Plato grew up in an Athens in which public performances of tragedy were among the most important forms of collective culture. Born around 425, he could have been in the audience for the late masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The fact of poetry’s central role in the life of the city is essential to understanding Plato’s critique of poetry in general and tragedy in particular. For Plato was operating not with conceptions of “high art” or aesthetic autonomy, but with a view of poetry as a civic institution with a role to play in the formation of citizens. The writings of poets formed a central part of Athenian education, and performing in a chorus was one of the important ways that young men were socialized into their role as citizens. Wisdom was often sought in poetry, and dramatists were regarded as teachers of the populace. Against this traditional reverence for poets and centrality of poetry to Athenian life, Plato responds with a biting critique of tragedy.
The late fifth century was a time of intellectual upheaval, as new currents of thoughts associated with the “sophists” (teachers of philosophy and rhetoric) were making themselves felt in Athenian culture and casting doubt on received ideas of wisdom and morality. Among these intellectuals was Socrates, who was well known for his eccentric investigations of nature and virtue as well as for his somewhat suspect friendliness toward the young men of the city. Plato became one of a group of followers of Socrates—many of them, like Plato, from aristocratic families. There is a story—probably apocryphal—that in his youth, Plato aspired to be a tragedian, but after hearing Socrates speak, he burned his tragedies and turned himself wholly to philosophy.
The legend of Plato’s turn from tragedian to philosopher illustrates the proximity and distance between literature and philosophy in Plato’s writing. Plato consistently sees poetry as the antagonist of philosophy, a rival genre that philosophy must interrogate, critique, and ultimately subsume. Though there are many passages in the Platonic corpus that invoke tragedy or use it as a metaphor, the central question surrounding the genre is whether a well-ruled city should admit performances of tragedy. The Republic contains the most sustained critique of tragedy, staged as a dialogue between Socrates a small group of interlocutors. In two separate discussions, Socrates addresses the value of poetry for the city and for the individual. Though we should be wary of equating the views expressed by the character Socrates with Plato’s own (and likewise of assuming that Plato held a single view throughout his career), the Republic at least makes a case for a sharp condemnation of poetry in general and of tragedy most of all.
Beginning in books II and III of the Republic, in which Socrates addresses the role of poetry in education, and continuing in book X, in which he discusses the value of poetry to the city in general, the critique of tragedy follows two broad strands: an ethical critique, which considers the effect of tragic performance first on the performer (in the earlier books) and then on the spectator (in book X); and a metaphysical critique, which investigates the way that tragic poetry, as an imitation of reality (mimēsis), relates to ultimate truths. Mimēsis could be translated “imitation” or “representation,” and it seems to describe the ways that poetry creates an appearance of reality without actually being the reality it represents. At the most basic level, Plato fears that we will be misled by appearances to lose sight of reality, and that this will make us worse citizens and philosophers.
Books II and III lay the groundwork for the ethical critique of tragedy. Socrates is considering how the young should be educated in an ideal city, and particularly, what kinds of stories they should hear as children. He suggests that the young are particularly impressionable and can easily be led astray by the kinds of stories they are exposed to (a concern we can recognize even today). The myths of the Greeks regularly portrayed gods and heroes acting in morally reprehensible ways, and Socrates fears that such stories perpetuate an impious and false view of divinity (an unusual and even radical view, given that most Greeks of this time seem to have considered the gods subject to human shortcomings). Even more deleterious seems to be the way that poetry depicts humans—even largely admirable ones—as acting and faring in ways contrary to reason. When we view a hero lamenting, or a bad man prospering, we are led to believe that the world is such that people fail to live up to the moral ideals that the Republic outlines. The poetic depiction of gods and humans, Socrates says, should present positive models for emulation, so that the young who witness them gain a sense of the good and just. This entails rejecting the majority (though not all) of serious poetry for the education of the young, because “poets and prose-writers speak badly about the most important matters concerning human beings” (392a).
This specific charge against mimēsis—that it confuses proper ethical understanding—is developed, in book X, into the even more general and damning metaphysical claim that all artistic mimēsis presents a false and misleading image of true reality. Socrates sets up a three-tiered hierarchy beginning with “forms” (perfect and immaterial templates for everything that exists), below that some material copy of the form, and at the bottom an artistic imitation of the material. A bed, for example, exists first and most fully as a form in the mind of the carpenter, then, less perfectly, as an actual bed made by the carpenter, and then, still less adequately, in a pictorial representation of a bed. At each level, something is lost from the previous one, to the point that the work of art corresponds to the fullest reality in only a vague and derivative sense. Applying this logic from the visual arts to poetry reveals that, insofar as it strives to imitate excellence, poetry—unlike philosophy, it is implied—cannot imitate the form of the good, but only its earthly manifestations. All poets are therefore merely “imitators of images of excellence” (600e), and their products cannot be considered philosophically serious. On this point, Aristotle will most strongly—if implicitly—disagree with Plato and elaborate a theory of mimēsis that does not rely on such hierarchies.
The famous charge that mimēsis is “third from the king and the truth” (597e) relates to all artistic representation, and it condemns aesthetic mimēsis generally as a faulty path to knowledge. But there is a more specific problem with tragedy, which has to do with the way that it speaks to our baser impulses (returning to the ethical strand of argument). Socrates finds that tragedy creates a conflict between reason, which urges us to restrain our emotions, and our natural desire to express our feelings. While in everyday life, we control the emotional parts of our soul with reason, the stories depicted in tragedy allow and even encourage these emotions to gain the upper hand, and thus they make us more prone to them in everyday life. The imitative poet, then, “arouses, nourishes, and makes the [inferior] part of the soul stronger, and so destroys the rational part” (605b).
Socrates’ final argument, the “greatest charge” against tragedy, goes a step further, by considering how and why tragedy is so compelling. It is, he finds, precisely because tragedy addresses these lower parts of our soul that we enjoy it so much. The pleasure of tragedy is an inherently irrational one, and so any exposure to tragedy will have a corrupting influence, even on the most rational people. Tragic poetry, by depicting intense emotional experience, unbalances our soul, giving way to pleasurable but ultimately destructive emotional responses. We can become so caught up in the enjoyment of tragedy that we fail to evaluate it rationally. If we allow it into our city, “pleasure and sorrow will rule in the city instead of law and reason” (607a). Tragedy threatens the effort of the Republic as a whole to construct a city on the basis of reason, for it places at the center of civic life an experience that is fundamentally contrary to rational thought. Socrates’ attack is directed against the entire Athenian way of life, typefied by the centrality it grants to poetry. In the well-ordered city, philosophy must replace poetry as the source of wisdom and education.
Plato never again addresses tragedy at such length, but the genre’s role as an antagonist of philosophy remains potent in his later writings. In the late dialogue Laws, an Athenian imagines addressing tragedians as a city legislator: “Most excellent of strangers, we are ourselves to the best of our ability the poets of the finest and most excellent tragedy. For our entire constitution has been set up as an imitation [mimēsis] of the finest and most excellent life, which we say at any rate is actually the truest tragedy” (817b). The passage points to an inevitable competition between the legislator and the tragic poet, both of whom produce mimēseis, tragedians in their plays and legislators in their constitutions. Both aim at the same goal—imitating “the finest and most excellent life”—but only a properly ordered city is capable of succeeding. “The truest tragedy” is not the one played onstage, but the one lived every day by citizens guided by philosophy.
It is, then, no accident that Plato’s dialogues themselves have a dramatic form: they aspire to replace one imitation of life with another. There is an irony to Plato’s project of displacing the false tragedies that he saw onstage with the “true tragedy” of civic order. Plato aims for a complete reorientation of the sources of civic value and prestige from the empty appearances of poetry to the secure truths of philosophy—but he sees both, at least metaphorically, as forms of tragedy. In turning to philosophy, Plato could burn his tragedies without ceasing to be a tragedian.