Metaphysical Presuppositions and Impasses PDF

Metaphysical Presuppositions and Impasses It is crucial to see that Plato aligns the potential of poetry explicitly with such degradation of political and psychical unity. The notion of unity acts as the metaphysical premise of Plato’s entire argument on a number of levels.6 What has emerged cumulat...

Metaphysical Presuppositions and Impasses It is crucial to see that Plato aligns the potential of poetry explicitly with such degradation of political and psychical unity. The notion of unity acts as the metaphysical premise of Plato’s entire argument on a number of levels.6 What has emerged cumulatively from the foregoing account of the connections between justice and poetry is Plato’s presupposition that unity is the desired end of both individual and state constitution. He has repeatedly asserted that the democratic “mob,” be it the mob of appetites in the soul or the mob of citizens, must be controlled by a rational element (IV, 431a–d). Moreover, it is the goal of unity which dictates a strict division of labor, based on Plato’s view that individuals exercising a variety of functions would lead to the state’s ruin (IV, 434b). Plato actually makes explicit his assumption that unity is intrinsically a positive value while multiplicity is associated with disorder, indulgence, and evil. He states, for example, that excellence is “one” while the varieties of evil are infinite (IV, 445c). The greatest evil for a state is that it should be “many” instead of “one.” In like manner, Plato sees 71 reason itself as a unity while emotion is variable (X, 604e– 605c). The structure of knowledge as Plato conceives it comprises a movement toward the apprehension of data as an interconnected whole or system: the science of dialectic both uncovers the first principles and essences of things and sees them as part of an ordered structure (VII, 533c–d, 534b, 537c). What enables this perception of order is that each of the Forms is itself a unity which has distilled into itself, as it were, the concentrated essence of various manifestations in the material world (V, 476a–b). It underlies, categorizes, and explains these. But the unity of the Forms is apprehended only by philosophers; the multitude, says Plato, are dreamers who “wander amid multiplicities,” mistaking resemblance for identity and particular for universal (V, 476c; VI, 484b). Hence the guardians, after their initial study of music and gymnastics, must undertake the study of unity “as such” (VII, 524e), fostered by training in number or arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. These sciences depend, according to Plato, on the use of reason rather than the senses. The most fundamental strategy toward the political implementation of unity is to unite the functions of ruler and philosopher. Plato sees the current separation of these roles as itself an expression of multiplicity; at present, a “motley horde” pursues either task independently (V, 473d). Plato here unwittingly reveals that, if the movement toward knowledge and justice is essentially a movement toward unity whether in individual or state, it is also a movement of coercion. The ruling faculty in the soul and the ruling body in the state do not unify 72 any real differences: the unity Plato has in mind is achieved by suppressing all difference and imperiously positing itself as the constant inner structure of a given type of variety in the physical world. For example, there is no compromise either between the multitude of competing appetites and desires in the soul or between these and reason: they must fall under the absolute sovereignty of reason. Similarly, the unity of the state is not achieved by any true harmony of the conflicting claims of various classes or groups; the guardians, the privileged political embodiment of reason, determine absolutely the interests of the state. Hence “unity” is anything but a confluence or coexistence of equal parts. Rather, it is effectively a euphemism for a system of dominance, a rigid hierarchy whereby the “lower” (referable to the body, the appetites, or the majority of people in a state) is not merely subsumed under the “higher” but is divested by such subsumption of any independent claim to reality, meaning, or value. The lower – which spans the various particulars of the material world – can have meaning or reality only in proportion with its potential to exemplify a pregiven Form. For example, a beautiful object as portrayed by a poet or painter must have its beauty already and completely contained within a pregiven Form or definition of the beautiful. The uniqueness of the poet’s expression of a particular object in a particular setting must be reducible to an exemplary status. It is precisely the uniqueness or particularity which must be foregone or sacrificed in the interests of unifiability. Should the poet attempt to extend or alter the assessment of beauty, this 73 becomes in Plato’s eyes a falsification of the nature or essence of this Form. In this way, the imperious demand of unity further precludes any contemplation of a material object “in itself.” For Plato, it is only the enabling ideal Form (such as beauty) of an object which can be studied “in itself.” The object itself cannot be so studied and is thereby reduced to purely referential status, pointing beyond itself to the Form of which it is merely the superfluously unique material realization. This is not the interconnected system of references in terms of which many modern theorists, from Saussure to Derrida, have viewed language. In Plato, the referentiality is directed only one way: from the material object, which alone is reduced to a referential status, to the self-subsisting Form. Moreover, the reference operates along the lines of a stringent hierarchy. It can be seen shortly, then, that much of Plato’s censure of poetry rests on the fact that the objects of its apprehension are merely references, not things in themselves. A second, and deeply related, metaphysical presupposition underlying Plato’s work generally is contained in his strategy of hypostatization, of reducing variety and multiplicity to a constant and definable essence. In terms of its bearing on the status of poetry, a number of inconsistencies inhering in this strategy need to be considered. Plato hypostatizes not only the Forms but also the mode of their apprehension, philosophy, as well as the entire realm of poetry. This means that philosophy and poetry have rigidly defined essences, the point here being 74 that these essences are determined in explicit mutual contrast. Plato’s argument simply does not comprehend the possibility that two genuine philosophers (as opposed to Sophists) could entertain sharply divergent visions of reality or that two poets could hold sharply opposed views. Despite his abundant use of examples from poetic tradition, his view of poetry is not constituted by inductive abstraction from the empirical practice of actual poets; rather, it is an a priori definition which coerces the potentially endless variety of that practice into a uniform assailability. Likewise, “philosophy” as a scientific discipline is viewed as an ideal pursuit standing above the actual practice of philosophers. Yet, even if we approach Plato’s hypostatized opposition of philosophy and poetry on its own terms, it is incoherent, entailing as it does an essentializing of the notions of truth, singularity of function, reason, emotion, and imitation. Plato’s indictment of poetry has been based on (1) its intrinsic expression of falsehood, (2) its intrinsic operation in the realm of imitation, (3) its combination of a variety of functions, (4) its appeal to the lower aspects of the soul such as emotion and appetite, and (5) its expression of irreducible particularity and multiplicity rather than unity. The argument “from truth” breaks down very early in the Republic. Having urged that most of the current “stories” told by poets – such as Hesiod’s account of the unseemly behavior between Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus – must be censored, Socrates adds: “Even if they were true... as few as possible should have heard these tales” (II, 377c–378a). It becomes immediately transparent here that it is not truth but 75 political and educational expediency which is the criterion of censorship. Moreover, Plato repeatedly states that the guardians themselves (though no one else) must employ lies “for the benefit of the state” (III, 389b; V, 459c–d; VII, 535d–e). The entire point of the notorious “noble lie” is to persuade the citizens, and possibly the rulers themselves, that their social status and function are not products of circumstance and ideological conditioning but were endowed naturally by their “mother” earth (III, 414c–415c) Plato, of course, is not unaware of this incoherence. He attempts to explain and overcome it by extending still further the strategy of hypostatization, urging that there is a distinction between “Essential falsehood” and “falsehood in words.” The former, contends Plato, is abhorred by both gods and men while the latter can be “serviceable” (II, 382c–d). By this stroke of essentializing the notion of truth, Plato at once removes it from the realm of language and the possibility of poetic access. The point is that, no matter what a poet says, it cannot express “essential” truth because it is confined in terms of its objects to the realm of appearance and in terms of its mode of operation to imitation. In other words, it is not the content of poetry which renders it false; its falsehood is embodied in its very form.7 The notion of imitation, in fact, complements truth as the basis of Plato’s reductive and incoherent opposition of philosophy and poetry. Plato’s comments concerning poetic imitation are not restricted to book X. In book III he had expressed anideological 76 preference for poetry in which the proportion of narration to imitation was high: the more imitative poetry is, the more degraded it will be, involving mimicry of all kinds of “unworthy” objects; as such, it requires “manifold forms of variation” (III, 396c–397d). In book X the poet is held up as a Sophist, a “marvelous” handicraftsman who can “make” anything: “all implements,... all plants and animals, including himself, and thereto earth and heaven and the gods and all things in heaven and in Hades.” Indeed, then, the poet “makes all the things that all handicraftsmen severally produce” (X, 596c–d). Hence poetic imitation in its very nature violates the political principle of singularity of function. And what the poet imitates is of course the appearance, not the reality, of things, since he merely imitates what others actually produce (X, 596e, 597e). Plato elaborates his famous triad: we find three beds, one existing in nature, which is made by God; another which is the work of the carpenter; and a third, the work of the painter or poet. Hence, the carpenter imitates the real bed and the painter or poet imitates the physical bed. The poet’s work, then, like that of the rhapsode, is the “imitation of an imitation.” It is worth recalling the precise order of Plato’s argument here: he does not simply argue that poetic imitation is thrice removed from truth; he first states that the imitation in general is “three removes from nature” and then subsumes poetic practice under this limitation (X, 597e). He states later that the imitator (not merely the poet) knows nothing of reality but only appearance (X, b–c). What, then, does the poet “know”? Plato’s answer is that the poet 77 knows only how to imitate (X, 601a). Hence, just as Plato essentialized the pursuit of philosophy, assigning pre given attributes to it, so he essentializes imitation itself, the mode to which poetry is confined. Moreover, he claims that poetry will deceive only those “who... judge only by forms and colors” (X, 601a), implying that a purely formal or aesthetic evaluation of poetry is necessarily indifferent to truth-value. General Questions: 1- Summarize the metaphysical presuppositions of Plato`s philosophy.