Excerpted from The Monist 71, Number 2 (April 1988), pp. 214–225. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Plato is not in any way concerned with art as such. This is not only because, if Paul Kristeller is correct, the very concept of the fine arts did not emerge in Europe until the eighteenth century. The main reason is quite specific: Plato does not even include painting in his denunciation. His argument does in fact depend on a series of analogies between painting and poetry, and he introduces all the major ideas through which he will eventually banish the poets by means of these analogies. This has led a number of scholars to conclude, and to feel they should explain why, Plato banished the artists from his model city. But a careful reading shows that neither painting nor sculpture is outlawed by Plato. This suggests, as we shall see in more detail below, that no general account of Plato’s attitude toward the arts is required. It also implies that we must determine which specific feature of imitative poetry makes it so dangerous that, in contrast to the other arts, it cannot be tolerated in Plato’s city.
This feature, on which Plato’s argument against poetry crucially depends, is that poetry (in telling contrast to painting and, particularly, to sculpture) is as a medium inherently suited to the representation, or imitation, of vulgar subjects and shameful behavior:
The irritable part of the soul gives many opportunities for all sorts of imitations, while the wise and quiet character which always remains the same is neither easy to imitate nor easy to understand when imitated, especially for a festival crowd, people of all sorts gathered in the theaters.
(60e1–5)
Plato makes his “greatest” objection to poetry on the basis of this idea. Not only average people but good people as well, even “the best among us,” are vulnerable to its harmful influence (605c6–10). Socrates speaks for these select individuals when he says that, confronted with the excessive and unseemly lamentation that is the staple of tragic and epic poetry, “we enjoy it, surrender ourselves, share [the heroes’] feelings, and earnestly praise as a good poet whoever affects us most in this way” (605d3–5; cf. Phil. 48a, Ion 535a, Lg. 800d). And yet, at least in the case of the best among us if not also among the rest of the people as well, this sort of behavior is exactly what we try to avoid when we meet with misfortunes of our own: In life, Plato claims, we praise the control and not the indulgence of our feelings of sorrow. How is it then that we admire in poetry just the kind of person we would be ashamed to resemble in life (605d7–e6)?
Socrates tries to account for this absurdity by means of the psychological terms provided by the tripartition of the soul in Book IV of the Republic. The lowest, appetitive, part of the soul, which is only concerned with immediate gratification and not with the good of the whole agent, delights in shameful behavior as it delights in anything that is not measured. Now poetry depicts the sufferings of others, not our own. The rational part of the soul, accordingly, is in this case indulgent toward the appetite, and allows it free expression. The whole agent, therefore, in the belief that such indulgence is harmless, enjoys the pleasure with which poetry provides the appetite (606a3–b5).
What we fail to realize is that enjoying the expression of sorrow in the case of others is directly transferred to the sorrows of our own. Cultivating our feelings of pity in spectacles disposes us to express them in similar ways in our own case and to enjoy (or at least to find no shame in) doing so: Thus it ultimately leads us to make a spectacle of ourselves (606a3–b8). Plato now generalizes his conclusion from sorrow in particular to all the passions:
So too with sex, anger, and all the desires, pleasures, and pains which we say follow us in every activity. Poetic imitation fosters these in us. It nurtures and waters them when they ought to wither; it places them in command in our soul when they ought to obey in order that we might become better and happier … instead of worse and more miserable.
(606d1–7)
In short, Plato accuses poetry of perverting its audience. Poetry is essentially suited to the representation of inferior characters and vulgar subjects: These are easy to imitate and what the crowd, which is already perverted to begin with, wants to see and enjoys. But the trouble is that all of us have an analogue to the crowd within our own soul (cf. 580d2–581a1). This is the appetitive part (the counterpart to the third and largest class, the money-lovers, in Plato’s analogy between city and soul), to the desires and pleasures of which we are all more or less sensitive. And since—this is a most crucial assumption to which we shall have to return—our reactions to poetry are transferred directly to, and in fact often determine, our reactions to life, poetry is likely to make us behave in ways of which we should be, and often are, ashamed. Poetry “introduces a bad government in the soul of each individual citizen” (605b7–8). But this is to destroy the soul and to destroy the city. It is precisely the opposite of everything the Republic is designed to accomplish. This is why poetry is intolerable.
We must now turn to Plato’s deeply controversial assumption that our reactions to life follow on the lines of our reactions to poetry: The whole issue of the sense of Plato’s charges against poetry and of their contemporary importance depends just on this idea. On its face, of course, this assumption can be easily dismissed. Enjoying (if that is the proper word) Euripides’ Medea is not likely to dispose us to admire mothers who murder their children for revenge nor to want to do so ourselves nor even to tend to adopt as our own Medea’s ways of lamenting her fate. But this quick reaction misses precisely what is deep and important in Plato’s attitude.
To begin to see what that is, we should note that Plato’s assumption does not seem so unreasonable in connection with children. Almost everyone today would find something plausible in Plato’s prohibition that children imitate bad models “lest from enjoying the imitation they come to enjoy the reality” and something accurate in his suspicion that “imitations, if they last from youth for some time, become part of one’s nature and settle into habits of gesture, voice, and thought” (395c7–d3). On this issue, Aristotle, who disagrees on so many issues regarding poetry with Plato, is in complete agreement: “We should also banish pictures and speeches from the stage which are indecent … the legislator should not allow youth to be spectators of iambi or of comedy” (Pol. VII, 1336b14–21). But, also like Plato, Aristotle does not confine his view to children only: “As we know from our own experience … the habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations (ta homoia) is not far removed from the same feelings about realities” (Pol. VIII, 1340a21–25).
To a great extent, in fact, Aristotle’s vindication of tragedy against Plato involves the argument that poetry is actually morally beneficial. And the reason for this is that katharsis both excites and purifies emotions which, in Stephen Halliwell’s words, “although potent, are properly and justifiably evoked by a portrayal of events which, if encountered in reality, would call for the same emotional response.”1 The assumption that there is some direct connection between our reactions to poetry and our reactions to life is common to both philosophers. The main difference is that Aristotle argues, against Plato, that this parallel tends to benefit rather than to harm the conduct of our life.
The Platonic argument seems plausible in the case of children because many of us think (though this view is itself debatable) that, unclear about the difference between them, children often treat representations simply as parts of and not also as symbols for reality. They don’t always seem able, for example, to distinguish a fictional danger from a real one. But Plato, as we have seen, believed that the case is similar with adults. Their reactions to poetry, too, determine their reactions to life because, to put the point bluntly, they are exactly the same kind of reactions. And the reason for this is that, as he believed, the representations of poetry are, at least superficially, exactly the same kind of objects as the real things they represent. The expression of sorrow in the theater is superficially identical with—exactly the same in appearance as—the expression of sorrow in life. Though actors do not, or need not, feel the sorrow they express on the stage, this underlying difference is necessarily imperceptible and allows the surface behavior of actors and real grievers to be exactly the same. … The clear implication is that the poets produce apparent crafts and apparent virtues in their imitations of what people say and do; they duplicate the appearance of people engaged in the practice of a craft or of virtuous activity (600e3–601b1). …
The metaphysics of Pygmalion is still in the center of our thinking about the arts. To see that this is so, and why, we must change subjects abruptly and recall Newton Minow’s famous address to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961. Though Minow admitted that some television was of high quality, he insisted that if his audience were to watch, from beginning to end, a full day’s programming,
I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western goodmen, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.2
This general view of the vulgarity of television has been given a less extreme expression, and a rationale, by George Gerbner and Larry Gross:
Unlike the real world, where personalities are complex, motives unclear, and outcomes ambiguous, television presents a world of clarity and simplicity. … In order to complete a story entertainingly in only an hour or even half an hour conflicts on TV are usually personal and solved by action. Since violence is dramatic and relatively simple to produce, much of the action tends to be violent.3
An extraordinary, almost hysterical version of such a view, but nevertheless a version that is uncannily close to Plato’s attitude that the lowest part of the soul is the subject-matter of poetry, is given by Jerry Mander. Television, he writes, is inherently suited for
expressing hate, fear, jealousy, winning, wanting, and violence … hysteria or ebullience of the kind of one-dimensional joyfulness usually associated with some objective victory—the facial expressions and bodily movements of antisocial behavior.4
Mander also duplicates, in connection with television, Plato’s view that poetry directly influences our life for the worse: “We slowly evolve into the images we carry, we become what we see.”5 This, of course, is the guiding premise of the almost universal debate concerning the portrayal of sex, violence, and other disapproved or antisocial behavior on television on the grounds that it tends to encourage television’s audience to engage in such behavior in life. And a very sophisticated version of this Platonic point, making use of the distinction between form and content, has been accepted by Wayne Booth:
The effects of the medium in shaping the primary experience of the viewer, and thus the quality of the self during the viewing, are radically resistant to any elevation of quality in the program content: as viewer, I become how I view, more than what I view. … Unless we change their characteristic forms, the new media will surely corrupt whatever global village they create; you cannot build a world community out of misshapen souls.6
We have seen that Plato’s reason for thinking that our reactions to life duplicate our reactions to poetry is that imitations are superficially identical with the objects of which they are imitations. Exactly this explanation is also given by Rudolph Arnheim, who wrote that television “is a mere instrument of transmission, which does not offer any new means for the artistic interpretation of reality.”7 Television, that is, presents us the world just as it is or, rather, it simply duplicates its appearance. Imitations are substitutes for reality. In Mander’s words,
people were believing that an image of nature was equal … to the experience of nature … that images of historical events or news events were equal to the events … the confusion of … information with a wider, direct mode of experience was advancing rapidly.8
Plato’s argument against poetry is repeated in summary form, and without an awareness of its provenance, in connection with television by Neil Postman: “Television,” he writes, “offers viewers a variety of subject-matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.” The inevitable result, strictly parallel to “the bad government in the soul”9 which Plato would go to all lengths to avert, is according to Postman, an equally dangerous “spiritual devastation.”10
1Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics” (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 200.
2Quoted in Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Making of American Television, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University, 1982) p. 300.
3George Gerbner and Larry Gross, “The Scary World of TV’s Heavy Viewer,” Psychology Today, April 1976, p. 44.
4Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Morrow Quill, 1978), pp. 279–80.
5Ibid., p. 219.
6Wayne C. Booth, “The Company We Keep: Self-Making in Imaginative Art,” Daedalus 111 (1982), pp. 56–57.
7Rudolph Arnheim, “A Forecast of Television,” in Adler, Understanding Television, (New York: Praeger, 1981), p. 7.
8Mander, Four Arguments, p, 25.
9Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Press, 1985), p. 86.
10Ibid., p. 155.