An Introduction to Plato and Book X of the Republic

1. An Introduction to Plato and Book X of the Republic English Hrs/Ap/IB Troy High School Mrs. Snipes

3. Plato (427 B.C. – 347 B.C.) was born to an aristocratic family. • He early on became a friend and disciple of Socrates and his later attitude toward poetry was then symbolically foreshadowed, according to legend, by his burning of the poems he had written before turning to the study of philosophy. • After traveling widely, he founded a school (the Academy) in the grove called Academus at Athens, taught philosophy, and there wrote the works associated with his name.

4. An understanding of what Plato considered to be reality is necessary if one is to begin to sense the meaning of his general influence on the theory of art, and also of his own specific remarks on art and literature. • To begin with, Plato’s philosophy may be described as a search for certainty—a search for a reality that never changes but is absolute, perfect, and fixed. • It is, in part, a reaction against the popular skepticism of the Greek Sophists, who believed in the doctrine that everything is relative—that all knowledge, judgment, or evaluation of any sort depends upon the particular person’s individual reactions. • In answer, Plato turned back to the general Greek confidence –still common in Greek thought despite the popularity of the Sophists as teachers—that there is a meaning, an order, or purpose in things, and that the mind, if it is alert enough, can discern this significance. • The persisting order of the universe and the “forms” through which it works were for Plato the sole reality.

5. Platonic View of the Universe • At times he regarded it as a mere “shadow” of reality—a shadow that we feel is there only because our own minds are not sufficiently awake and attuned to what is real. It is, in short, a world of mere “appearance” rather than reality. • On other occasions, he viewed the material world as a chaos of imperfect elements, all struggling vainly to fulfill themselves according to the absolute forms or “ideas” that constitute reality.

6. At all events, the world of matter is at most an imperfect “copy” of a final and absolute reality. • Through reason, man is potentially capable of conceiving the “ideas” and thus attaining certainty. • Man’s other capacities—sense, imagination, emotion—are of value only if they subserve reason. Otherwise, they are actual hindrances. For they tend by themselves to focus upon the world of matter, the unstable world of mere appearance, of flux, of sensations, and of emotional “opinion.”

7. Plato was not himself a literary “critic” or theorist in the specific sense that Aristotle was. He did, to be sure, discuss general problems and aspects of art.

8. It is largely because of Plato’s misgivings about the social and intellectual value of poetry, particularly as his opinions are expressed in Book X of the Republic, that the history of criticism is sometimes said to have begun specifically with him. • For Aristotle’s Poetics, it is argued, is essentially an answer to Plato, and cannot be understood apart from the circumstances that prompted it. • Yet it is worth remembering that the Poetics is one of a series of several works by Aristotle, each investigating a particular field of knowledge; and as such, it would probably have been written whether Plato had questioned the value of poetry or not. • Moreover, it would probably have been written in the same spirit. For it rests upon widespread Greek principles, although it elaborates on them. • Chief among these principles is the belief in the unique value of poetry as a formative developer of the human mind and emotion.

9. To begin with, Plato maintained that poetry, as a fictional creation, does not offer “reality” but unreal “imitations.” It not only offers mere imitations, but its imitations are confined to copying only the concrete world. • Ultimate truth, however, is absolute: it transcends the changing flux of material things, which themselves are only shadows and imitations of the fixed principles, forms, and “ideas” that comprise the final reality. • Philosophy, not poetry, is directed to ultimate truth. Moreover, while philosophy exercises and appeals to reason, poetry, and the arts, openly address the feelings. • “Poetry,” according to Plato, “feeds and waters the passions instead of starving them.” Plato’s attitude thus illuminates, by contrast, the contribution of Aristotle, to the theory of art and literature.

10. Aristotle admitted that art is very much concerned with the concrete world about us—the world of “Becoming” as distinct from Plato’s world of ideal, absolute “Being.” • But, in the first place, this activity, this process of “becoming” is reality as Aristotle conceived it. • Moreover, art is not confined to the mere material side of this activity of nature, but can draw out and emphasize the general form emerging through it.

11. Instead of being a copy of a copy, as Plato thought, art is, according to Aristotle, a duplicating of the living process of nature, completing and accentuating its potential form. • As for the emotional appeal of art, that is all to its credit. The soul, said Aristotle, is an “activity”; and the capacity to feel should be educated, developed, and extended, not suppressed or starved.

12. Plato follows the general Greek tendency to connect the conception of art as “imitation” with the formative shaping and development of human character. But it should be repeated and emphasized that his more specific contribution to the idea of “imitation” is to narrow the range of what imitative art can do. • It remained, for later Platonists, to justify art by pleading that, at its best, it can approximately “imitate” those very “ideas” that for Plato were the final reality.

13. In Plato’s own theory of art, the tendency is to conceive art as essentially an imitation of objects or aspects of the material world, and as being therefore of limited moral and educational value. • This very restricting of the range of “imitation,” on the other hand, served to focus attention even more strongly upon the imitative character of art, supplying a provocative stimulus for later theorists to try to interpret the concept of imitation in a more liberal way.

14. Alred North Whitehead remarked that the history of European philosophy is a “series of footnotes to Plato.” • Even so, the real significance of Plato for the history of criticism lies mainly in the effect of his philosophy as a whole rather than his specific remarks on art and literature.