The Poet: Public Enemy Number One?

The Plato vs. Aristotle Cage Match (part 1), and The Stack of the Week

(It’s more interesting than Zuckerberg vs. Musk.)

Actual photo of Plato and Aristotle wrestling. That’s why it looks so old. Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Reading

Tara Penry

’s excellent post last week on her Substack, Enchanted in America, reminded me that Plato's wrestling metaphors for our struggles with the text are still with us. Plato was a wrestler and was concerned about physical as well as intellectual education, and so we still "wrestle" with a text. In my literary criticism course syllabus, I called our first unit "Mimesis (Grappling with Plato)" without remembering this Platonic legacy, and so I suppose that I got lucky, since grapple is an acceptable synonym for wrestle.

So, why must we wrestle with Plato? Well, if we are poets or allies of poets, then he would banish us, or at least our poetry, from the ideal republic. Why? Many reasons: for one thing, poetry is powerful. It can make us feel things. It can persuade us. But it does so by appealing to the lower parts of the soul (emotion, desire) rather than to our reason.

Furthermore (and this is where it gets complicated), poetry takes us further away from truth rather than closer to it. According to Plato, the world that we perceive around us is simply an imperfect reflection or imitation of an ideal world, or a world of forms. Since for Plato, poetry is a mimetic or imitative art, it is simply an imperfect imitation of what is already an imperfect imitation of the ideal, and, therefore, it cannot help us to find truth. It is only through reason that we may approach truth, and for that we need the philosopher rather than the poet.

Also, by the way, poets are liars. They tell us about all of these things that never really happened, and, therefore, they deceive us. In particular, they tell us lies about God. Plato’s Socrates focuses on these alleged lies in Book II of The Republic, as he reduces his interlocutor, Glaucon, who had put up a spirited (though misguided) argument in favor of injustice earlier, to a babbling yes man. (In case you are not familiar to with Plato’s dialogues, I should explain that Plato uses Socrates as his spokesperson; Plato himself does not appear as a character in the dialogues.)

Actual photo of Glaucon giving the thumbs-up to Socrates, Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

Here is a crucial exchange in the dialogue, translated by Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott:

[Socrates:] The good we receive we must attribute to god alone; for the causes of evil we must look elsewhere.

[Glaucon:] I think what you say is true.

[Socrates:] Then we cannot countenance the follies and errors in the poets’ descriptions of the gods.

Socrates then goes on to provide a famous example from the final book of the Iliad:

Homer, for instance, says: “Two urns stand on the palace floor of Zeus / filled with destinies he allots, / one containing good things and the other evil.” He who receives from Zeus both kinds “chances upon evil one day and good the next.” But when Zeus does not blend the lots and instead gives a man unmixed evil, “Hunger drives him, a wanderer everywhere on earth.” So we must not have it said that “good and evil are alike bestowed by Zeus.”

The passage that Socrates is quoting is perhaps the most emotionally powerful moment in the Homeric poem, but he removes it from its context. First of all, it is not “Homer” as narrator who is saying these things, but Achilles speaking to Priam, the King of Troy. Priam has come to Achilles’s tent to beg for the body of his dead son, Hector, whom Achilles has killed. Inspired by his rage over the death of his friend Patroclus, Achilles defeats Hector in combat and then drags the lifeless body around the walls of Troy.

In what one would expect to be an encounter filled with acrimony and accusation, Achilles and Priam share a moment of deep empathy. Hector was a good and honorable man, and Achilles recognizes this, but bad things happen to good people. This is what Achilles is telling Priam in the passage quoted by Socrates: something bad happened to Hector, but it wasn’t his fault. It was, rather, his fate. We have both lost loved ones who didn’t deserve to die: I have lost Patroclus, and you have lost Hector.

It is a deeply human moment, one which transcends time and the narrative context in order to speak to the central tragedy of the human experience. The fact that the moment still resonates with readers thousands of years later demonstrates that this is not really about Zeus; it’s about us and the reality of our lives—and our mortality.

Plato has intentionally missed the point. I say it’s intentional, because he is well aware that poetry can signify on various levels beyond the literal, but he doesn’t think that people, and especially young people, are smart enough to understand this. Socrates says as much earlier in Book II: “Young minds are not able to discriminate between what is allegorical and what is literal. At that age, whatever their minds absorb is likely to become fixed and unalterable. This may be the most important reason why tales for the very young should epitomize the fairest thoughts of virtue.”

Furthermore, Plato famously uses allegory himself in Book VII. “The Allegory of the Cave,” which is meant to signify the theory of ideal forms, is certainly more obscure and difficult to interpret for the first-time reader than the passage that Socrates quotes from the Iliad, but Plato would counter that his allegory is meant for seasoned, educated readers, who are discerning enough to interpret these things. (And, after all, he has Socrates there to explain things in case his dense interlocutors don’t catch on.)

The Cave Allegory is crucial, however, because it sets things up for the notorious, categorical rejection of poetry in Book X. Once again, if we accept a world of ideal forms, then mimesis, Socrates argues, is a mere distorted image of the idea. Since poetry, like painting, is a mimetic art, it can never serve truth. Furthermore, both painting and poetry are useless. Can you sleep on a painting of a bed? If you need a new bed, would you hire a painter or a carpenter? If you need a general to lead your army, would you hire the war poet Homer or a general with battlefield experience?

Let’s set aside the fact that Plato is once again intentionally misreading things. These are not the claims of art, and he is well aware of this. No painter ever suggested that anyone might use his picture as an actual bed for sleeping.

Actual photo of viewers contemplating whether or not to sleep on Van Gogh’s bed. Photo by Jean Carlo Emer on Unsplash

But to give Plato credit, I must add that he concludes his attack on the poets by inviting us to continue the debate—sort of. Socrates recognizes the charms of poetry and claims that “we would certainly offer her partisans—not poets themselves but those who love poetry—an opportunity to plead her case in prose without meter and to argue that poetry is not only delightful but also a blessing to the life of men and well-governed cities.” You see what he did there? He excludes the poets themselves from defending their art, and he forbids the use of their art itself in this defense. Any rejoinder, any challenge must take place on Socrates’s terms. We must fight with Plato’s weapons: reason and philosophical prose.

Very well. We can handle it. After all, we have Plato’s own student, Aristotle, in our corner. He will respond in part two next week.

The Stack of the Week

This week’s stack has already appeared at the beginning of today’s post: Enchanted in America by

Tara Penry

. Tara’s pinned post, “A Word before the Curtain Rises,” brilliantly explains what her newsletter does better than I ever could. In it, she writes:

By “enchantment,” I mean a state of feeling so exalted that it makes the edges of identity go fuzzy. In this condition, one feels—at least briefly—unusually connected to—something or someone. At the ocean’s edge, one person feels strangely merged with other liquids and solids. At a certain point in a song, a chant, or a game, someone else senses that the choir, the band, the cast, the team, the crowd, or the family is the primary organism. Participants become individually smaller and yet paradoxically enlarged. We are not all susceptible to the same charms, but when we give ourselves up to enchantment, we serve up a little of our separateness, too.

In search of enchantment, she plumbs the depths of the poetry and prose of writers she admires, and—I hasten to add—provides enchantment through her own marvelous writing as well. She goes on to ask questions that those of you who have been reading PCF will know are near and dear to my heart: “Is enchantment-literacy as important as ‘critical’ literacy? Does enchantment offer a key to the differentiation of the humanities from other branches of knowledge?” I will be asking these questions as well in other contexts in the Classroom Journal over the next few weeks, as we consider the sublime in literature and we read Longinus, Burke, Sidney, and others (or at least we’ll get to all of that in class; it may be too much to cover all of it for the newsletter).

So yes, please check out Tara’s stack:

That’s all for today. I’ll be back on Friday with the weekly roundup of reading and listening for paid subscribers, and I’ll be back next week with Big Papi Aristotle.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Actual photo of Plato’s typewriter. Glaucon gave him the sunflowers. Photo by Joyce Hankins on Unsplash