Next,
we will consider passages in Plato that have weighed heavily in our
reconstruction of Greek culture and education during the transition
from oral poetry to written philosophy. In the dialogues,
Socrates leads a sustained and merciless attack against the poets
with Homer and Simonides (Rep. 331d-335e; Prt. 316d,
339a-347a; Hppr. 228c; Ltr. II. 311a) the targets most
frequently mentioned by name. For instance, in Books II and
III of the Republic, Socrates considers the subject of
diction and points out that Homer and "all the other poets
effect their narration through imitation" (Rep. 393c).
The poets are criticized for producing deceptive images and for not
telling their tales in the prescribed patterns (379a; 398b).
In the middle of the dialogue, images are relegated to the lowest
level of the diagram of the divided line. In Book X, the poets
are said to be imitators who produce without knowledge of the truth
(598a). Deceived by their own images, they are unable to
perceive them as "three removes from reality" (598b),
"for it is phantoms, not realities, that they produce"
(599a). Their imitations, Socrates says, cast a spell
(601b) over the audience that charms and entertains them while
offering no educational benefit (608). Near the end of the
dialogue, he looks back on the argument and decides to banish the
poets from the ideal republic. They will not be allowed to
return from exile, he proclaims, until a defence is offered in
prose, showing that poetry is not just delightful but beneficial to
the order of the state (607d).[1]
Through
the occurrences of words we would translate as art (τέχvη),
imitation (μίμησις), images (είδωλα;
είκόvες), imagination (είκασία),
and phantasy (φαvτ
σία), these statements in the Republic have
been linked in the history of interpretation to passages in other
dialogues, particularly the Sophist (235e; 265-268d), the Philebus
(38a-48d), the Timaeus (22a-37d) and the Theaetetus
(152c-160c and 164d-165b)[2].
These
terms recur again in the Laws (811-818), where the entire preceding
discourse is said to be the "kind of poem" that is the
most suitable for teaching the young. In fact, in determining
what should be taught, the dialogues themselves, we are told, are
the standard against which all other compositions - whether poetry,
prose or even unwritten discourses - are to be measured. This
passage emphasizes that the Platonic writings should serve as the
model for the kinds of compositions that will be committed to
writing (811d). Therefore, when the tragic poets stand before
the judge and the Minister of Education and ask if they can be
readmitted and their poetry with them (817a-d), they are
invited to present their compositions for comparison with the
dialogues, and they are told that they will be allowed to return
only if their works are the same, or better.[3]
[1]Deanne
Bogdan, "Instruction and Delight: Northrop Frye and the
Educational Value of Literature" (Ph.D. diss., University
of Toronto, 1980); "Censorship of Literature Texts and
Plato's Banishment of the Poets," Interchange: On
Education, 14, No. 3: 1-16, 1983; Re-Educating the
Imagination: Toward a Poetics, Politics, and Pedagogy of
Literary Engagement (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook/Heinemann
Inc., 1992); John Bussanich, "Review of Julias A. Elias's
Plato's Defense of Poetry," Ancient Philosophy, Vol.
6 (1986): 211-215; Julias Elias, Plato's Defense of Poetry
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1984); A.S.
Ferguson, "Plato and the Poet's Eidola," Philosophical
Essays Presented to John Watson (Kingston: Queens University
Press, 1922); William Chase Greene, "Plato's View of
Poetry," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology,
edited by a committee of the classical instructors of Harvard
University (London: Cambridge University Press, Harvard
University Press and Oxford University Press, 1918), pp. 1-75;
Charles L. Griswold Jr., "The Ideas and Criticism of Poetry
in Plato's Republic, Book 10," Journal of the History of
Philosophy, Vol. 19 (1981): 135-150; J. Hartland-Swann,
"Plato as Poet: A Critical Interpretation," Philosophy,
26 (1951): 3-18; Philip H. Hwang, "Poetry in Plato's
Republic," Philosophical Quarterly (1991): 29-37;
Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Plato's Critique
of the Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Murray
Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 1956); Penelope Murray,
"Poetic Inspiration in Early Greece," The Journal
of Hellenic Studies, Vol. CI (1981): 87-100; A. Nehamas,
"Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10," eds.,
J. Moravcsik and P. Tempko, Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the
Arts (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982); Morriss
Henry Partee, Plato's Poetics (Salt Lake City: University
of Utah Press, 1981); Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel Between
Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988); Hermann Wiegman, trans. by
Henry W. Johnstone, Jr. "Plato's Critique of the Poets and
the Misunderstanding of his Epistemological Argumentation,"
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1990): 109-124.
[2]See
especially Murray W. Bundy, "Plato's View of the
Imagination," Studies in Philology, 19 (1922):
362-403; idem, "The Theory of Imagination in Classical and
Medieval Thought," University of Illinois Studies in
Language and Literature, 12 (1927):2-3.; also Gerard Watson,
Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University
Press, 1988).
[3]For
one of the few discussions of this passage in the Laws, see
Elizabeth Asmis, "Plato On Poetic Creativity," The
Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed., Richard Kraut (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 1992), pp. 338-364.
