The same goes for tragic playwrights, then, since they’re representers: they’re two generations away from the throne of truth, and so are all other representers. (X, 597e)
We are less inclined to fall into step behind Plato’s attacks on poetry and painting in the final book. We have already met the beginning of this battle (in chapters 5 and 7) where Plato was lamenting first the way in which poets represent the gods, and secondly the dangers in the poetic habit of taking the man of spirit or thumos as a role model. The point in each case is that drama, or poetic excellence, is likely to be achieved by representations of human weakness. The calm courage, justice and wisdom of a Socrates, with his mind on eternal things, simply does not make for great theatre. In modern terms, a TV show in which everyone behaves with restraint, wisdom and dignity, or a Jerry Springer show in which nobody has anything to confess, and nobody loses their self-control, is poised to fail. The whole point of such shows is that they present human folly and weakness for the rest of us to enjoy.
But on the face of it any such critique cannot apply to all art, and we might share a Platonic distaste for the viler forms of ‘entertainment’, while remaining proud of our poets and art galleries. But Plato deepens his attack, and makes clear its uncompromising nature, in the final book of Republic. Here, he puts the theory of knowledge of the central books to work, using them to show how far away from the truth artistic representation remains.
The precise interpretation of his thought is controversial, and once more even the most sympathetic commentators have despaired.1 The most straightforward is that it depends on the most ‘metaphysical’ interpretation of the central books and the metaphor of the Cave. According to that, the domain of truth and knowledge is entirely distinct from the domain of ordinary life. Hence, since the poet or painter only gives us ‘representations’ of ordinary life, their work is at two removes from reality itself. Actually, taking the allegory of the Cave seriously, representational artists seem to be offering us only shadows of shadows of marionettes, themselves only dimly illuminated copies of the daylight world and its denizens, itself a kind of projection of the light of the sun. By my count, that puts them at least three, and possibly four removes from Truth and Reality. And since being removed from reality is equivalent to being removed from truth and knowledge, poets and painters are incapable of furthering either. They can offer nothing to the well-ordering of the mind.
I doubt if anyone has ever been convinced by this bald argument, depending as it does on the unattractive idea that what the senses show is itself unreal. But it is dependent as well on a more important misunderstanding of what can be represented by poetry or painting. For Plato supposes that representations simply produce secondary things – new objects of attention, distinct from and distracting from anything more ‘real’. Consider, for example, X, 598b, where Socrates is trying to convince Glaucon of the evils of painting:
‘So I want you to consider carefully which of these two alternatives painting is designed for in any and every instance. Is it designed to represent the facts of the real world or appearances? Does it represent appearance or truth?’
‘Appearance,’ he said.
The disastrous move here is to suppose that representing how something, such as a bed or a chair, or President Bush, appears, is not representing a bed or chair or President Bush at all, but only this different thing, their appearance. This certainly deserves the title of philosophia perennis: it is one of the hoariest, most tempting, and most pervasive errors in the entire subject.
For it does not seem to have occurred to Plato that representations may bring out new aspects of the very things they represent. We can pursue an interest in the time by looking at a sundial or a watch that represents it. The sundial or watch does not have to substitute for an interest in the time. A cartoon of your favourite politician does not just present a substitute or shadow to look at instead of the very person. It presents the person, looking perhaps mad, or bad, or wild or stupid, and it thereby suggests, and potentially reveals, an aspect of the person. Plato makes it sound as though a painting or a poem inevitably substitutes one subject or another. But it does not: the subject stays the same, although what is shown about them may be new. But precisely because of that, art has the capacity to tell us things, just as language does. It is not a distraction from the truth, but potentially an ally of it.
The example of a cartoon is deliberately everyday. But the point is reinforced when we turn to higher artistic exercises. We have already touched on the Romantics’ use of Plato, giving us the ‘immanent’ reading, that first suggested by Symposium, of the ascent from the cave. Here is one of the most famous passages, from his great poem ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, in which Wordsworth expresses the moral message he finds in nature:
… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.2
The full poem has many meanings. But what these lines show in particular is the equation between the feelings engendered by the poet’s love of the meadows and the woods, and the moral elevation of the awareness they bring to him, of the spirit that rolls through all things, the Wordsworthian equivalent of Plato’s Form of the Good. Again, the visible world or ‘all the mighty world of eye and ear’ reveals an aspect of things, indeed, a highly Platonic aspect of things, an anchor for Wordsworth’s entire moral nature. And we in turn, reading the poem, can in principle find it expressing something similar, namely the fact that nature can be revelatory of a Platonic spirit that ‘impels all thinking things’. Of course, if we are out of sympathy with Platonic imagery altogether, we may retort that Wordsworth is fantasizing or deceiving himself, but this is hardly an objection that Plato is in a position to make. If Wordsworth is wrong about whether nature reveals something ‘far more deeply interfused’, then the poem contains a suggestion of falsehood, although even so it might contain a yet more important suggestion of truth, for instance that there is a connection between loving nature and beauty, and loving the good and the true. And if Wordsworth is right the poem contains more than a suggestion of truth. The second possibility must remain open for Platonists. Furthermore, it would be truth put in such a way as to impress and attract an audience, a triumph of education.
Of course, it is not easy to say how art works. Indeed, at that level of generality there may be nothing much to be said about it. Any generalization will meet counter-examples. Indeed, in our receptive and experimental times, it would be almost a duty of the artist to transgress against any attempt at a formula. The only point we need is that sometimes art does work, and work in a revelatory way. It may tell us a new truth about an old subject-matter, or about a new one, about the nature of people or the nature of nature. It may even, if Plato and Wordsworth are right, reveal new truth about the relationship between the world of eye and ear, and the world of morality, or the world of something eternal.
Plato unfortunately intersperses his discussion with jeering remarks, especially about painting, which he seems to think can go on in complete ignorance of its subject-matter, and is in any case confined to attempting trompe l’œil imitations of reality. The idea that, for example, a painter like Leonardo da Vinci might need to know a great deal about human anatomy, or one like George Stubbs might first know and then show us an aspect of horses and their lives that had previously been hidden from us, seems completely beyond him.
Given that the most elevated part of the mind is solely interested in knowledge and truth, and that poetry and representational art keep us away from the truth, there is an immediate inference that they pander only to the base part of the mind. They deform even good people (X, 605c). The example Plato gives is of Homer, or any other poet, representing grief, and having the protagonist sing a ‘dirge and beat his breast’. And we, the audience, take pleasure in this, surrendering ourselves and sharing ‘the hero’s pain’ (X, 605d). But this all shows the poet satisfying and gratifying the part of ourselves that we ought to pride ourselves on suppressing, and the same goes when other emotions are involved: ‘sex, anger, and all the desires and feelings of pleasure and distress which, we’re saying, accompany everything we do’ (X, 606d). The deformity in question is not just one that might derive from watching murders on television. It is one that might equally come from reading Shakespeare or Wordsworth. Poetic representation:
irrigates and tends to these things when they should be left to wither, and it makes them our rulers when they should be our subjects, because otherwise we won’t live better and happier lives, but quite the opposite. (X, 606d)
There is a significant and sinister change of tack here. The city is no longer one in which the rulers care about the flourishing of each of the other parts. The ruling part now claims a monopoly of value, indeed, the flourishing of emotion, desire and pleasure is a positive evil, and in the best commonwealth they ‘should be left to wither’. This aspect of Plato was enormously influential on the Stoics, who mistrusted emotion in the same exaggerated way, seeing it not merely as something to be governed and moderated and rightly channelled, but as something to be destroyed altogether. It is not just a question of keeping a stiff upper lip, but of stark insensitivity, brutal unfeeling. The ideal man becomes completely impassive, immune to ‘desire and feelings of pleasure and distress’, no longer a man but a frozen block of ice. This part of Book X does most to justify Nietzsche’s charge against Plato of sadism, asceticism and the desire to do the dirt on human life itself. It is also the part that Aristotle most firmly repudiates, integrating reason with the life of the animal, and the proper and necessary role of cultivated and moderate sentiment (although in the final part of his major work, the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle too succumbs to the idea that the best life is one of pure intellectual contemplation).
At this point we might, in some despair, be tempted to follow the line pursued by the American scholar Leo Strauss, who has been such an influence on modern neo-conservative politics. Strauss had a keen enough eye for the weaknesses in Socrates’s overt messages in Republic. So he convinced himself that Plato’s skill as a dramatist included that of hiding his own teachings, sometimes behind their apparent opposite. It is by the failures of the overt arguments that we learn what we can about justice, politics and the soul. So in the end Republic tells us that there is no working analogy between the city and the soul, that Thrasymachus remains victorious, or even that poets are not to be banished.3 About the only doctrine from Socrates’s mouth that remains is that those in government are encouraged to tell noble lies for the good of the state – a convenient exception, of which Strauss’s followers appear to have taken full advantage, along with the rehabilitation of Thrasymachus and the superiority of the life of both dictators and plutocrats. We may leave the arguments about this kind of revisionary interpretation to specialists, but since the Straussian Plato is so far away from the figure recognized by everyone else, including Aristotle, who was so close to Plato for so long, it is wise to be sceptical.