The Ironic Poet: Socrates’ Account of Poetry in Books II, III, and X of The Republic
After Socrates responds to Thrasymachus’ outburst with a self-effacing comment in Book I, Thrasymachus replies, “Here is that habitual irony of Socrates.”(337a) Although Thrasymachus means that Socrates will claim that he knows nothing even though he will rhetorically prove that he is more clever than others around him, one can extend Socrates’ mode of dialectic and The Republic itself as essentially ironic, i.e., one cannot take what Socrates says literally, and, conversely, it is dangerous to take what Socrates says out of context. This awareness of Socratic irony is especially true upon considering Socrates’ account of poetry in Books II, III, and X.
In Books II and III, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus have constructed their Beautiful City, which is the purged Feverish City, and are now discussing the education of the warriors, the guardians of the Beautiful City; included in the warrior education is a special, reformed type of poetry. Scholar Philip H. Hwang states that Socrates has a “contempt for poetry” which colours the entire dialogue. Hwang suggests that:
Perhaps we could understand better Socrates contempt for poetry if we consider that it is, after all, the poet Aristophanes, who ridiculed Socrates in the Clouds and paved the way for his later official accusation, namely, teaching atheism and corrupting young men. (Hwang, “Poetry in Plato’s Republic” 30)
With this historical fact in mind, Hwang takes Socrates’ poetic criticism and theory literally, choosing to ignore the context – the warrior education in the Beautiful City – in which Socrates speaks and to whom he speaks. Similarly, Scholar Richard Lewis Nettleship points out that “Plato’s views are developed by antagonism” (Nettleship, Lectures on Plato’s Republic, 82), but, unlike Hwang who forgets the context of the discussion on poetry, Nettleship continues:
[Plato’s] business in this dialogue is not to write poems but to found a state, and that accordingly he is only concerned to lay down general principles for poets to observe. It is a natural result of this that his criticism should to a great extent seem merely negative. (Nettleship, 82)
What Nettleship reminds the reader, which Hwang ignores, is that Socrates is founding a city and shaping a highly improbable class of warriors. As Allan Bloom points out, “The poets are taken most seriously as the makers of the horizon which constitutes the limit of men’s desires and aspiration” (Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 351). As a founder of a city, Socrates sees himself as the maker of citizens and the poets as tools for the formation of the warrior class as good, courageous citizens.
The kind of poetry which will form good, courageous citizens – i.e., the warrior class – are simplistic, patriotic, pious, non-imitative poetry. Any poetry which does not fit this authoritative prescription, like “[m]ost of those they now tell must be thrown out.” (377c). In Book II, Socrates speaks about the content of this sort of poetry by contrasting it with the unauthorized variety. The unauthorized variety give “a bad representation of what gods and heroes are like” (377e) because the god of the Beautiful City must be “altogether simple and true in deed and speech, and he doesn’t himself change or deceive others by illusions, speeches, or the sending of signs either in waking or dreaming.” (382e) Since poetry shape souls, bad representations – which Socrates call “real lies” (382c) -- of gods warring amongst themselves, lying to otheers, and changing shape, which Socrates calls a “lie to the soul” (381b), are harmful for the formation of good, simple, pious, truth-telling warriors. As Socrates says to Adeimantus, the poetry-loving Greek:
When someone says such things about gods, we’ll be harsh and not provide a chorus; and we’ll not let the teachers use them for the education of the young, if our guardians are going to be god-revering and divine insofar as a human being can possibly be. (382c)
One needs to be aware of the “if our guardians” in the above passage and not take this passage out of context. Socrates has convinced Adeimantus to see poetry objectively as a tool of the rulers –- i.e. themselves – by picking apart and choosing which poetry to give to the guardians and which to censor. As seen in the action depicted in Book II – and in Book III -- the only way Socrates and Adeimantus are able to discriminate between the authorized and unauthorized poetry is to know all of poetry, the authorized and unauthorized, an act of discrimination which Socrates and Adeimantus do not allow for the warriors in speech but ironically do allow themselves in action (the dialectic)as the founders/legislators of the Beautiful City and as interlocutors in a dialectic with Socrates.
In Book III, Socrates continues with what is appropriate and correct poetic content and discusses what is appropriate and correct poetic form. Similarly with the depiction of the gods, the unauthorized variety give a bad representation of courage, saying that Hades – and thus death -- are really terrible, as seen in the hero Achilles in Homer’s Odyssey, as quoted by Socrates:
I would rather be on the soil, a serf to another,
To a man without lot whose means of life are not great,
Than rule over all the dead who have perished.
(386c)
Following their prescription for simple, courageous warriors, Socrates and Adeimantus expurgate in Homer’s poetry any reference to a divided struggle over courage and fear of death because “we fear that our guardians, as a result of such shivers, will get hotter and softer than they ought.” (387c) On this purpose for ridding fear of death Bloom makes an insightful observation:
Socrates wishes to expunge all of these disagreeable stories about Hades from the literature. But in doing so he seems to destroy the virtue of courage. If there is nothing terrible in death, then the sacrifice of life is not particularly praiseworthy. It would not require the overcoming of fear. …. What he objects to is the price such men, given their understanding of death, must pay in order to face it [death]. (Bloom, 354)
The warrior class, in order to be simple, must not experience this inner struggle of overcoming fear in order to be courageous but most be simply courageous because they are simply protectors of the Beautiful City. This simplicity of soul in the warrior class also excludes any comedy in their education since “[a lover of laughter] seeks a mighty change to accompany his condition” (389a). The poetry must be simple in order to create simple, believing warrior citizens.
In contrast, the rulers/founders/legislators – i.e. Socrates and Adeimantus – who must know both authorized and unauthorized poetry – i.e. true and false things – cannot be the simpletons which the warrior class are. In fact, they must lie as a prescription, “to lie for the benefit of the city” (389b) and command poets to create these noble lies, the most important being “moderation for the multitude: being obedient to the rulers, and being themselves rulers of the pleasures of drink, sex, and eating” (389e). The rulers relation to poets are as a boss to his employee: “we should compel the poets” (390d), and the veracity of what the poets tell does not seem to be as important as the overall good of the Beautiful City; i.e. what is good may not immediately be seen as what is true, that goodness may take the guise of a lie.
Socrates drops this paradox with his simple edict that the authorized poetic form must be narrative – third person – and not very imitative – first person. Socrates gives an example of narrative, non-imitative form when he narrates the action of Chryses when Agamemnon refused to give his daughter (393d-394a). The reason behind this edict against imitation is again towards creating simple warriors; if a warrior imitated as a first person actor in a dramatic or epic poem, he will both be a warrior and not a warrior (i.e. a character in the poem) at the same time, introducing a dangerous division in his simple nature which might lead him away from the simple habits of the simple, pious, courageous, patriotic warrior. Socrates, however, does allow a little bit of imitation if the thing imitated leads to simple, pious, courageous, patriotic warriors: “And if they doe imitate, they must imitate what’s appropriate to them from childhood; men who are courageous, moderate, holy, free, and everything of the sort” (395c). Conversely, such a poet creating simple poetry must also be simple because “there’s no double man among us, nor a manifold one, since each man does one thing” (397e). In stating this “no double man” existing, Socrates is being ironic because the rulers, Socrates included, must be a “double man” in order to discriminate what is authorized and unauthorized, what is false and what is true.
In Book X, Socrates, Adeimantus, and Glaucon had already departed from the Beautiful City, which, one realizes, is merely a cave of illusions, and had gone through the various degraded regimes that exist in reality, as seen in Books VIII and IX. Socrates, the manifold ruler of the Beautiful City, returns to his role as Philosopher-King to give his final judgment of imitative poetry, “in not admitting at all any part of it that is imitative” (595a). The wording of this phrase is subtle since many scholars read “in not admitting at all any poetry, which is imitative” – which rejects all poetry. The phrase “any part of it that is imitative” implies admission of any part that is not imitative. The reason why such a distinction is important is because of Socrates’ simplistic analysis of poetic imitation and poets as imitators, whom Socrates claims “do not as a remedy have the knowledge of how they really are” (595c). In essence, Socrates uses the Beautiful City paradigm in which rulers compel poets to create horizons of meaning, which the rulers know and indicate, and the poets themselves are too simplistic to know and discriminate what they are imitating. The problem that Socrates has is that he is not the ruler of these real world cities, even though he, as a philosopher, have some access to that knowledge which poets ought to imitate, in accordance to the Beautiful City paradigm. But Socrates is aware that this paradigm is not real, a paradigm which insists that poets of the Beautiful City do not and must not know whether what they are imitating is true or not, i.e. they must not know true knowledge, and, of course, these poets as imitators “knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates” (602b). But since Socrates questions what knowledge a poet possesses (598e), complicates the simple scheme of what the poet imitates (does he imitate the craftsman who imitates the Creator or the craftsman who imitates the User?), admits that man is not a simple soul but a being manifold in his nature, “teem[ing] with ten thousand such oppositions arising at the same time” (603d), admits that poetry does affect a real part of the soul, “the irritable disposition” (604e) as opposed to creating a false reality in the soul, and admits that man’s actual nature “desire these things” (606a), he cannot simply dismiss poetry as merely imitative, as Hwang suggests. Socrates gives birth to serious literary criticism when says to Glaucon, the erotic man:
And surely we would give its protectors, those who aren’t poets but lovers of poetry, occasion to speak an argument without meter on its behalf, showing that it’s not only pleasant but also beneficial to regimes and human life. And we shall listen benevolently. For surely we shall gain if it should turn out to be not only pleasant but also beneficial. (607e)
Thus, even though Socrates ostensibly rejects poetry because of its lack of knowledge of the truth of things, he ironically implies that poetry, in its portrayal of actions in images, leads to an understanding, to possible knowledge, as seen in his tale-telling of the myth of Er; the “habitual irony of Socrates” describes not only Socrates the philosopher but Socrates the poet as well.
Thus, Socrates becomes – or perhaps, always has been – the ironic poet criticizing too-simple poets in The Republic. Says Bloom, “Poetry is essentially comprehensive or synoptic, and this distinguishes it from the special arts. The poem is a collection of imitations, but it is informed by the vision that transcends the level of the special arts.” (Bloom, 429). Suggests Nettleship, “Now there is no reason why a poet should not really in his own way be animated by the same spirit as a philosopher” (Nettleship, 354). One should see that these insights of these two scholars, as opposed to the literal minded-ness of Hwang, exist within the dialogue itself, within the irony of Socrates himself, as actor within the dialogue.
Works Cited
Primary
Plato. The Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. Trans. and ed. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Secondary
Bloom, Allan. “Interpretive Essay.” In The Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. Trans. and ed. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991. 309-436.
Hwang, Philip H. “Poetry in Plato’s Republic.” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, 15(1981): 29-37.
Nettleship, Richard Lewis. “V. Educators of Rulers in Early life” and “XV. Digression on Poetry.” In Lectures on the Republic of Plato. 1897. 2nd ed. London: MacMillan, 1964. 77-130, 340-354.
© 17 October 2000 Rufel F. Ramos