Plato and the Poets

Author(s): Darnell Rucker

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 1966), pp. 167170
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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DARNELL

Plato

and

THE POETS nor the critics

NEITHER
have ever forgiven Plato for his censorship
of poetry in the Republic. Yet the vituperation against Plato on this score seems, to
say the least, misplaced. The treatment accorded the artist in the Republic is a reasonable aspect of the ideal state being constructed there and a logical consequence
of Plato's view of the relations among the
good, the true, and the beautiful. Neither
the legislator nor the philosopher nor the
poet has the same role in the Republic as
he has in an actual state; and these differences in role are consequent upon the
difference between an ideal and an actuality.
Take the account of the philosopher in
the characteristic Socratic dialogues. The
philosopher is a gadfly pointing out what
is wrong in his society; his characteristic
activity is a continuing inquiry; he never
claims to know and, when questioned, he
responds by beginning a search. Socrates'
profession of ignorance is not a false humility nor a bad joke at the expense of
the truly ignorant. It is a statement of
Plato's view of the essential incompleteness of human knowledge and it is a
method by which a degree of knowledge
may be attained. The idea of the good is
inexhaustible. Socrates does not know
what it is; he only knows a means for
approaching it. And any man who is sinDARNELLRUCKERis professor of philosophy at
Colorado College, Colorado Springs. His article,
"Man and Institution: The Moral Problem," appeared in the Western Humanities Review (Summer
1965).

RUCKER

the

Poets

cerely interested in joining in the search

can show Socrates some new aspect of the
good at the same time that Socrates is
showing him something new. Every inquiry starts from a different perspective
and a different problem than other inquiries, and thus every inquiry is new in
a significant sense.
Why, then, is the philosopher in the
Republic depicted as the man who has
knowledge? On the face of it, this depiction goes directly against almost the
whole body of Plato's other works. But
the ideal state is specifically constructed
by Plato to produce knowledge in the
ablest men of that society so that those
men, once they have glimpsed the good,
can properly order the state, the citizens,
and themselves. But it is only in the ideal
state that the philosopher can take part
in politics.1 The philosopher in our world,
as Plato says in the Apology and Socrates
exemplifies, must exist in a private station. Short of the institutionalization of
the education process of the Republic, the
philosopher-king could not hope for the
necessary support from the institutions
and the citizens of his city. And that education process alone provides the conditions for the philosopher's grasp of the
idea of good. The claim of such a grasp
by a man outside the Republic marks him
as an ignorant man or a fraud.
Where is the legislator in the Republic?
Or the judge? Plato's reverence for the
laws is evidenced in many places in his
other dialogues. The Crito is one of the
strongest statements made by a philoso-

168
pher on the citizen's obligation to the laws
of his state. The Laws goes into considerable detail about the framing and functioning of laws for a proposed state. Yet,
in the Republic, Socrates brushes aside the
question of what laws will be needed to
regulate the relations among men with the
observation that, if these men are properly
educated as citizens, they can regulate their
own relations without need of a network
of petty laws.2 Does this mean that Plato
has changed his mind since the Apology
and then reversed himself by the time of
the Laws? Again, the distinction between
an ideal and an actual state explains the
difference in perspective. The Republic
is a pattern in heaven, an image of ideal
justice to be found nowhere on earth,
which is to serve as a norm in our judgments about justice on earth.
In the same way, the role of the poet
must be tailored to the requirements of
this image of the ideal state. In other contexts, Plato speaks of the poets as divine,
inspired, wise. Socrates' typical reaction to
a quotation from a respected poet is "what
does it mean?" In Book I of the Republic
(before the construction of the ideal city
begins), Socrates' conclusion about the saying of Simonides quoted by Polemarchus
is that they cannot attribute Polemarchus' inadequate definition of justice to
the poet "or any other of the wise and
blessed."3 The poets are inspired; God
speaks through them. But like the prophecies of the oracles, the utterances of the
poets must be interpreted. There is no
impiety in Plato's attitude nor any scorn
of the poets or oracles. He does not question the wisdom of the gods; he merely
questions the meaning of the formulations
given that wisdom by the instruments the
gods have to use. The gods or the wise
cannot say foolish things.
But if the poets are inspired, why does
Plato banish them from the Republic? In
the first place, poets, as such, are not banished. Certain kinds of poetry will not be
allowed, and Homer's and Hesiod's works
must be the first to go. Education begins
with myths about gods and heroes, and
useful myths are tales which, while not
literally true, are not false. And all such

DARNELL

RUCKER

dreadful tales of murder and rape and

licentiousness as the poets tell of the gods
are false-false of gods, for the gods are
good.4 If theology and heroic tales are to
have any place in shaping the minds of the
children of Plato's city, the gods and heroes
must be suitable images. "Then, though
there are many other things we praise in
Homer, this we will not applaud...."5
Poems must be such that they may serve
as patterns for the youth of a good city.
And the gods and men in Homer and
Hesiod certainly provide no patterns for a
just and upright life.
Homer is the most poetic of poets and the first
of the tragedians, but we must know the truth,
... we can admit no poetry into our city save
only hymns to the gods and praises of good men.
For if you grant admission to the honeyed muse
in lyric or epic, pleasure and pain will be lords
of your city instead of law and that which shall
from time to time have approved itself to the
general reason as the best.'

The poetry that is allowed must be conducive to the end of the state: the production of good men. All elements in the Republic are directed toward the shaping of
its citizens for their proper function in the
state. Plato is fully aware of the complexity
and difficulty of education-involving
as
it does the whole society as it impinges on
the young. One discordant element can
wreck the entire enterprise. The ideas contained in the poems taught the children
affect their characters; so do the rhythms
and tunes. Noble men can be formed
only by noble themes and noble harmonies. Poetry is, therefore, central to the
education of the citizens, but poetry is not
an end in itself. Nor is anything else, for
Plato, short of the Good.
Censorship is an ugly word, and not only
to poets and critics. We need to realize,
however, that censorship in the world we
inhabit is usually silly simply because we
have no standard of what is allowable. We
have nothing more than arbitrary rules of
exclusion-the writer must not speak favorably of communism or graphically of
sex, for instance. But in a society that
produces perverted minds, the artist does
seem to have a claim to the right to produce art for those minds.7 Plato has a

Plato and the Poets

standard in the Republic: The guardians
must be of a certain character if they are
to preserve the city, and the whole city has
to educate the young to that character.
Plato is not concerned in this dialogue
with the warped characters men do have;
he is concerned with the kinds of characters they would need in order to be just.
Hence catering to perversions would defeat the entire aim of the Republic. But,
once more, the Republic is not Athens; it
exists, so far as it does exist, in the minds
of men as a guide and a goal.
Moreover, there is not the same need for
art as a separate function in the Republic
that there is in less well-ordered societies.
For us, art functions, at least in part, as a
palliative and as an ideal moment in a
frustrating world. Art makes life bearable by freeing us momentarily from the
impossible demands and inevitable failures
we face. Art achieves a wholeness that is
impossible for everyday experience and is
thus a solace and a balm. The wholeness is of some facet of experience carved
out of life, polished to a shine, and displayed in a pristine isolation. The audience has to supply the connection of the
art object to actual experience, and those
connections are usually too tenuous to provide more than a temporarily efficacious
ideal for life in its full scope and disorder.
Life in the Republic, in contrast to our
actuality, is aesthetic as well as moral and
true. The shape and tone of the activities
of the citizens at every level are such as to
give meaning and worth and beauty to all
men to whatever degree they are capable of
experiencing these things. The Republic
is an ideal but not a utopia precisely because its citizens are educated to accept
their powers and their limitations instead
of all being transformed into angels.8 The
citizen is educated to a comprehension of
the social nature of his activities and to an
awareness of the essential connection between those activities and his own being.
Hence he is not subject to the frustrations
we ordinary men face. He has no need for
an artificial respite from his life. Education
in the Republic produces knowledge, character, and grace in the citizens. Each man

169
attains that degree of harmony within
himself and with his fellows that he is capable of. Grace characterizes all that the
educated man is and does, and consequently he does not have to look beyond
his own activities for those feelings and
awarenesses that art must furnish us because our lives are graceless and disordered.
The hierarchy of beautiful objects, as
Socrates quotes Diotoma in the Symposium,9 runs:
1. One particular beautiful body;
2. Beauty of body in general;
3. All beautiful bodies;
4. Beauty of psyches;
5. Beauty of laws and institutions;
6. Beauty of knowledge;
7. Beauty itself.
The Republic is designed to construct
beauty at the fifth level: beauty of custom
and action for the entire city. The philosopher-king can attain the sixth level, but,
since he is dependent upon the city for
his being as a philosopher, he is obliged
to maintain his concern with the fifth level
to the extent required to keep the city
functioning smoothly. Art as a distinct
function from practical life is at the level
of somatic beauty-physical form. Physical beauty is not disregarded at the higher
levels but is transformed, put into a new
perspective, transcended. Alcibiades in the
Symposium depicts Socrates as the paradigm of beauty at the fourth level, because Socrates' ugliness of body is but the
outer shell concealing the beauty of his
soul which fills Alcibiades with awe and
forces upon him the realization of the
triviality of his own physical beauty.
The contrast between Alcibiades and
Socrates makes clear the instability of the
beauty of soul. Alcibiades, the most beautiful man in all Hellas, recognizes the
superior beauty of Socrates, but Alcibiades
himself is continually seduced and ruined
by the disorderly elements of the political
systems he inhabits. Socrates is a happy accident-a man with remarkable physical
and mental powers, shaped by the best
forces at work in Athens, and driven by
the sense of a divine mission. But the
rulers of Athens have neither the knowl-

170
edge nor the education system to produce
good men deliberately. The nurturing of
the natural capacities of men requires the
Republic and its well-ordered institutions
-institutions
with the purpose and the
means of producing beautiful characters
and actions. There physical beauty-natural or artificial-is not a separate consideration; it is a concomitant of the development of well-ordered psyches in a
well-ordered state. If all men were capable
of becoming philosophers, the beauty of
institutions could become a secondary
matter; but this would require a utopian
revolution in the nature and situation of
man. And were it conceivable that men
became gods, the contemplation of beauty
itself would make philosophy as we know
it trivial by comparison.
The primary aesthetic concern of the
ideal city-inhabited by men, not just by
philosophers-is with the moral-political
structure of the society. Plato has built for
us a model in view of which we can gauge
our own societies. We always fall short of
the model, since it is an ideal, but the
ideal provides a goal, useful to us insofar
as we see the range of divergences of our
situation from that of the Republic.
Plato does not denigrate art as suchonly art (or knowledge or character) which
claims to be more than it is. Ignorance is
failure to recognize the limitations of
whatever skills or opinions or inspirations
one may be fortunate enough to have (as
Socrates says in the Apology and demonstrates in other dialogues). Socrates does
not attack Ion's ability as a rhapsode in
the Ion; he attacks Ion's claim to knowledge of the topics of his recitations. So
long as the poet makes no claim to knowledge of those things he is inspired to say
(or make), Plato has no quarrel with him
as a poet. The poem itself remains a matter for interpretation and acceptance or
rejection in accordance with the standard
of the wise man.
Art that degrades man is, of course, a
constant target of Plato's arguments. The

DARNELL

RUCKER

empty rhetoric Meno and Phaedrus admire and the clever sophistry Protagoras
practices do not produce beauty or knowledge, because, while they profess to be
concerned with beauty of soul, they are
really concerned with the physicalmoney, power, sex. Thus, as arts, they are
frauds and despoilers of men.
That which works for increased harmony and integrity for a man attracts
his love by its beauty, satisfies his needs
by its goodness, and becomes the ground
for further progress by its truth. We compartmentalize art and ethics and science
because we only see things in bits and
pieces. Plato tried hard to make us see
things whole. The artist has no call to
feel any more put down by this attempt
than do the rest of men. We are all
struggling in a more or less chaotic entanglement with ourselves and others.
Plato's work exemplifies more nearly than
any other we have the oneness of the true,
the good, and the beautiful. And while,
like the sun in his cave analogy, his work
is not itself vision, by its aid, if we have
eyes, we may be able to see.

1 The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Loeb Classical Library), 592B.

aIbid. 425B-427C.
3Ibid. 336A.
'Cf. the quotation by Aristotle: "bards tell many
a lie," Metaphysics I. 2. 983a. 5.
6 The Republic 38SB.
6 Ibid. 607A.
7Again, cf. Aristotle: "A man receives pleasure
from what is natural to him, and therefore professional musicians may be allowed to practise this
lower sort of music before an audience of a lower
type. But, for the purposes of education, as I have
already said, those modes and melodies should be
employed which are ethical...." Politics VIII. 7.
1342a. 25-30.
8The stir Socrates makes over the golden lie required to get men to accept the hard truth of differences in ability is Plato's acknowledgement of the
major difficulty of this problem.
9Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Loeb Classical Library),
210B.