Monday
Delving into Plato’s suspicion of poetry for my book project (Does Literature Make Us Better People?) recently has me thinking of the conspiracy theories that are driving rightwing crazies. Liberals like me gaze astonished as QAnon believers talk about cannibalistic, pedophile Democrats stealing the election, but Plato long ago warned about the power of stories to circumvent rational thought and undermine good governance. Current political developments prompt me to at least revisit—if not to accept—Plato’s proposal that poets be banished from his ideal republic.
Before delving into the philosopher, however, here’s what Haruki Murakami says about conspiracy believers in 1Q84, a novel that explore alternative realities and a disturbing religious cult. (The title echoes George Orwell’s 1984.) A wealthy dowager who runs a home for battered women, speaking about how this cult rapes little girls, makes an observation that explains the relative success of QAnon, Trump, and others of their ilk:
People have been repeating the same kinds of fraud throughout the world since the beginning of time, using the same old tricks, and still these despicable fakes continue to thrive. That is because most people believe not so much in truth as in things they wish were the truth. Their eyes may be wide open, but they don’t see a thing. Tricking them is as easy as twisting a baby’s arm.
Trickery is all the more powerful when cast as a story. Jonathan Gottshall, in his book The Story Telling Animal: How Stories Makes Us Human, talks about how the ready availability of stories is creating social havoc:
There’s an analogy to be made between our craving for story and our craving for food. A tendency to overeat served our ancestors well when food shortages were a predictable part of life. But now that we modern desk jockeys are awash in cheap grease and corn syrup, overeating is more likely to fatten us up and kill us young. Likewise, it could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where books, MP3 players, TVs, and iPhones make story omnipresent—and where we have, in romance novels and television shows such as Jersey Shore, something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies.
Gottschall concludes
I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic.”
This isn’t a totally modern phenomenon. Cervantes’s famous protagonist, of course, gets lost in a world of stories and finds himself unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey warns about her heroine Catherine Morland losing perspective from her immersion in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic thrillers. While Catherine doesn’t take a gun and go searching for a Hillary Clinton child trafficking ring in the basement of a local pizza establishment, her hold on reality has become tenuous. Fortunately for her, she has reality-grounded Henry Tilney to set her right.
But what if, not only Radcliffe novels, but Facebook posts, radio shock jocks, and Fox News were all shouting the same nonsense. Are we confident that Catherine would not conclude, at some point, that she should engage in a Regency-period equivalent of storming the U.S. Capitol?
Which brings us back to Plato. It has long been a mystery why this most poetic of philosophers should have such a deep suspicion of poetry. The Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney, finding poetry under attack by a Plato-citing Puritan, writes in his Defense of Poesie,
[M]y burthen is great, that Plato’s name is laid upon me, whom, I must confess, of all philosophers I have ever esteemed most worthy of reverence; and with good reason, since of all philosophers he is the most poetical.
Sidney goes on to say that, if Plato “will defile the fountain out of which his flowing streams have proceeded,” then he must be examined closely, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks.
My conclusion is this: If Plato wants to banish poets from his republic, it’s because of his passion for poetry, not the opposite. Anything that has this much power over him, he figures, must be handled the way one handles a wild lion. Perhaps he can manage things okay, but can other people?
Plato’s love for poetry, especially Homer, is particularly evident in the final book of The Republic, Plato’s extended reflection on the elements needed for a perfect society. After declaring that “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers,” Plato follows up,
[A]lthough I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on my lips, for he is the great captain and teacher of the whole of that charming tragic company; but a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out.
Plato explains that, while people in other professions know their specialties first-hand, “poetical imitations”—or fictional representations—are second hand. We go to a statesman, not Homer, to lead our country, and we go to a general, not Homer, to conduct a battle. Plato here is like those parents who insist that their college-age children major in something practical rather than (shudder!) the arts.
Yet for all the ways that he denigrates Homer and the great tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides), Plato keeps referring to their power. For instance, there’s this:
The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and smiting his breast—the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most.
Plato contrasts two possible responses to this: the manly rational response (good) and the womanly emotional response (bad). Real men, he essentially says, don’t cry. Oh, and they also philosophize:
But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality—we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.
We come to realize that what Plato most fears is passion. If we haven’t sufficiently trained our “reason,” we will give way to “weeping and lamentation”:
If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation, and that this feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is satisfied and delighted by the poets;—the better nature in each of us, not having been sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another’s; and the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in praising and pitying anyone who comes telling him what a good man he is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem too? …And so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of the misfortunes of others is with difficulty repressed in our own.
If you allow poets to guide you, Plato warns, you will let “pleasure and pain,” not “law and the reason of mankind” rule your lives:
[W]e are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.
Watch out for that honeyed muse!
Socrates refers then to the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” which is essentially a quarrel between reason and emotion. But since (as Plato sees it) philosophical reason is the way to truth, then poets must be banished—not in spite of our love for them but because of our love for them. We must cut them out of our lives the way we give up a cherished lover who is not good for us:
If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we after the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle.
Finally, to clinch his argument, Socrates puts love of poetry in the same category as love of money and power:
[W]ill anyone be profited if under the influence of honor or money or power, aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue? [my emphasis]
Recall that his discussion began with what we can now call the honeyed call of conspiracy theories. Where I—and for that matter Aristotle—diverge from Plato is calling for Reason and Passion, not Reason or Passion. In my view, the greatest literature (including Homer and the great tragedians) gives us full scope to exercise both our rational and our emotional side.
But I appreciate Plato’s warning because there is plenty of stories out there that invite us to set aside critical thinking and immerse ourselves in an emotional bath. Plato responds to literature at such a gut level that he is more aware of the dangers than those who feel less deeply. Thus we literature lovers must take him seriously, even as we voice our disagreements.
