Other dialogues by Plato, such as Meno or Phaedrus seem to value more highly the fact that poetry is a form of divine madness. But these views are fragmentary, and Plato's main later pronouncements in the Republic and the Laws present us with a view of literature which is in the main negative. It is significant that both dialogues have a dominant social and politic concern: they are the blueprints for ideal communities.
In the Republic, Plato discusses the role of poets in his perfect commonwhealth in several places, above all in books II, III and X.
o Book II deals with the contents of educative literature. They can be either good or bad. Those erroneous tales about gods and heroes carrying out revenge, quarreling, showing disrespect towards parents, etc., must be censored. "The founders of a state ought to know the general forms in which poets cast their tales and the limits which must be observed by them." The traditional tales transmitted by Homer contain false ideas about the gods: divine beings are supposed to assume several shapes, and God is supposed to be the cause of all things, including evil. This is untrue for Plato's spokesman Socrates. God is essentially good, and is not the cause of evil in the universe. All these tales must be forbidden.
o Book III continues this discussion. The stories about Hades must portray it as a delightful place, and not as a terrible one, so as to obliterate fear of death in the warriors. The more poetical false stories are, the more harmful. The poets will no longer have the privilege of lying: it will be restricted to the rulers themselves, whenever public good demands it. "And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender laxity of morals among the young" (Republic 27). But the tales which tell of virtue, endurance, heroism, courage, etc., are to be admitted. So much, Plato says, for the content of the tales.
As for the style : "All mythology is a narration of events, either past, present or to come . . . . And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of the two" (Republic 27). That is, the poet may speak in his own voice (simple narration) or he may speak in the voice of a character (imitation, mimesis). This is a different sense of mimesis from the one we found in Ion. Tragedy and comedy are wholly imitative, in dithyramb and other genres the poet is the sole speaker, "and the combination of both is found in epic, and in several other styles of poetry" (Republic 28). We may notice that this is the first theoretical definition of literary genres on a formal basis. But it is more than that: it is also the first theoretical approach to the problem of narrative voice. We may as well point out that "narration" is to be taken in the more general sense of "enunciation"; it is obvious that this classification accounts for other genres apart from narrative. The diagram in the following page reflects Plato's classification of narrative modes and genres.
Figure 5
Three types of narration:
(diégesis)
1) Simple narration
(haplé diégesis)
2) Imitative narration
(mimesis)
3) Mixed narration
Dithyramb Epic, etc. Tragedy, comedy
Human nature, according to Plato, is incapable of imitating many things well; there is a need of specialization. That may be one reason why poets are either tragedians, or comedians, or epic poets. In any case, imitative genres are dangerous because imitations "at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice and mind" (Republic 29). Many of the themes the poet will be dealing with will be unworthy, and imitation of them would be below a reasonable man. Therefore, only one narrative mode is decent when dealing with unworthy themes , "unless in jest." Only the imitation of good men acting wisely is allowed. In general, the ideal poet will have a definite style: "His style will be both imitative and narrative; but there will be, in a long story, only a small proportion of the former" (Republic 29).
All these qualifications would seem to give more latitude to poetry than many interpretations of Plato would allow. However, Plato has indeed divided poetry into good or bad and poets into beneficial or pernicious:
And therefore, when one of those pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sacred, marvellous, and delightful being; but we must also inform him that in our state such as him are not permitted to exist: the law will not allow them. And so, when we have anointed him with myrrh and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. (Republic 30)
The form of the words in a poem has already been determined, as the content before it. But there is more in a poem than words. According to Plato, there are three parts in a song: words, melody, and rhythm. We see that in the Republic Plato has gone beyond Ion in that he no longer makes poets responsible for their raw material only: he also discusses questions of style, of the shape that the poets must give to that material. However, he does not grasp all the implications of form in a work of art, and this is a serious shortcoming of his theory even at this point.
So, words, melody and rhythm are the three aspects of a poem or song. Rhythm is what we call metre, accent and quantity Melody is music, which is taken into account by Plato because lyrical poetry was sung in ancient Greece. Plato gives a careless account of the rhythms used in his time, saying that it is better to leave such things to the poets. He applies to music and rhythm criteria similar to those used in dealing with words. Those harmonics and rhythms expressive of sorrow or indolence must be banned. In Plato's view, therefore, harmony has ethical effects on the soul. This is an heritage of earlier Pythagorean doctrines.
Music and literature, therefore, are not banned by Plato, although some specific kinds of melodies and subjects are. On the contrary, music and literature have an important role to play in education. They educate the soul before reason can start to act: so much greater the need of their having the right effect.
o Book VI of the Republic presents us with an ascending scale of types of knowledge: eikasia (sensory imaging, knowledge of that which can be imitated); pistis (a kind of faith in the permanence of things beyond the changing stream of phenomena); dianoia (discursive understanding of mathematical figures); noesis (intuitive and true knowledge of permanent beings, ideas). In the light of previous discussion, the poet would seem to be restricted to eikasia.
o In Book X we find again the concept of mimesis or imitation. It is different from that used in Book III, which was written several years before. here imitation has metaphysical implications, and is used as a pejorative term. Plato's definition of imitation runs as follows: Artificers make things following the Idea as a model: we can likewise make images of all particular things moving a mirror around. So, we have a scale going down from the Idea, through the things in the world, to images of those things reproduced by artificial means. The scale goes from God, through the artificer, to the artist (painter, tragic poet, etc.). "And so, if the tragic poet is an imitator, he too is thrice removed from the [philosopher] king and from the truth, and so are all other imitators" (Republic 35). To these notions we should add the cosmological variety of mimesis described in Timaeus : a lesser divinity or demiurge (that is, artisan) gave shape to the chaos of matter and created the universe taking the eternal ideas as his models. Figure 6 overleaf shows these different kinds of mimesis.
Although the dotted line is implied in Plato's discussion, is not taken into account by his theory. This is one of the many flaws in the whole reasoning-it would imply that the artist need not be a third degree, but only a second degree imitator. Besides, this scheme lacks integration with Plato's theory of divine madness as developed in Ion. Here there is no direct relation whatsoever between the poet and the divine realm of ideas.
Figure 6
Ideas
Demiurge
(Cosmical mimesis)
Natural beings Artificer
(Technical mimesis)
Artificial objects
Artist
(Artistic mimesis)
Artistic imitations
Through speech Through other media
(painting, gestures, etc).
Simple Imitative
narration narration
One further problem concerning mimesis arises with the issue of fantasy. Are we to understand that artistic mimesis can only be an imitation of objects which exist in fact? There would be no place then for creative imagination-which is in fact a concept completely foreign to Platonic thought. Plato does, however, account for both kinds of imitation. In the Sophist , Plato draws a distinction between the art of making likenesses of actual things (icastic mimesis) and the art of making images of fantastic objects or beings (fantastic mimesis). He concludes, as might be expected, that this art of the fantastic is unworthy and indeed harmful. This is another vital blow dealt by Plato to any elements in literature that we might want to consider artistic, and even to the legitimacy of fiction as a poetic activity. It is perfectly coherent however with his rejection of perspectivism, with his notion of painting as the imitation of appearances and with his denial of a real knowledge of any craft to the poet. Real things are for Plato better than the fantastic, and better than their own images.
"The imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates" (Republic 37; cf. Ion ). He is not guided by reason, but by appearance, and so his is an unhealthy aim. The reasonable response to things of fortune does not lend itself to imitation; crowds are inclined to the imitations of irrational, useless and cowardly impulses. A completely virtuous life, Plato seems to say, would not be a fit subject for a tragedy or a comedy, and this does not say much in favor of tragedies or comedies.
There is no cathartic theory of art in Plato, as there will be in Aristotle. Instead, we find an anti-cathartic pronouncement. Sorrow repressed in ourselves breaks loose when as spectators we sympathise with another's misfortune. This is not a good thing for Plato: it is habit-forming and contagious. It weakens the soul instead of fortifying it. The same happens with all other passions induced by art. It could be said that, for Plato, art severs thought from the emotions and breaks them loose. There is no intellectual element in the effect of art on the spectator, just as there was no intellectual element in the inspiration of the poet. Later, we shall see that Aristotle's theory of catharsis has opposite implications.
As we have said before, this theory of Plato's does not mean that all art has pernicious effects. If the passions aroused by it are positive, art is beneficial, and this accounts for Plato's tolerance of some kinds of poetry: "hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our state" (Republic 40). Plato justifies this severe treatment with an allusion to an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. He calls those defenders of poetry who are not themselves poets to prove "that there is a use in poetry as well as a delight" (Republic 40).
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry is also the quarrel between the sophists and the philosophers in Plato's time, the quarrel between rhetoric and logic in the Renaissance, and the quarrel today between the Arts and the Sciences. It seems that the only possible agreement is to be found with a scientific account of poetry, or of literature in general. The basis for such an account was already set by Aristotle's Poetics .
In a later dialogue, the Laws , Plato brings forward similar arguments on the subject of poetry to those of the Republic. He sets as an example the poets of Egypt, who are subservient to the aims of the state. Plato, who is about eighty by the time he writes the Laws , selects old men as the most discerning public (other sections of the public listed by Plato include children, older children, young men, women, and people in general). Pleasure, he says, ought not to be the basis of the value judgments given by discerning judges. However, pleasure has a role in the evaluation of poetry, since pleasurable learning is most adequate when teaching to children by means of poetry. Plato insists again on the need of a censorship on literature.
We may conclude that Plato, like many others after him, including Tolstoy and many Marxist critics, has found something greater than art, and art has to be subordinated to this something. In his case, it is the welfare of the soul and the state. But in general, anyone who believes to have found Truth with a capital T will agree to some extent with Plato's views on art. Whether we support or dislike this view, the role of Plato as a literary critic is an outstanding one. He raises or develops in an important way many of the topics that all later critical theories will have to deal with: the social role of the artist, the psychological effects of art, the formal grounds for a classification of literary genres, the debate on whether art is the product of technique or inspiration, the analogies between the different arts . . . The Platonic view of art can be regarded as one of two main perspectives on art, the other being the Aristotelian one.