Plato and the Poets Rucker

Plato and the PoetsAuthor(s): Darnell RuckerSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 1966), pp. 167-170Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/429388 .

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DARNELL RUCKER

Plato and the Poets

NEITHER THE POETS nor the critics have ever forgiven Plato for his censorship of poetry in the Republic. Yet the vituper- ation against Plato on this score seems, to say the least, misplaced. The treatment ac- corded the artist in the Republic is a rea- sonable 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 dif- ferences 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 hu- mility nor a bad joke at the expense of the truly ignorant. It is a statement of Plato's view of the essential incomplete- ness 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 sin-

DARNELL RUCKER is professor of philosophy at Colorado College, Colorado Springs. His article, "Man and Institution: The Moral Problem," ap- peared in the Western Humanities Review (Summer 1965).

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 in- quiries, 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 depic- tion 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 sta- tion. 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-



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pher on the citizen's obligation to the laws of his state. The Laws goes into consider- able 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 judg- ments 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 con- texts, 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 say- ing of Simonides quoted by Polemarchus is that they cannot attribute Polemar- chus' 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 prophe- cies 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 ban- ished. 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 con- ducive to the end of the state: the produc- tion of good men. All elements in the Re- public 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 con- tained 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 harmo- nies. 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 fa- vorably 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 de- feat 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 beara- ble 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 dis- played 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 disor- der.

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

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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 conse- quently 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 disor- dered.

The hierarchy of beautiful objects, as Socrates quotes Diotoma in the Sympo- sium,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. Physi- cal 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 para- digm 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 ac- cident-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 con- sideration; it is a concomitant of the de- velopment 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 such- only 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 demon- strates 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 ad- mire 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 physical- money, 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 com- partmentalize 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 en- tanglement 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 Classi- cal Library), 592B.

a Ibid. 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 pro- fessional 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.

8 The stir Socrates makes over the golden lie required to get men to accept the hard truth of dif- ferences in ability is Plato's acknowledgement of the major difficulty of this problem.

9 Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Loeb Classical Library), 210B.



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Plato and the Poets Rucker