ion’s power as a rhapsode is based not on art or knowledge – if it were, he would be able to speak equally well of other poets – but rather on divine inspiration (Ion, 533d–534e). According to Socrates, the rhapsode, like the poet himself, is in a state of “divine possession” and speaks not with his own voice, which is merely a medium through which a god speaks. The Muse inspires the poet, who in turn passes on this inspiration to the rhapsode, who produces an inspired emotional effect on the spectators (Ion, 534c–e). Socrates likens this process to a magnet, which transmits its attractive power to a series of iron rings, which in turn pass on the attraction to other rings, suspended from the first set. The Muse is the magnet or loadstone; the poet is the first ring, the rhapsode is the middle ring, and the audience the last one (Ion, 533a, 536a–b). In this way, the poet conveys and interprets the utterances of the gods, and the rhapsode interprets the poets. Hence, the rhapsodes are “interpreters of interpreters” (Ion, 535a). 46 The poet, insists Socrates, is “a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him” (Ion, 534b). Not only poetry, according to Socrates, but even criticism is irrational and inspired. Hence, in this early dialogue, composed several years before the Republic, Plato has already sharply separated the provinces of poetry and philosophy; the former has its very basis in a divorce from reason, which is the realm of philosophy; poetry in its very nature is steeped in emotional transport and lack of self-possession. Having said this, Plato in this earlier dialogue accords poetry a certain reverence: he speaks of the poet as “holy,” and as divinely inspired. Plato’s theory of poetry in the Republic is much less flattering. In fact, a modern-day reader is likely to be exasperated at the space devoted to poetry in what is, after all, a political tract concerned primarily with justice in both individual and state. Plato’s text has inspired several defenses of poetry, notably by Sidney2 and Shelley.3 In general, political commentators have devoted their attention to the notion of justice while literary critics have tended to isolate the commentary on aesthetics from the overall discussion.4 However, there is an intimate connection between Plato’s aesthetics and his formulation of the ideal of justice. Plato’s entire conception of justice arises explicitly in opposition to poetic lore, and the close connection between poetry and justice shapes the entire discussion, in political as well as aesthetic terms. It will be useful to consider three broad issues: (1) how Plato’s commentary on poetry structures the form of his text; (2) 47 the political motivations of Plato’s aesthetics; and (3) the underlying philosophical premises of these aesthetics as well as the contradictions in Plato’s argument. Poetry and the Formal Structure of the Republic It is only toward the end of the Republic that Socrates mentions “an ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry (Republic, 607b). Yet this conflict clearly emerges in the opening pages not only as Plato’s starting point but also as a structural premise of his text. Before Socrates offers his own account of justice he is made to hear a number of other, more popular, definitions. In characteristic dialectical strain, the Socratic version is cumulatively articulated as a refutation of those popular assessments, finding its very premises within their negation. Hence what is at stake is not simply an impartial pursuit of the meaning of justice argued directly from first principles, but rather a power struggle, where the historical claims to authority of philosophy and poetry clash. Through this dialectic, the status of poetry as usurper of the throne of wisdom, and especially of popular wisdom, is cumulatively exposed.5 The claims of the individual speakers emerge as mouthpieces of poetic authority. Socrates is arguing with a man called Polemarchus over the definition of “justice.” Polemarchus invokes the “wise and inspired man” Simonides in arguing that justice is the rendering to each his due. This provokes Socrates into saying that it “was a riddling definition of justice... that 48 Simonides gave after the manner of the poets” (331d– 332c). It is Socrates himself who makes the connection between his immediate antagonists and poetic lore, saying to Polemarchus: “A kind of thief then the just man it seems has turned out to be, and it is likely that you acquired this idea from Homer. For he regards with complacency Autolycus, the maternal uncle of Odysseus, and says, ‘he was gifted beyond all men in thievery and perjury.’ So justice, according to you and Homer and Simonides, seems to be a kind of stealing, with the qualification that it is for the benefit of friends and the harm of enemies” (334a–b, emphasis added). Hence Socrates explicitly attributes Polemarchus’ erratic notion of “justice” to a poetic tradition. Even this is only the prelude to a more comprehensive assault on the entire Hellenic store of poetic wisdom. At the beginning of book II Socrates affirms that justice must be loved not only for the results it engenders but also “for its own sake” (358a). We have here, perhaps, the first hint in the Republic of a distinction between reality and appearance, between the self-subsisting Forms as ultimate ends of knowledge and action, and the more immediate or proximate ends of worldly activity. Socrates argues that poetry has failed to examine justice “in itself ” because poetic knowledge is confined to the world of appearance. This fact is further evinced through the argument of another speaker Adeimantus, who reinforces Socrates’ critique of poetry. Adeimantus says that what is popularly considered praiseworthy is not justice itself but the good reputation arising 49 from it. Again, Adeimantus invokes Homer and Hesiod – whom he misreads – in support of his position (363a–d). Adeimantus proceeds to survey the overall shortcomings of poetry in expressing justice, thereby providing a context of received wisdom against which philosophy’s “true” search for justice can emerge as a refutation. Against the “language about justice and injustice employed by both laymen and poets,” he brings four charges: laymen and poets acknowledge sobriety and righteousness as honorable but unpleasant; they view licentiousness and injustice as not only pleasant but also as “only in opinion and by convention disgraceful”; they hold that injustice “pays better” than justice, and do not scruple to honor the wicked if they are rich and powerful; and, strangest of all, they portray the gods both as assigning misfortunes to good men and as easy to propitiate or manipulate by sacrifices, spells, and enchantments. “And for all these sayings,” continues Adeimantus, “they cite the poets as witnesses” (364a–c). Once again, poetry is equated with popular wisdom; it is also associated with the sophistic view that beliefs, laws, and practicesclaim only conventional rather than absolute validity (a charge to be repeated in book X); and its vision of the gods is deemed morally incoherent. The ground has now been prepared for the emerging hegemony of philosophy. Poetry, concludes Adeimantus, teaches young men that appearance “masters” reality and that seeming just is more profitable than being just. It is this pursuit of a phantom, this honoring of dissemblance, which has led to social corruption whose symptoms include the 50 organization of secret societies, political clubs, and the sophistic teaching of “cajolery” whereby the “arts of the popular assembly and the courtroom” are imparted (365a–e). Adeimantus now offers his crucial observation that no one, in either poetry or prose, has adequately inquired as to what justice is “in itself ” (366e). Hence the starting point of Socrates’ inquiry is finally arrived at through a complex strategy whereby (1) poetry is held to be the repository of received popular wisdom concerning justice; (2) as such, poetry is a codification of the rationale of individual self-interest and desire, a rationale which makes necessary the imposition of laws to constrain selfishness; (3) in consequence, such “wisdom” is morally incoherent, furnishing a divine and human apparatus for the greater prosperity of the unjust man; (4) most fundamentally, the poets’ account is confined to the appearance of justice, not real justice or justice “in itself.”, This “poetic” account, according to Socrates, confuses justice with its effects, its material results, the reputation it engenders, and its psychological motivation. The implicit charge is that poetry fails to abstract justice itself from its contingent surroundings and conditions, failing to apprehend its essential, universally applicable, unity. Poetry can perceive only an incoherent multiplicity, only particular appearances, and is intrinsically unable to see these as part of a larger totality. The aim of philosophy emerges cumulatively, then, from this series of negations: in pursuing the real nature of justice the 51 philosopher will, on the one hand, isolate its essence by abstraction from particular circumstances and, on the other hand, will apprehend its coherent participation in a totalizing system of knowledge. Hence the assault on poetry, in all of its guises, is moved inexorably forward by Plato’s most fundamental strategy, that of hypostatization, or the treatment of a concept as if it had a fixed essence: justice is viewed as a unity, having a single essence (479a). Moreover, the commentary on poetry furnishes the major elements which philosophy sets out to overcome: popular wisdom must be controverted by the higher knowledge of a specialized elite; the ethics of individualism and desire must be displaced by the predomination of state interest; justice must be shown to be more profitable than injustice; and the gods must be assumed to be just. In these crucial ways, the significance of poetry defines the very purpose and method of the Republic. General questions: 1-Discuss Plato`s concepts of poetry and poets, providing his reasons for rejecting both. 2-Discuss Plato`s concept of justice. 52 The Politics of Plato’s Aesthetics Poetry’s deeper structural function in this text is not confined to the first two books. In books III and X that function extends to the program of education Plato advocates for the guardians or rulers of his ideal city. The initial elements prescribed for this training comprise the conventional Athenian combination of gymnastics and music. The Greek word mousike, as its form suggests, refers broadly to any art over which the Muses preside, including poetry, letters, and music. Plato shrewdly sees the importance of this entire sphere in the ideological conditioning of youth: “education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it” (401d– e). Ideology operates, then, far more by its formal expression than by its explicit content, and poetry, as we have seen, is viewed by Plato as a powerful force in molding public opinion. Hence he does not underestimate the danger it presents to his ideal city, ordered as this is in a strict hierarchy whereby the guardians (philosophers) and their helpers (soldiers) comprise an elect minority which rules over a large majority of farmers, craftsmen, and “moneymakers” (415a–b; 434c). It is how seriously Plato takes this threat is signaled by the fact that it is music which primarily defines the function of guardianship: “It is here... in music... that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch.” Alert to the potential “insensible corruption” of the state, what they must guard 53 against above all are “innovations in music and gymnastics counter to the established order... For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.” Such innovations, fears Plato (who is speaking through Adeimantus), encourage a “lawlessness” which “by gradual infiltration... softly overflows the characters and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attack their business dealings, and from these relations it proceeds against the laws and the constitution with wanton license... till finally it overthrows all things public and private” (IV, 424b–e). Plato here implicitly acknowledges what Marx and Engels were to theorize over two thousand years later: that the ruling ideas of a society are those of its ruling class. Moreover, he also anticipates Gramsci’s theory that such hegemony is not an automatic process but must be achieved by means of a conscious and deliberate program. The molding of subjectivity itself toward unconscious complicity with the aims of the rulers preempts the need for excessive and dangerously provocative coercion by law and by force. That poetry, as the most articulate voice of ideology, must be subjected to constant vigilance lest it unleash forces which undermine the political, economic, and legal structure suggests that Plato accredited it with an inherent subversiveness, a mark of his hypostatization of the entire realm of poetry. Before examining this reductive account of poetic 54 form, however, the precise nature of poetry’s subversive potential as elaborated by Plato needs to be evinced. Socrates suggests that justice would better be examined first in a city rather than as characterizing an individual, on the grounds that justice in the “larger” object will be more clearly discernible (II, 368e). Given that the desired city will be wise, brave, sober, and just (IV, 427e), the guardians themselves must possess a number of qualities: keen senses, strength, bravery, high- spiritedness, and love of wisdom (376e). Plato regards both music and gymnastics as directed to the improvement of the soul: gymnastics alone would foster a brutal and harsh disposition, while an exclusively musical training would render the soul too soft. Hence the guardians’ nature must achieve a harmony between both dispositions, high-spiritedness on the one hand, and gentleness, together with a love of knowledge, on the other. Plato’s terminology here is revealing: such a guardian would be “the most perfect and harmonious musician” (III, 410c–412a). This terminology enables us better to understand just how Plato conceives of poetry as an ideologically destabilizing force. The harmony in the soul of the guardian is not innate; it is achieved only by long training and ideological inculcation. In describing such a guardian as a musician, in arrogating to this class of society the governance of music, in appropriating from poets themselves jurisdiction over their art, Plato is once again marking out music as the arena of ideological conflict between 55 poetry and philosophy. Poetry’s main threat resides in its ability to upset the finely attuned balance achieved as a model of subjectivity in rulers. In book X, Plato will allege that poetry establishes a “vicious constitution” in the soul, setting up emotions as rulers in place of reason (X, 605b–c, 606d). Hence in the earlier book Plato advocates an open and strict censorship of poetry, introducing certain charges hitherto unelaborated: (1) the falsity of its claims and representations regarding both gods and men; (2) its corruptive effect on character; and (3) its “disorderly” complexity and encouragement of individualism in the sphere of sensibility and feeling. Music, observes Socrates, includes tales and stories. Those currently being told, he urges, especially those by Homer and Hesiod, should be suppressed on account of their degrading portrayal of the gods; or at most, they should be allowed circulation among “a very small audience.” These include Hesiod’s account of the struggles between Uranus and Cronus, and Homer’s depiction of Hera’s squabbles with Zeus. Even if allegorical, such tales are impermissible since “the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is not allegory” (II, 377c– 378e). Such representations falsify the actual nature of God who is “good in reality” and cannot, further, be the cause of evil things as these poets and Aeschylus suggest (II, 379b–e). Nor should poets be allowed to present the gods as assuming manifold forms since, in actuality, “each of them, being the fairest and best possible, abides forever simply in his own form” 56 (II, 381c–d). Finally, poets must not present the gods as deceitful since, affirms Socrates, “there is no lying poet in God” (II, 382d). Again, this phrase suggests that poetry by its very nature is a falsifying rhetorical activity. The underlying point is that such portrayals of gods and men will inculcate false and corruptive ideals into the guardians. What also emerges here as a crucial element in the conflict between philosophy and poetry is the right to name the divine, to authorize a particular vision of the divine world: for poetry, that world is presented as an anthropomorphic projection of human values centered on self- interest, a world of dark chance, irrational, in flux, and devoid of a unifying structure. The project of philosophy, in Plato’s hands, is to stabilize that world, drawing all of its scattered elements into the form of order and unity under which alone they can be posited as absolute and transcendent. It might be more accurate to say that, whatever the world is like in actuality, the only version of it to which the guardians should be exposed is that which sees it as orderly and coherent. We can see that a pattern begins to emerge here: in each of the areas of its indictment, whether it be the expression of justice, truth, or depiction of the gods, poetry offers a vision of ungovernable and irreducible multiplicity where the transcendence of any ideal is only sporadically and therefore incompletely achieved. n addition to its confused conception of the gods, poetry is also charged with speaking falsehood “about men in matters of the greatest moment,” portraying unjust men as happy, just men as wretched, and concealed injustice as profitable. Such speech 57 must be prohibited (III, 392b). In view of the qualities which need to be fostered in the guardians, this proscription must extend to certain specific features. Given that the guardians must be brave, tales of the underworld must be “supervised” and stripped of their “entire vocabulary” of terror and fear so as to avoid the risk of “softness” infecting the rulers. The portrayal of both lamentation and laughter in gods and men must be forbidden, since these are not conducive to sobriety and self- control. Poetry must also be prevented from presenting gods and men as greedy or bribable (III, 390e) and in fact from representing “the evil disposition, the licentious, the illiberal, the graceless” (III, 401b). This will help prevent the guardians from being “bred among symbols of evil” lest they “unawares accumulate and build up a huge mass of evil in their own souls.” From earliest childhood, they must be “insensibly” guided “to likeness, to friendship, to harmony with beautiful reason” (III, 401c–d). Given the desired psychical constitution of the guardians as brave, sober, and self-controlled, we might sympathize or at least understand Plato’s proscriptions of such passages – until we come across his actual definitions of these qualities. Courage, for example, is defined as the “unfailing conservation of right and lawful belief about things to be and not to be feared.” In qualification, Plato explains that the courage thus defined is “the courage of a citizen” (IV, 430b). He likens the implantation of such courage in the guardians to a dye which “might not be 58 washed out by those lyes that have such dread power to scour our faiths away” (IV, 430a). Likewise, sobriety consists in the mastery over the “multitude” of one’s appetites; by extension, sobriety in a city means that the rabble or multitude of people is dominated by a minority “of the better sort.” Plato goes so far as to define sobriety as a condition of “unanimity” in which both rulers and ruled are of one mind, are harmonious in their agreement, as to who ought to rule (IV, 430e–432a). In similar vein, self-control, for both rulers and “multitude,” means control over one’s appetites; but for the multitude it also entails being “obedient to their rulers.” Plato adds that authors should be forbidden from portraying “impertinences in prose or verse of private citizens to their rulers” (III, 389e–390a). These definitions reveal two glaring features of the connection Plato makes between aesthetics and politics. Firstly, despite his claims that each of these concepts should be examined “in itself,” his definitions of them are politically motivated in that they arbitrarily import into these concepts a reference to the relation between classes in a hierarchically ordered state. In Plato’s scheme, a man can be brave, self-controlled, or sober only by acknowledging inwardly, as well as outwardly, the validity of the political status quo. What this implies on a broader level is that not only knowledge but also language itself is structured by a political teleology whereby the meaning of concepts is given less in their mutual relations than in the subservient relation of each of them to the desired political end. In view of this, the struggle between philosophy and poetry emerges as a struggle for 59 language, a struggle not merely to define the qualities of human nature or of the divine world, but to define these qualities “in themselves.” The guardians must be protected from exposure to the ideological and linguistic matrix of poetry so that philosophy might work on the ideologically instituted tabula rasa or blank slate of the soul, enjoying a freely receptive domain not only for the inscription of its own ideological agenda but for its effective kenosis and remolding of language itself.