IMITATION
by John White
Note: This paper was given as a lecture at St. John’s College and I have kept that form. This is not a scholarly paper, and there are no footnotes. I have taken two examples of imitation from Lessing (the scepter and Helen), and this is not stated within the body of the paper. Quotations from the Republic are from Allan Bloom’s translation.
Since I want to talk about imitation, I must talk about two extraordinary books, the Iliad and the Republic. The Iliad uses “imitation” as a way to understand painting or sculpting (on Achilles’ shield “the earth looked like earth that had been plowed though it was made of gold”). The Republic uses “imitation” to understand poetry.
Both the Iliad and the Republic are difficult to grasp, but the Republic has a special kind of difficulty. It is full of questions that turn back upon themselves and answers that somehow cancel or contradict themselves. For example, when Socrates throws out passages of Homer and also quotes him at great length, does he want us to hear Homer or not? Or when Socrates founds the “best city” on a noble lie and also tells us that the lie is a lie, does he want to fool us or not? And in what the Republic talks about—justice—we can see this odd “canceling” or “ambiguity” from the beginning. A discussion of justice draws attention to the actions of the discussion, as well as its explicit content and opinions. The “what” and the “how” of the discussion sometimes support each other—e.g., in Book I, where Socrates is a shepherd guarding his flock against a wolf. But sometimes they seem to “cancel” each other. “Doing good to friends and harm to enemies” is a definition that Socrates rejects in Book I. But when he talks to Thrasymachus and considers the claim that justice is
the interest of the stronger, he treats him harshly. Finally, Socrates claims that he knows nothing and he begins to leave (end of Book I, beginning of Book II). When Glaucon and Adeimantus ask him to discuss that same opinion, Socrates says that he sees something wonderful in their nature, and he stays and talks for a long time. Has Socrates’ action shown that, at some level, he believes that it is right to treat friends well and enemies harshly?
This same kind of difficulty or ambiguity appears in other ways, too. The style of the Republic is “decadent.” It is a jumble of other styles—narrative, lyric and mimetic; it is both comic and tragic. The style is “realistic” to the point of obscuring the difference between history and fiction, real and ideal. No one style is employed in its purity. Poetry and the criticism of poetry are combined in an artful form.
These difficulties about style are not only present as questions about the dialogue; they are present within the dialogue also. When Glaucon and Adeimantus enter the conversation (in Book II), they are as much concerned with the proper way to praise justice as with justice itself. Glaucon (358a) thinks that Socrates has not refuted those who praise injustice; while Socrates may have punished Thrasymachus—pushed him around in speech, humiliated him—Socrates has not convincingly refuted injustice. Glaucon thinks that no one has ever praised justice competently, so he will praise injustice to give Socrates a pattern for the praise of justice. And for Adeimantus the greatest difficulty with justice is what happens when anyone tries to praise it. Parents, lawgivers, and poets contradict themselves when they talk about justice. They try to praise justice, but the style of their praise, the stories of rewards and the afterlife, really praises the seeming, the appearance, of justice. We should seem just to our judges. This style of praise (justice in an afterlife) conceals envy. It “exhorts one to be unjust and get away with it” in this life (367b). Adeimantus says that “of all those who claim to be praisers of justice—beginning with those who have left speeches—there is not one who has ever praised justice other than for the reputation and honors.... But as to what [justice] itself does with its own power..., no one has ever, in poetry or prose” adequately praised it (366c). Glaucon and Adeimantus think that Socrates understands this kind of difficulty and can give them the proper praise of justice. Do they want to hear poetry (praise of justice) or its criticism? Do they want poetry or philosophy? They want both.
So Socrates must do both: He must criticize poetry and be a kind of poet. Socrates does both of these things in the Republic. And Book X in particular is the most compact expression of the ambiguity and difficulty of what he tries to do—of looking at questions that turn back on themselves and answers that somehow cancel themselves. In Book X Socrates both gives his most radical criticism of poetry and also becomes explicitly “poetic,” by telling tales of the afterlife (in the myth of Er).
Socrates gives three arguments against imitation in Book X. In this essay I will present them briefly and then examine them by looking at their underpinnings, their assumptions. The result of this examination turns out to be ambiguous: If Socrates’ criticism of imitation succeeds, it succeeds in a perverse way, for it attacks not only the Iliad but also much that was said in the first nine books of the Republic. Book X turns against and “cancels” the unity and coherence of the Republic itself. Why is Book X there at all? Book IX ends so beautifully, with the best city a “pattern laid up in heaven;” it is uplifting. Why ruin this ending with the cranky, contradictory character of Book X? While I can’t argue for the unity of the Republic on the level of an opinion—for example, that it is for or against poetry, for or against some particular definition of justice—I think I can give an image of its unity, an image that is able to guide us to the interpretation of some of Socrates’ own poetry, the images he makes and the myth he tells.
I. IMITATION AND THE MIRROR
In Books II and III of the Republic Socrates gave long, sober arguments against imitative poetry: As far as content goes, poetry tells lies about gods and heroes; it talks of Hades and the afterlife, thereby undermining courage; its talk is neither “holy nor true” (377b-386b). And finally (397b ff.) tragedy, imitation without narration, was exiled for its imitative character: Imitation, where one has to jumble together “all modes and rhythms,” encourages a doubleness or ambiguity in the character of the citizens; it violates the principle of the city, “one man, one job.”
Now in Book X Socrates returns to the topic of poetry. His criticism of imitation this time is both more fierce and more respectful, for while he says that poets “maim the thought of those who hear them,” he also says that “a certain friendship for Homer, and shame before him, which has possessed me since childhood, prevents me from speaking.” (595b) This time when he criticizes poetry, unlike his earlier criticism, Socrates begins with an image of the imitative artist, a “wonderful and clever craftsman,” and this image rules and guides the arguments that follow.
For this same manual artisan is not only able to make all implements but also makes everything that grows naturally from the earth, and he produces all animals— the others and himself too—and, in addition to that, produces earth and heaven and gods and everything in heaven and everything in Hades under the earth. (596c)
Socrates tells Glaucon that this is not so wonderful, for he too could make all these things, in a certain way.
You could fabricate them quickly in many ways and most quickly, of course, if you are willing to take a mirror [not a glass mirror; their mirrors were sheets of polished bronze] and carry it around everywhere; quickly you will make the sun and the things in the heavens; quickly, the earth; and quickly yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and everything else that was just now mentioned. (596d-e)
In Socrates’ image of the mirror, who is the “clever man” and what is his mirror? I cannot answer these questions now, but I will return to them.
After making this image, Socrates gives three arguments against imitation. The first concerns the being of a work of art (596a-598b). The second concerns the knowledge which the imitator has (601b-602b). The third concerns virtue (598e-601b; 603e-606d). The conclusion of these arguments is that poetry needs an apology in its ancient quarrel with philosophy (607b). Within Book X this restatement of the exile of poetry forms a transition to the discussion of the immortality of the soul (608e ff.) and the myth of Er.
Here I will present Socrates’ first two arguments—the being of an art work and the knowledge it contains. These arguments belong together because they both rely on the same assumptions and they both draw out the consequences of the image of the mirror. The third argument does not rely on the mirror, so I will consider it later.
The first argument is about being. In the case of a bed, there are three artisans concerned with it and there are three kinds of beds. First, there is one bed “by nature,” produced by god. (Notice the oddity of this phrase: “the bed by nature.”) The god makes only one bed; if he made two beds, it would come to light that they shared the same “Form.” The god is called the “nature-begetter.” Second, there is the bed we sleep on, made by a craftsman. He doesn’t make the “Form” of a bed, but he does make a particular bed. He is both imitative and productive. Socrates says, “If he doesn’t make what is, he wouldn’t make the being but something that is like the being.” (597a) Third, there is the bed that appears in the painting of an imitator. He is third because he does not imitate the “Form” of the one bed, as does the craftsman; instead he imitates what the craftsman has made. Socrates says (598b) that the painter imitates not the “being as it is” but the “looking as it looks” of a thing. He concludes that imitation is three removes from the truth about being.
Socrates’ second argument concerns knowledge. For each thing, there are three arts concerned with it: the art of its use, the art of its making, and the art of its imitation. In the case of a bridle, Socrates asks who understands it best, who knows what he is talking about when he talks about bridles. In this case first place goes to the user because “the virtue, beauty and rightness of each implement, animal, and action [are] related to nothing but the use for which each was made, or grew naturally.” Second place goes to the craftsman, who will have “right trust concerning its beauty or its badness” (601e). The imitator has neither knowledge nor right opinion about the bridle; no one can tell him how to paint it because there is no clear-cut use for a painting. The painter has neither knowledge nor right opinion with respect to the beauty or badness in anything. He can only paint what looks fair to the many (602b).
The painter, the imitative artist, gets third place in both of these arguments. Socrates concludes the arguments this way:
Then it looks like we are pretty well agreed on these things: the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates; imitation is a kind of play and not serious; and those who take up tragic poetry in iambics and epics are all imitators in the highest possible degree. (602b)
These two arguments have some assumptions as their underpinnings. The first hypothesis is that “god made only one bed by nature.” Socrates says:
Do you want us to make our consideration according to our customary procedure, beginning from the following point? For we are, presumably, accustomed to set down some one particular form for each of the particular ‘manys’ to which we apply the same name. (596a)
Only with this assumption can Socrates give his analysis of the being of an artwork (the three craftsmen) and its knowledge (the three arts). These “Forms” help his argument in another way: Each argument analyzed an implement or tool (bed and bridle), a work of craft or technê designed for use rather than a natural being. The analysis is impossible if there is an important difference between nature and art with respect to either being or our understanding of being. For example, if use is the test of our knowledge, who is the user of a giraffe or an ostrich such that he understands them for what they are? This difference (between natural and artful being) is not a serious problem if we follow Socrates’ image of the mirror (which imitates implements and animals and gods equally well) or if a thing is what it is by “participation” in a “Form.” Both “theories” (the poetic image and the philosophical distinction) allow us to understand the being of a thing without reference to its coming-to-be, the path by which it arrived. I.e., the understanding of being is as self-contained as being seems to be. We can ignore the distinction between nature and art because the distinction rests on the importance of becoming, motion.
The second assumption needed for these two arguments against imitation is that the poet is similar to the painter (596e, 603c, 605a). Both arguments and the image of the “mirror“ concern painting directly, and we have to trust that painting and poetry do the same kind of imitating in order to apply Socrates’ two arguments to poetry.
II. POETRY AND PAINTING; LAOKOON
Here I want to examine the second assumption that Socrates makes, the similarity of poetry and painting. The best examination of the relation of poetry to painting (and sculpture, too—the plastic arts) is Lessing’s Laokoon. Laokoon was a Trojan priest who told the Trojans not to bring a piece of sculpture into their city, a wooden sculpture of a horse. Two serpents attacked Laokoon and his sons for making this warning. Lessing uses the Laokoon theme because it exists in two treatments, as an incident in the Aeneid and as a sculpture. In the treatment in the Aeneid, Laokoon is bitten by a serpent.
All the while his appalling cries go up to heaven—A bellowing, such as you hear when a wounded bull escapes from the altar, after it’s shrugged off an ill-aimed blow at its neck.(II, 223 ff.)
In the Laokoon statue, Laokoon is being bitten by a serpent and he is crying out—or perhaps he is calling out, calling on some god, or saying something. The statue is wordless, so we cannot tell. Laokoon’s posture and the shape of his mouth give this moment of pain a serene greatness and noble simplicity—a timelessness, a strange and wonderful presence. The wordless cry of the statue (possibly wordless—we cannot tell) is not the awful bellowing of which the poem speaks. This difference shows Lessing that the way to focus an examination of the similarity of poetry and painting is to focus on how they express emotions—in particular, how they portray the experience of pain.
This difference in expression is striking and consistent: If one looks at Greek poets, there are many examples of heroes and gods expressing pain with a violence that ruins their “serene greatness” and beauty. When Achilles first hears of the death of Patroklus, he pours dust and ashes on his face and “fouls his handsome countenance” (XVIII, 24). Or in one of the two most terrible and wonderful moments in the book, when Zeus is finally faced with the death of his son, Sarpedon, and he cannot save him even though he has the power (Zeus has already saved his life twice), Zeus stops arguing with Hera and sits, wordless; Homer says “the father of gods and men wept tears of blood” (XVI, 459).
In general, if one listens to screams of pain in the Iliad, one can see a progression. Early in the book, the usual way of dying is that a spear is thrown and it “drives inward through the bone, and a mist of darkness clouded both eyes and he fell as a tower falls” (IV, 460). As the book goes on, screams of pain are mentioned as part of the dying. In Book XIII, when Zeus looks away from the battle, there is more boasting over fallen enemies, one man cries out in pain (393), and another “cried out then a great cry... and the spear in his breast was stuck fast but the heart was beating still and beating to shake the butt end of the spear” (441). A man is struck between the navel and genitals “where beyond all places death in battle comes most painfully to pitiful mortals” (568). Another man is struck in the eye; then his head is cut off, but the eyeball sticks to the point of the spear and is “lifted high like the head of a poppy” (XIV, 499).
The culmination of this progression of the violent expression of pain is in Book XVIII, the moment that answers and balances the silent, bloody tears of Zeus. After the death of Patroklus, Hera sends Achilles to the wall around the ships. He has no armor. He stands there on the wall, then goes to the ditch. He is caught between anger and grief. He cries out, a great brazen scream, and Athena makes the “unwearied dangerous fire” of heaven blaze from his head. The cry he gives is “wordless,” a piercing utterance (without any possibility of becoming “winged”).
The Greeks were immoderate in their poetry because moderation is not dramatic. The reason for the serenity of the statue is not the “moderation” of the Greeks, as some have theorized; the statue is “moderate” because it is a statue, because of the limitation of plastic art. The limit and goal of plastic art is physical beauty and beauty of expression: What is ugly must be veiled and transformed, and expressions of emotion must be moderated (if we are to feel something like pity and fear rather than disgust). Since the plastic arts can portray only one moment in time, they must choose a moment that most implies the wholeness of an action, and not a moment that expresses it. There is no one moment of expression, for an action is a temporal whole that needs a “before” and an “after,” motivation and suffering, to be complete. The last moment, the suffering and the bellow of pain, is for plastic art the least useful: The eyeball on the spear becomes disgusting or funny after a while. So plastic art, when considering an action and its suffering, must choose the beginning, a moment of transition or choice—the moment where the soul has decided and is just about to move the body. It may choose the “last” moment of Laokoon’s struggle only if the struggle is not quite over: We know Laokoon is doomed, while Laokoon is about to know and is about to bellow. (Of course, plastic art could choose a moment that is eternal, a moment of contemplation or a moment that expresses the serene self-sufficiency of the gods.)
Poetry does not have these limits. In it we can have wordless screams (which will stand out as wordless) and tears of blood because we do not see the ugly gaping mouth, and the moment is quickly left behind. In dramatic imitation, the ugly and disfiguring, the natural display of emotion, may and must be shown.
Poetry has a wider range than painting; much that it imitates can’t be given in a painting. For example, consider the gods. To the painter they are “personified abstractions” who must remain the same, doing the one thing that is typical of them, if they are to be identified. To the poet these “personified abstractions,” these timeless entities, must act, must enter time, and therefore they must have various passions and deeds. (Poetry violates the god’s simplicity, 508d.) In poetry there are many moments when Aphrodite does not act like the abstraction of love, but the painter can’t portray her then unless he adds some kind of label or sign, a non-visual element that is a substitute for a name.
If painters try to use Homer’s “pictures” as a model, they will face impossible problems. For example. Homer treats of two kinds of beings, visible and invisible: men and gods. Painters can’t do this. When a painting portrays gods and men together, it ignores the distinction between the visible and the invisible—a distinction that for Homer is not a matter of sight. Painting lowers the invisible. For example, if one wishes to paint the battle of the gods and men in Book XXI of the Iliad, one needs some visual scale of distinction between gods and men—a scale that tells you this figure is a god and that one is not because (perhaps) one figure is ten times as large as the other (XVIII, 518). Homer does say that the gods are “huge.” But for Homer this “size” is not physical; the gods have stature, greatness. A painting would ignore this difference between gods and men by being so literal-minded about the word “huge.”
What the visibility of the gods means for Homer is that they are only visible to men by an increased power of mortal vision, such as Athene grants to Diomedes. The gods are not invisible because of mists or clouds. Although Homer mentions them, in a painting clouds and mists would cease being a physical presence and would become a “sign.” The gods are visible only to the greatest of the Greeks, and they are never visible to someone like Thersites. Visibility has little to do with vision, but a lot to do with the distinction between the great and the ordinary, the serious and the superficial. Homer’s gods are related to men, and distinct from men, in this way: The gods reveal human life by showing its possibilities and limits. They are a kind of skepticism and self-consciousness. The gods are limits for us that are not merely “other,” as are cats and crocodiles or stars or any of the many things that different people see as divine. The gods don’t “exist” in the literal-minded sense of a painting that has both gods and men in it. The idea of human life is beautiful and real, and actual human life is incomplete without these ideas—even if they are “mere possibilities”—and without this kind of greatness. Only poetry can give us this kind of limit, one that “cancels” and affirms at the same time. These gods are “other,” but their otherness has a human form. Painting has trouble showing us the otherness of the gods—this unique combination of same and other.
Poetry and painting are different because they imitate different things: Painting imitates bodies, silent presences whose parts co-exist in time, and poetry imitates wholes that unfold and complete themselves in time. When Homer describes an object, he usually gives it only one characteristic (the hollow ship, the black ship), but he describes actions in greater detail. When Homer does describe an object, the description is not visual and it serves other purposes. Let’s consider three examples of Homer’s kind of description, Homer’s “pictures,” to see how they work and what they are describing.
The first example is the description of a scepter. Homer gives two descriptions of it, and we have to look at them together to understand what he is describing and how he is doing it. When Agamemnon holds the scepter, this is what Homer says:
Powerful Agamemnon
stood up holding the scepter Hephaistos has wrought him carefully.
Hephaistos gave it to Zeus the king, the son of Chronos,
and Zeus in turn gave it to the courier Argeïphontes,
and Lord Hermes gave it to Pelops, driver of horses,
and Pelops gave it to Atreus, the shepherd of the people.
Atreus dying left it to Thyestes of the rich flocks,
and Thyestes in turn left it to Agamemnon to carry
and to be lord of many islands and over all Argos.
Here is the second description. It is given by Achilles when he holds the scepter.
This scepter, which never again will bear leaf nor
branch, now that it has left behind the cut stump in the mountains,
nor shall it blossom again, since the bronze blade stripped
bark and leafage, and now at last the sons of the Achaians
carry it in their hands in state when they administer the justice of Zeus.
(I, 234-239)
And then Achilles dashes the scepter to the ground. Neither description gives any visual information; they give a history. But they are descriptions of a sort if we look at the two descriptions together. One description calls the scepter the work of Hephaistos; the other describes the scepter as cut from the mountainside by unknown hand. The one talks of an ancient possession of a noble house; the other talks of a scepter destined to fit the hand of anyone who might chance to grab it. The one talks of a scepter held by one who rules over many islands and over all of Argos; the other talks of justice, then throws the scepter down. What is being described is not the scepter; the descriptions are giving us the difference between Agamemnon and Achilles.
Second, when Homer doesn’t match up two descriptions of an object to give us something else, when he does want to describe something that demands a picture, what does he do? After all, the symbols of poetry are arbitrary and can be made to represent a body coexistent in space. How do bodies, whose parts coexist in space, lend themselves to a description? Here is the problem for a poet: since the description is in words and sentences, the description itself must be sequential. The temporal sequence obscures the co-existence of the parts; by the end of the description, the beginning is forgotten. The statue or painting, as a physical object, is experiences in time, just like any object. But its “image” character appears and is present all at once, as a whole—similar to what happens with a mirror. Speech never achieves the wholeness or “direct presence” of a painting. So when Homer is forced to enter the special province of plastic art, physical beauty and unmediated presence, what does he do? How does he describe Helen? A direct, “mirror-like” description, which considers her features one by one, can’t help but be a kind of arbitrary jumble, a mere sequence—why talk of eyes first? How does Homer give us the experience of her beauty? He gives a mediate description of her beauty by describing an action: He has Helen come to the wall, and he describes how the sight of her affects old men (not young ones).
They were seated by the gates, elders of the people.
Now through old age they fought no longer, yet they were excellent
speakers still, and clear, as cicadas who through the forest
settle on trees, to issue the delicate voice of their singing.
Such were they who sat on the tower, chief men of the Trojans.
And these, as they saw Helen along the tower approaching,
murmuring softly to each other uttered their winged words:
‘Surely there is no blame on Trojans and strong-greaved Achaians
if for long time they suffer hardship for a woman like this one.
Terrible is the likeness of her face to immortal goddesses.
Still, though she be such, let her go away with the ships, lest
she be left behind, a grief to us and our children.
We don’t know what she looks like. When Zeuxis made a painting of this scene, he did give a direct, mirror-like presentation of Helen’s beauty. Helen was the only figure in the painting—no old men who have “winged words” and wrinkles. (Which is more beautiful: the looks of Helen or the looking of the old men?)
The third example of Homer’s descriptions is the most complex and revealing: What does Homer do when he invades plastic art itself, when he goes behind and beneath the overwhelming presence of the beautiful object? What does he do when he describes both the presence of beautiful object and the context of this unmediated presence? What does he do when he describes both the being and the becoming of the object, both the image and the imitating?
Thetis of the silver feet came to the house of Hephaistos.
She found him sweating as he turned here and there to his bellows
busily since he was working on twenty tripods....
[Hephaistos] took the huge blower off from the block of anvil limping.... He...gathered and put away
all the tools with which he worked in a silver strong box.
Then with a sponge he wiped clean his forehead, and both hands
and his massive neck and hairy chest....
[Hephaistos then] went to his bellows He turned those toward the
fire...
And the bellows...blew on the crucibles,
from all directions blasting forth wind to blow the flames high,
now as he hurried from one place to another.
He cast on the fire bronze which is weariless... and gripped in one
hand
the ponderous hammer, while in the other he grasped the pincers.
And then all this labor and sweat just disappear.
First of all he forged a shield that was huge and heavy.
Hephaistos made the earth upon it, and sky, and the sea’s water,
and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness,
and on it all the constellations that adorn the heavens....
On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men.
And there were marriages in one, and festivals.
The people were assembled in the market place. Around the other
city were lying
two forces of armed men shining in their war gear. He made upon it
a soft field,
the pride of tilled land, wide and triple-ploughed, with many plow
men upon it.
And as these making their turn would reach the end-strip of a field
a man would come up to them at this point and hand them a flagon
of honey-sweet wine, and they would turn again to the furrow.
The earth darkened behind them and looked like earth that has
been ploughed
though it was made of gold. Such was the wonder of the shield’s
forging.
(XVIII, 369-549, selected)
Homer shows the labor of the imitating; he shows the making of the shield, its coming-to-be. But then the sweat and labor disappear. The ability to see this “disappearing” is what poetry can see about sculpting that sculpting can’t see about itself—what sculpting ‘forgets’ about itself. I.e., poetry is able to see and understand the coming-to-be of images despite the nondynamic co-existence of their being. Visual images have a being that points away from itself to the imaged thing, where wonder overcomes and denies its own forging. But the “disappearing” is not just the secret that poetry knows about visual art. The disappearing—the disappearing, not the disappearance—is also the essential gesture that poetry imitates and repeats when it tries to give its own becoming. The invocation is both the appearing of the poem and the disappearing of the poet. With the invocation a poet disappears into the divine, which is a style and a rhythm (“Sing, goddess, of wrath....”). Poetry tries to hide its own becoming.
The shield is the greatest “presence” in the poem. The shield is a visual presence that is impossible to see because the looking has overcome the object and its looks.
Thetis came to the ships and carried with her the gifts of Hephaistos.
She found her beloved son lying in the arms of Patroklus crying
shrill....
She clung to her son’s hand and called him by name and spoke to
him:
“My child, we must let this man lie dead,
in the way he first was killed through the gods’ designing.
Accept rather from me the glorious arms of Hephaistos,
so splendid, and such as no man has ever worn.”
The goddess spoke, and set down the armor on the ground
before Achilleus, and all its elaboration clashed loudly.
Trembling took hold of all the Myrmidons. None had the courage to
look straight at it.
They were afraid of it. Only Achilleus looked, and as he looked
the anger came harder upon him and his eyes glittered terribly, like
sunflare.
He was glad, holding the shining gifts of Hephaistos.
But when he had satisfied his heart with looking,
he spoke to his mother and addressed her in winged words:
“Mother, the god has given me these weapons; they are the work of
immortals.
No mortal man could have made them.”
Many have been tempted to draw this shield, but they can’t. The things on the shield are in motion, and no human painting or sculpture could show that. But there is a divine kind of painting that can show things in motion, in their life.
Hephaistos is an unusual god, not a god of “serene greatness,” for he limps and sweats and has a hairy chest. He was important to Achilles at another time, too. When the river Xanthos attacked Achilles and tried to give him an anonymous death—to bury him in mud, bodies, and watery blood— Hephaistos saved Achilles with his fire. Now, too, with the shield, Hephaistos says that he wishes he could hide Achilles from death and its sorrow; he wishes it as surely as there will be a shield to wonder at (XVIII, 467). Again Hephaistos uses his fire for Achilles: He makes a “shield of wonder” to replace Achilles’ lost armor, his Uranian armor, taken by Hector (XVII, 195). This new Olympian armor is forged by a divine art that shows things in motion, in their life. The divine art that shows things in winged motion, the art the forges Olympian armor, is poetry.
III. THE THIRD ARGUMENT AND ITS DIFFICULTIES
Socrates gives a third argument against mimetic poetry in Book X. This argument both sums up the earlier criticisms (about being and knowledge) and goes beyond them. It has two parts; both parts concern “virtue.” I’ll look at the two parts separately and make some observations.
The first part of the argument (598e-601b) says that Homer must not himself have been virtuous because he did no “deeds.” Homer founded no cities, conducted no wars, and is not credited with any inventions or devices; he is not famous for a way of life, as was Pythagoras, nor was he a teacher of virtue. If one has knowledge about virtue, one is more serious about deeds than speeches and imitations; one would be “more eager to be the one who is praised than the one who praises” (599b). Homer’s art produced only a song, so he produced nothing serious, only an imitation of what is serious.
Either to defend Homer or to understand him better, we have to answer these questions: What was Homer’s deed and what “invention or device” can we credit him with? Herodotus (II, 50-53) says that while Homer (and Hesiod) didn’t invent the gods, he was the first to give them special honors, arts, names, and genealogies—a “theogony,” a coming-to-be. Homer, by giving deeds, histories, and preferences to the gods, made them into characters. No longer are the gods merely the subject for statues and lyric poems, “timeless” hymns to Apollo or Zeus (Socrates allows this kind of poetry in his “healthy” city—372b). Now the gods are fit subjects for epic poetry, the kind of poetry that uses “winged words.” But the gods and the Iliad, the book where the gods become characters, were not Homer’s deed; they were the “devices” he needed to perform his deed. Homer devised Olympian armor, the Iliad, for the Greeks to look at, and this kind of looking produced the Greeks—they were Homer’s deed. The Greeks were the kind of people they were because they had these gods and the Iliad, instead of cats or crocodiles or statues of Uranian gods.
Homer’s deed, this bringing into being of a certain kind of person, has an odd timelessness for a deed; it is not over yet; it can still occur. When we read the Iliad attentively, we sit, unmoving and wordless, as if chained to a chair in a cave; we are aware only of the images before us. We are not aware of them as images. Instead, the images convince us that they are real, that our emotions are only reflections of Achilles’ wrath and grief.
Socrates is aware of this kind of cave and this kind of defense of Homer: “Praisers of Homer say that this poet educated Greece” (606e). Socrates is aware that the Greeks have a “noble lie” in their souls, where they confuse nature and education: “The inborn love of such poetry we owe to our rearing in these fine regimes” (608a).
So far, in this “ancient quarrel of poetry and philosophy,” I see no decisive advantage for either side. Homer is beautiful if bloody; the images of philosophy (“patterns laid up in heaven”) are uplifting, if a little cold. But in most ways the quarrel remains a mere quarrel; no new understanding has been opened up by either side, nor have new possibilities come into view for either side. Philosophy sees through this poetic “disappearing” and the false objectivity of “forgetting.” But, as poetry repeated the forgetting and the unself-conscious knowing of “disappearing,” so may philosophy with its “pattern laid up in heaven (end of Book IX).
But now, when Socrates turns to the second part of this argument against Homer, he turns away from the “mirror” image and its emphasis on the imitation of objects: “Imitation imitates forced and voluntary actions” (603c). He goes beyond the limit and assumption of the first two arguments, the similarity of poetry and painting: “Let’s not just trust the likelihood based on painting; but let’s go directly to the very part of thought with which poetry’s imitation keeps company and see whether it is ordinary or serious” (603c). We are no longer arguing about “truth” or “being,” questions that can become the province of philosophy in a narrowly technical way—a kind of thinking that is “true” but has no greatness, a thinking that is hard for us to take seriously because it doesn’t take seriously human life in its naive, non-technical immediacy.
With this new beginning, Socrates turns to the deepest criticism of poetry: Mimetic poetry does not produce “seriousness” about virtue in the soul of the spectator. He says that poetry cannot imitate a serious soul, a soul that is restrained, one that is “self-same.” Poetry must imitate a soul in conflict. When we see tragic suffering, the best part of the soul, the measuring and calculating part, relaxes its rule over the other parts. Here Socrates says that he makes the “greatest charge” (605b) against mimetic poetry. This charge is more serious than those “third remove” criticisms in the first two arguments (about being and knowledge), technical arguments that relied on an image, the “mirror.” Socrates says that mimetic poetry “fosters and waters desires, pains, pleasures, sex and spiritedness—things which ought to be dried up” (606d). Spiritedness, thumos, ought to be dried up.
Whatever else one might say about this criticism of poetry, one can’t simply disagree with it: After looking at the Iliad with Lessing’s help, we have to agree that the soul without conflict is not dramatic; it belongs on a pedestal, not in a poem. But, on the other hand, we also have to remember that if we are going to “dry up” thumos, that it was thumos, spiritedness, that made possible the Republic and its three-part soul by mediating between reason and appetite. This part of the soul, which conflicts with natural desires and goes beyond them in wanting relishes, made “guardianship” possible, with its dog-like combination of the qualities of “being gentle to friends and cruel to enemies” (375b ff.). The “measuring and calculating” part of the soul, reason, needs a force naturally allied to it, a guardian, if it is to rule the soul or the city. And if reason can’t rule both soul and city, the image that rules and unifies the first nine books of the Republic is lost: the image where “the city is the soul ‘writ large.’”
This new attack on mimetic poetry involves another surprise for us, as Socrates explores the restrained self-sameness of soul which poetry cannot imitate. The surprise is the immortality of the soul. When Socrates mentions immortality, Glaucon “looks him in the face with wonder” (608d). The immortality of the soul depends on the soul’s simplicity and unity, its radical self-sameness. If the soul is “simple,” how can it have three parts?
When Socrates tries to explain this difficulty about the parts of the soul (611c), that up until now the soul had three parts, he says that, so far, he has been talking about the “looks” of the soul only. All right, but that was his criticism of mimetic poetry in the first two arguments against it, the ones based on painting and the “mirror” (that poetry talks about “looks” instead of being). Whatever else we may think about this third attack on mimetic poetry, these arguments of Book X are also a kind of “canceling” and “turning against” much that was said in the first nine books—the most extreme form of the canceling I mentioned at the beginning (the special difficulty of the Republic).
Why is Book X there at all? Book IX ends so nicely, with the best city as a city in speech, a “pattern laid up in heaven,” and there is a review of actual cities, cities “in deed.” The tyrant has been “stripped of his tragic gear” (577a), which allows Socrates to answer the original question about the relation of justice and happiness: The just man is 729 times as happy as the tyrant (587e).
I think we can see the reason for including Book X if we look a little more closely at the “degeneration” of the cities in Books VIII and IX, because there we can see the return of mimetic poetry despite its exile in Book III, and we can see the emergence of a special concern with poetry in one of the cities, a democracy.
Before the “degeneration” begins, Book VII ends with the description of the best city and the education of the philosopher-kings. Glaucon recognizes the completion of the discussion when he says, “just like a sculptor, Socrates, you have produced men who are wholly fair” (540a). Then the “degeneration” begins as Socrates makes the gesture characteristic of poetry—an invocation: “How will our city be moved? Do you want us, as does Homer, to pray to the Muses to tell us how ‘faction first attacked,’ and shall we say they speak to us with high, tragic talk, as though they were speaking seriously?” (545d). So the sculptural climax of Book VII is insufficient; poetry has returned after its exile.
The “degeneration” must bring back mimetic poetry because the degeneration involves choices and actions. And conversely, the presentation of a variety of cities demands something like a “degeneration.” If one is going to describe various cities, which city does one start with? Without a principle of order, the cities are a jumble and the description would be a jumble (as in the problem of describing Helen; eyes or teeth first?). And not only does the “degeneration” involve a return to mimetic poetry in its Homeric beginning, but poetry itself enters at one stage of the degeneration, a democracy.
Democracy enters with a kind of flourish because the transition from oligarchy to democracy echoes the transition from the first city, Socrates’ “city of utmost necessity” (369d), to the “feverish city” in Book II. In Book II, Glaucon had objected to the simple, unified “pig city” because it had no relishes, nothing beyond the necessary—not even sexual desire goes beyond what is economically feasible (“They will have sweet intercourse with one another, and not produce children beyond their means”—372b). Now, in Book IX, in the degeneration from oligarchy to democracy, an oligarchic father satisfies only necessary desires; he holds down other desires by force (554a); he is unable to compete for “noble objects” (555a). The son feels that this is petty, that his father has no generosity or magnificence or freedom. The son hears “boasting speeches...persuading [him] that measure and orderly expenditure are rustic and illiberal” (560c). He has a desire for relishes (559a-b). Again, with democracy as with the fall of the “pig city,” many kinds of relishes and imitators are added to the son’s life, but now there is no desire for a katharsis or purging, as there was in Book II. So the democratic man becomes overwhelmed by his possibilities, his freedom and his choices.
For this democratic man, freedom of choice depends on the fact that no particular choice is serious. No choice is serious because no choice closes off other possibilities; no choice makes him this rather than that. At his best, he is intrepid and daring—capable of both action and deliberation: He can love beauty without softness, and he “needs no lying poet” to make monuments for him; he will make his own (I am thinking of Pericles’ praise of the Athenians in the funeral oration). But at his worst, this is his attitude toward a choice: He says, “Some say it’s good, some say it’s bad—everyone has his own opinion. We won’t know until we try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll change it back. Why not? After all, it’s not written in stone.” He can experiment with anything because no choice has serious consequences; there is nothing written in stone for him. The democratic man is a soldier one day, a flute-player the next, a philosopher the next (561c). With these superficial choices, choices that don’t touch him deeply, he never actually becomes anything. For example, he doesn’t become a soldier; he becomes an imitation of a soldier. He does something for a while—he is even serious for a while—but then he turns away and forgets. He turns to another kind of life; but he is always trapped by the ordinary.
When the democratic man looks at people and tries to understand them and their choices, their justice—when he looks for some kind of brotherhood or a sameness beneath human differences—he discovers that all human differences and choices are superficial; no choice is serious. Living in a democratic city, he confronts the variety of human differences and the jumble of choices every day. He sees that people follow their strongest inclination or ruling passion as long as it is strongest, and then they change. When he looks at the cities of the world, he sees the same thing: Democratic cities have democratic laws, oligarchic cities have oligarchic laws, etc. In each case the strongest faction makes the rules and defines justice, as long as it is strongest. What universal justice does he see? What truth is hidden beneath the overwhelming variety? In each case, universally and without exception, justice is the interest of the stronger.
Thrasymachus knows this hidden truth, and he reveals the cynicism and tyranny beneath the surface. No mere “refutation in words” can succeed in dealing with what Thrasymachus says. For while Socrates may be able to tie him in knots and make him look foolish, that might only be a sign of Socrates’ superior strength and skill in arguments and thereby a sign of Socrates’ superficiality (that he accepts the “truth in speech” and ignores the truth revealed by deeds—that he is “more serious about speeches and imitations than deeds”—Socrates’ criticism of Homer, 599b). The victory would be only one more self-contradictory praising of justice; it would confirm the truth “in deeds” of what Thrasymachus says about the role of strength. Socrates’ victory would be a mere “victory in speech.” While a “city in speech,” a “pattern laid up in heaven,” might seem to be an uplifting possibility, a mere “victory in speech” for Socrates here is an ugly, fearful possibility. Glaucon and Adeimantus know this: Despite Socrates’ victory “in speech” in Book I, our souls may harbor a “secret lawlessness,” an imperviousness to speech: No speech may touch us deeply. We don’t need to know the soul’s opinion about the truth of justice. Its opinion about whether the armor should be returned or not (for example); we aren’t even sure that the “truth in speech” matters in the depths of the soul. But the soul must act—must either return the armor or not. There is no third possibility. Only an impossible experiment could help us see this truth about the soul. We would have to know what the soul would choose if it had perfect freedom and invisibility. Glaucon proposes this: We need a “ring of Gyges,” a magical freedom and invisibility for the soul, to discover the truth about the soul’s choosing.
Glaucon and Adeimantus and the democratic man himself need more protection than has been offered in the first nine books. A democratic man needs to be protected not just from making the wrong choice about “returning the armor,” for example; he needs to be protected from cynicism and superficiality. Can mimetic poetry do this? Is it “ordinary or serious” (603c)?
And not only does the democratic man need to be protected from the possibility of degeneration, philosophy also needs to be protected from this possibility. Is it “ordinary or serious?” (Most of the world thinks philosophy to be trivial, as Socrates knows.) Is philosophy only “victories in speech,” a continuation of the struggle for victory on a different playing field with words as weapons? Is it a non-serious possibility thrown onto the world’s stage by democracy and its tolerance for non-serious choices? Is philosophy only a continuation of the democratic style, a jumbled and decadent style (debate, oration, and argument; both comic and tragic) with a new content, where only the novelty of its content distracts one from its inability to see deeply into the soul? This is Socrates’ question; this is the greatest challenge to mimetic poetry and to philosophy’s “city in speech.” This is why Book X is there.
Let’s look again at the result of this third argument against imitation. What Socrates now says in criticism of mimetic poetry is a criticism of thumos and the three-part soul, and thereby it reveals difficulties in much of what was said and constructed in the first nine books: the unity of the soul and of the city, and the unity of the guiding image of the first nine books (the city is the soul “writ large”). The unity and coherence of the book is in doubt. Book X is the most compact expression of this kind of “cancellation” and turning against itself, because it contains both the most austere criticism of poetry and the myth of Er.
IV. KATHARSIS AND THE SILVER SOUL
When we read the Iliad or watch a tragedy, we sit absorbed, as if chained to a chair in a cave. Socrates says we are to leave that cave in order to see the sun and the world in its light. Education and its canceling, its “purging” (katharsis is the word Book III uses to describe education), are to take the place of poetry and its katharsis. We are to give up our Homeric, Olympian armor, even though it has somehow made us what we are.
But in this replacement of one katharsis by another, we must first ask why we are in the position of having to choose between poetry and philosophy. Why do we need any katharsis at all? What in our souls finds purification, resolution, unification in response to speeches about deeds? Socrates has criticized Homer as one who is more serious about speeches than about the deeds with which they deal. This understanding of “seriousness” makes us ask why we want to hear speeches about deeds; why do we want to hear praise of deeds? Why do Glaucon and Adeimantus want to hear the correct praise of justice from Socrates? Why does the incorrect praise bother them so much?
To answer these questions we need to look at the ‘silver’ soul (thumos), the kind of soul that Book X wants to “dry up,” not the gold or bronze soul. The Republic asks us to see the limits of this kind of soul, how it begins in the desire for relishes and ends in the acceptance of a noble lie.
How can we understand the beginning of the silver soul, the desire for relishes? At the beginning of Book II Socrates constructs a simple, unified city, a “true and healthy” city. Glaucon says that it has no relishes; it is a “city fit for pigs”; it is contemptible. What this city needs is a large dose of luxury, fever. The occupations that are added to this city when it attempts to become worthy of honor are suggestive: hunters, imitators concerned with figure and color and music, poets, rhapsodes, actors, craftsmen for feminine adornment, servants, teachers, beauticians, barbers and cooks. Imitators and poets have been added, along with cosmeticians and barbers.
The silver in our soul asserts itself and becomes visible by having a certain contempt for mere nature; it does not begin in simple greed or lust. It does not want two pieces of meat; it wants one piece with relish. It does not want two coats; it wants one coat with a gold braid on it. It does not sexually desire two women rather than one, or two men rather than one; it wants a sexual object that is “improved”: lipstick, jewelry, perfume, or a bone in the nose and tattoos—anything, it seems, as long as mere nature is gone beyond, adorned, transformed. The silver soul is willing to pervert even the apparent naturalness of erotic attraction. The silver soul is angry at the pig city and “mere nature.” It wants a kind of revenge, because the soul and its terrible beauty are invisible and unrecognized. There is no friendship in the pig city, no relation of souls; there is only an economic partnership (371e). The justice of the artisan (paying debts and telling the truth, the first definition of justice in Book I) is contemptible. “Paying debts” is an economic exchange based on bodily needs; it is not a relation of souls.
So the idea of “paying debts” must get some relish; it must be adorned and transformed by the silver soul, not just “refuted” or thrown out. “Doing good to friends and evil to enemies” adds relish to “paying debts.” This is the second definition of justice in Book I; the definition comes up when a friend gives you his weapons, then asks for them back when he has gone mad. The mere idea of “paying debts” can’t handle this situation because it is an economic definition that does not recognize “friendship.” Honor is the just recognition for this doing of good and evil (to friends and enemies) because honor is payment adorned with relish, praise (as the “good and the evil” adorn the idea of “debts”).
But there is a difficulty with honor as a kind of payment. Although honor is a reward for the silver soul, how can the soul arrange things so that honor does not become a mere payment for services rendered? If honor becomes a payment, the silver soul falls back to the level of a bronze soul. And a bronze soul can’t give honor; it can only give payment, large as that payment might be. For example, would you return to the risks of war if you were offered “seven unfired tripods, ten talents of gold, twenty shining cauldrons, twelve horses, seven women of Lesbos, twenty Trojan women, Agamemnon’s daughter in marriage and seven citadels”? Achilles rejects this offer; it is offered in the spirit of payment; Agamemnon is incapable of saying “I’m sorry—we were friends and I violated it.” (Later, when Achilles wants to re-enter battle, Agamemnon (and Odysseus) insists that he first take the payment: Achilles is desperate for battle in his rage and grief, and he is supposed to sit down, admire the presents and eat a meal. He begins to get angry again.) This payment is an insult. “Friendship” is a relation of souls that replaces the impersonality of an economic transaction.
“Friendship” and its recognition are meant to solve this problem of “honor as a payment.” But the silver soul is caught by envy, by the clash of honor and friendship: He believes in friendship and is capable of it, but honor continually tempts him to stand out alone. (Achilles says to Patroklus, when honor prevents his return to battle but allows Patroklus to enter wearing his armor, “O that you and I could storm Troy together, by ourselves,” hoping for a union of honor and friendship.)
How can the silver soul avoid this clash of honor and friendship and solve the problem of honor as a payment; the payment will become large and thereby confuse size with greatness? The silver soul can get the recognition he deserves only if he elevates another soul above himself, one who is beyond competing with him, one who is “friendly” but not a friend, one who is “objective,” one who offers nothing useful, nothing with cash value. Thus the one who gives recognition, speeches of praise, is elevated above the doer of the deeds. And the one who praises but is not a “friend” needs knowledge of what is praiseworthy—knowledge of justice, souls, and speeches. The silver soul, the doer, must elevate the one who recognizes him— the one who praises, the imitator in speech—above himself in order to recognize himself as elevated above the bronze. So only a gold soul can understand the silver, giving him the recognition in speech or song that he deserves. But now the silver soul, besides being caught on the point of difference of deeds and speeches, is caught in another clash: What kind of praise? A speech or song? Poetry or philosophy?
Now let’s look at the end of the silver soul; he begins in the desire for relishes and ends in the acceptance of a noble lie. This is the last and the highest thing the silver soul does: He takes the first definition of justice, “paying debts and telling the truth,” and now he adorns the last part, the “telling the truth” part; he decorates it in the same way he adorned “paying debts.” He doesn’t take “the truth” to be justice. Instead, he believes a lie, but it is a noble lie, a lie with relish on it. He believes that his education was a dream and that all men are brothers, having Earth as mother. He believes in the brotherhood of man despite metallic differences (gold, silver, bronze) that are of special concern to him. So when the silver soul believes the noble lie, he is not merely taken in and fooled by it; he believes it in part because it is a lie, a lie (brotherhood, friendship without its passion and particularity) that demands nobility of soul in one who would believe it. The lie is “noble” in another sense also: It ennobles the soul that believes it (brotherhood) because it takes the viciousness from his anger, his criticism of “mere nature.” The silver soul does these two things at once—he believes and he overcomes the belief—in the way that Socrates both censors Homer and quotes him at length—because the silver soul knows that the unadorned truth is not worth having.
These are the limits of the silver soul: Because he loves nature, truth, and justice only when they are adorned and transformed, he must be transformed, “purged,” given a katharsis. But we can’t merely do away with him when we purge the city, for this part of the soul binds together the other parts, reason and appetite. If we just “subtracted” him from the city, we might return to the pig city. The silver soul not only makes necessary another city, a “best” city, but it also makes possible the coming-to-be of that city or any city beyond the pig city. (The best city could not have come into being in the way taken by the pig city, simple addition without subtraction or katharsis; the standard of “usefulness” in the pig city prevents this—e.g., “To have a city we need a farmer, a carpenter, and we’ll add a philosopher.”) In particular, he makes possible the “best city” by his capacity for the kind of transformation called katharsis. For him, “subtraction” is addition and transformation.
The silver soul is not only capable of this kind of transformation and recognition, katharsis, he also demands it. But the recognition that poetry offers is, Socrates says, “a hymn to tyranny” (586b), for the songs of poetry reveal only the terrible beauty of the soul; they do not recognize its monstrosity. For example, Oedipus, at the end of the play, asks to be brought on stage after putting out his eyes. He won’t get off the stage despite Creon’s urging, and he says, “Apollo did this to me, but I put out my eyes.” This line gathers and repeats what we have felt about him throughout the play, an alternation of “He is sinned against” (Apollo does these things and Oedipus suffers them) and “He is sinning” (Oedipus is bringing this upon himself). And then Oedipus says, “Only I can bear this suffering.” The alternation of pity and fear—pity for him insofar as he suffers and fear of him insofar as he acts to bring these events upon himself—that we have felt is collected together: In claiming as his own the suffering that Apollo inflicts on him, is he active or passive? This deed, turning suffering into an action and action into a suffering, transcends the alternatives of pity and fear; Instead, Oedipus becomes an object of wonder. Whether he is right or wrong, good or evil, in what he did is no longer important. He has a greatness that goes beyond these questions of right and wrong. He is the object of our looking, our regard, in a new way, and a new kind of looking is called for. The play is a hymn to this greatness.
Since poetry grasps the greatness of Oedipus’ soul but doesn’t see its monstrosity, the play is a “hymn to tyranny.” So philosophy and its understanding of greatness (491a ff.) —not just its understanding of good and evil—must take the place of mimetic poetry and its understanding of human greatness. Somehow the Republic must take the place of the Iliad.
V. IMAGES
Now we can turn to the unity of the Republic. I promised to make or discover an image of it. Let me return to two passages I referred to at the beginning of this essay, the passages from Book X where Socrates made an image that guided his criticism of mimetic poetry:
For this same manual artisan is not only able to make all implements but also makes everything that grows naturally from the earth, and he produces all animals—the others and himself too—and, in addition to that, produces earth and heaven and gods and everything in heaven and everything in Hades under the earth. (596c)
You could fabricate them quickly in many ways and most quickly, of course, if you are willing to take a mirror and carry it around everywhere [not a glass mirror; their mirrors were sheets of polished bronze]; quickly you will make the sun and the things in the heavens; quickly, the earth; and quickly yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and everything else that was just now mentioned. (596d)
Who is this craftsman? It must be Homer. And the other question: What is that mirror? Look again at the Iliad.
So [Hephaistos] spoke, and left [Thetis] there.
He cast on the fire bronze which is weariless, and tin with it
and valuable gold, and silver.
First of all, he forged a shield that was huge and heavy,
elaborating it about, and threw around it a shining triple rim that
glittered.
He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s
water and the tireless sun, and the moon...,
and on it all the constellations that adorn the heavens....
On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men.
So what happens in the Republic is this: Socrates goes to the house of Cephalus, a prosperous manufacturer of armor, and there he forges a new shield from men with souls of gold, silver, and bronze. The Republic is that shield, that mirror, that will replace our Homeric, Olympian armor.
Could anyone really make such a shield in “deeds”? Is such a city possible? This best city is not possible in “deed” partly because it is a “pattern laid up in heaven,” something like a “Form”—something unique which can’t be imitated without distortion. To found the city, one would need to have gold separate from bronze or silver, silver separate from gold or bronze. But in so far as the best city is an image of the soul, all of the metals are present in each of us. No one could fully enter one of the classes without doing damage to the wholeness, the tri-partness, of his soul.
And even if the best city were to exist, it would degenerate (and this means that it would inevitably lead to a democracy and its problems) because of the impossible marriage number (546a), a number that Socrates constructs and the best city must solve if it is to endure without change. The impossibility of the marriage number means that the riddle of generation can’t be solved: The city can’t just continue after its founding. The city will degenerate without the founder and his ability to see the quality of our souls. But the founder cannot be “imitated;” he is not a “type;” he is original.
This inevitable degeneration means, on the one hand, that no kind of soul will be pure; all souls will be at least a bit of a mixture, a jumble. Even in the best soul there is mixed a deep secret lawlessness, as Glaucon suspected when he wished for a ring of Gyges. For Socrates says that there is some “terrible, savage, and lawless form of desire” in every man if only in dreams (572b); even the philosopher might dream of incest (571c).
On the other hand, the necessity for the presence of the founder, the original, means that the philosopher cannot just “disappear,” cannot return to looking at the sun, once he has come on the scene; he cannot disappear behind a noble lie that attempts to hide the origin of the city. (i.e., he cannot become an “ideal,” a noble lie, for the rest of human beings in the way that Homer, with the invocation of his poem, disappears into his style, leaving us with the song of a Goddess, the “noble lie” of epic poetry).
Who or what is this new shield designed to protect? What needs and can use the protection of the impossible city, a city in speech? In general, the city in speech will try to protect young gold and silver souls from being corrupted, being made cynical and vicious like Thrasymachus, by an uncritical look at the diverse opinions of the city (491a-495b). The shield will also work in the opposite direction: It will try to protect the city from the innocent savagery of unformed philosophic souls (491e) and from the corrupt savagery of the badly raised golden soul. Socrates points to this danger most clearly in the Apology, when he makes this prophecy:
For now you have done this to me because you hoped that you would be relieved from rendering an account of your lives, but I say that you will find the result far different. Those who will force you to give an account will be more numerous than before; men whom I restrained, though you knew it not; and they will be harsher. Inasmuch as they are younger, and you will be more annoyed. (39c)
This new kind of “shielding” is not equally necessary in all cities: A golden soul is not the same danger to all cities nor are all cities equally dangerous to golden souls (some cities are contemptible—496b; usually the city ignores philosophers totally). Nor is poetry the same danger to all cities. Poetry is a particular danger to a democracy because it exaggerates democracy’s tendency to tyranny and cynicism; it encourages the eros that takes over the soul with its “hymns to tyranny.” Poetry is not said to be a danger to any city other than a democracy. So the shield is designed to protect the soul and the democratic city from each other.
This connection between the new shield and the democratic city allows us to interpret one final, baffling image of Socrates, and then to look at the myth of Er. Socrates makes a strange and monstrous image of the soul in Book IX (588c), an “image of the soul in speech.” There is a man outside; inside there is a many-headed beast, a lion, and another man. In this image of the soul, which man, outside or inside, is the image and which the original? What unity does this image have, and what does it mean to make an image of man that includes two images of man, one being a reflection and purification of the other?
We can understand this image if we think of the relation of the “best city” and democracy. First, other cities may reflect more correctly than democracy particular features of the soul and particular understandings of justice, but only democracy and the “best city” have all the parts of the soul imaged in some way— for example, democracy is the only degenerate city that has philosophy (561d), even if the philosophy is not serious. And both democracy and the “best city” degenerate because of eros: A democracy succumbs to eros through the tyrannical hymns of poetry, while the “best city” cannot understand the marriage number and declines. Finally, for someone who wants to found a city or to understand human beings, a democracy is the best place to look, for there one will find all kinds of regimes and all kinds of souls on display (557d). Of all regimes, on the surface and from the outside, democracy is the most beautiful.
A democracy images the soul, but the parts are all jumbled up. It is like the “man on the outside,” in Socrates’ image of the soul. Because of that jumble, even if democracy is somehow the best city to live in, it is not the best city to have living in your soul. The “best city,” the “man inside” in Socrates’ image of the soul, is Socrates’ “pattern laid up in heaven” (592b).
So now, at the end, in the myth of Er, after the return to the criticism of poetry, Socrates can try to satisfy Glaucon and Adeimantus. When they began this long conversation, they were suspicious of those who praise justice—poetry “cancels” itself when it tries to praise justice—and they wanted to hear the correct praise from Socrates. Socrates is ready to give it to them. He says that “we haven’t yet gone through the greatest rewards for virtue” (608b), and now he will do so, with the immortality of the soul and the myth of Er. But first he checks with Glaucon: “Will you, then, stand for me saying about [the just man] what you yourself said about the unjust?” (613d). Now justice will get back what the argument owes it, a speech of praise; the argument is now able to “pay its debts and tell the truth”; it can even “do good to friends” while harming no one. Glaucon and Adeimantus are able to hear a kind of poetry praising justice without being pulled in two directions by it.
The myth of Er has a harmony of philosophy and myth, of thumos and mind, but the harmony is not complete or “simple.” Immortality has been connected to the soul by the “desire to know” and the unity of soul that this desire indicates. But the myth of Er cannot be about this simplicity or this immortality; it cannot be an “uplifting” presentation of philosophy, an ideal harmony of knowledge and action, deeds and speeches, where poetry takes the place of philosophy and offers “patterns laid up in heaven.” The myth emphasizes the soul and its choices, its doings and sufferings, as all myths and mimetic images must. And so the myth introduces faction into the soul, because there is faction in the soul whenever it comes to deeds, choices (603d). The myth, because it is a myth, talks about something that may be deeper than knowing, a choice. And thereby the myth is about another kind of immortality.
This other kind of immortality is a sign and expression of the soul’s ambiguity, its monstrosity, its “un-naturalness.” The soul’s transcendence is not unambiguously a heavenly possibility. And so there is another argument for the soul’s immortality in Book X (609a ff.), given just before the argument about the soul’s simplicity. The soul is the only thing in nature that is not destroyed by its “specific evil,” injustice (610e). So the soul has a strength beyond the natural, a greatness beneath the right and wrong of its ordinary choices, in its capacity to survive injustice and evil.
The myth is another look at the range of human possibilities and the spectacle of choice, a look that complements and echoes the first presentation of that spectacle, the democratic man and his possibilities. In the myth, however, unlike democratic life, choice doesn’t occur in the ordinary course of our lives. Choice takes place in an interval between the time of rewards and the time of ordinary choices, between a time of immortality (relief from the burden of choosing) and the time of mortal life (the time of confusing choices). In this odd interval between two kinds of life, the soul come to a place where all kinds of lives are scattered about, with no rank or order, in a democratic jumble. And then the soul is asked to choose. The soul is alone—no teachers, no parents, no law-givers, no poets, no philosophers. The soul has put on the ring of Gyges.
The first man to choose (619b) was a virtuous man in his previous life. He comes from heaven to make his choice, but he chooses from habit, not “philosophy.” He chooses a tyranny that involves eating his children. Then he complains about fate, and he blames everything but himself. He probably says “I didn’t mean it,” and he wishes that this choice were an ordinary choice, one that he could take back. But—and here we start to see the soul’s monstrosity—he doesn’t blame himself. When he blames circumstances, what he is saying is, “If the same circumstances came up, I would do the same thing again.” Despite his tragic lamentation, he is accepting his choice and his suffering. (“Apollo did this to me, but I put out my eyes. Only I can bear this suffering.”) There is something not serious about his tragic suffering; there is acceptance and even a kind of joy (“I would do it again, in the same circumstances”).
The last one to choose is Odysseus. There aren’t many lives left, but he makes a good choice because he has been cured of his love of honor, a cure in which philosophy was not needed. (The goal of philosophy is such a cure—521a, 540b, 592a.) The myth again points to a choice that might be deeper than knowledge. In the way that Socrates has said that the soul may include some “terrible, savage lawlessness” (572b), the soul may also have some “deep, secret attraction” to virtue. After all, Glaucon and Adeimantus in Book I say that they choose justice over injustice (347e), but they do not choose from knowledge or philosophy; they are very aware of the lack of a ground for their choice. There is something about their nature that strikes Socrates with wonder (368a).
The choice in the myth is a special kind of choice. It is very serious, because it determines all our other choices: Ordinary choices, the choices that we make in the course of our ordinary, mortal lives, are imitations of this one deep choice. We become what we choose here. This choice is always there, always made again and again, but it is somehow hidden and forgotten and covered by our ordinary choices. The danger for us that this kind of choice reveals is not so much that we will make the wrong choice—the first man to choose in the myth of Er, who chose tyranny, once before had made a good choice, a life of virtue and decency that took him to heaven, but he chose a life without “philosophy.” (Glaucon and Adeimantus may have made this very choice.) The danger is that we will choose superficially, out of habit or honor. Our love for these images of glorious choice might betray us.
The myth ends with the waters of Lethe and forgetting; the deep choice and its moment are overcome by forgetting, the triumph of the ordinary over the serious. And thereby the myth points to something that is more mysteriousness than knowing: forgetting, Lethe, and ordinariness. Socrates says that we should spend our lives trying to be capable of making that special choice, trying to be “serious” and awake. Only philosophy and its peculiar call to a kind of human greatness can save us from superficiality, can hold together thumos and nous, poetry and thinking, the transcendence of the soul in its beauty and its monstrosity. This impossible shield holds apart, and binds together, the democratic city and the “best city”; it gives the soul a “pattern laid up in heaven” and allows philosophy to “come on the scene,” stepping out of a mythical past and artfully arranging its own entrance. The Republic tries to hold together and see in one glance the desire for greatness and the love of truth.