Poetic Justice

Rereading Plato's "Republic"

Jill Frank

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226515809
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When Plato set his dialogs, written texts were disseminated primarily by performance and recitation. He wrote them, however, when literacy was expanding. Jill Frank argues that there are unique insights to be gained from appreciating Plato's dialogs as written texts to be read and reread. At the center of these insights are two distinct ways of learning to read in the dialogs. One approach that appears in the Statesman, Sophist, and Protagoras, treats learning to read as a top-down affair, in which authoritative teachers lead students to true beliefs. Another, recommended by Socrates, encourages trial and error and the formation of beliefs based on students' own fallible experiences. In all of these dialogs, learning to read is likened to coming to know or understand something. Given Plato's repeated presentation of the analogy between reading and coming to know, what can these two approaches tell us about his dialogs' representations of philosophy and politics?           With Poetic Justice, Jill Frank overturns the conventional view that the Republic endorses a hierarchical ascent to knowledge and the authoritarian politics associated with that philosophy. When learning to read is understood as the passive absorption of a teacher's beliefs, this reflects the account of Platonic philosophy as authoritative knowledge wielded by philosopher kings who ruled the ideal city. When we learn to read by way of the method Socrates introduces in the Republic, Frank argues, we are offered an education in ethical and political self-governance, one that prompts citizens to challenge all claims to authority, including those of philosophy.

Chapter 1

Reading Plato

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Nature

“If one understands by political science political theory, its father certainly is Plato.” So writes Hannah Arendt in her essay “What Is Authority?”1 Treating Plato as the “father” specifically of the rationalism, transcendentalism, and universalism she takes to be characteristic of much of Western political thought, Arendt associates these features, in particular, with the authority of the philosopher-kings in the ideal city of the Republic.2 Acknowledging that the word “authority” and the concept are not Greek in origin, Arendt maintains that Plato, nonetheless, “tried to introduce something akin to authority into the public life of the Greek polis.” He does this, she claims, by invoking an extrapolitical source to legitimate rule by philosopher-kings, a source lying beyond the sphere of power and “not man-made,” namely, the ideas or what have come to be called Plato’s “forms.”3

The ideas are referenced in the Republic’s sun-good analogy, divided line simile, and cave metaphor (507a–509d; 509e–511e; 514a–518b). Establishing a manifold hierarchy, these famous images depict modes of knowing ranging from imagination to belief to understanding to insight, and objects of knowledge ranging, correspondingly, from shadows, images, and reflections to things and artifacts, mathematical entities, and the ideas. The ontological and epistemological trajectory appears to be one of ascension: from the particulars that populate the visible realm of appearances to the transcendent universals populating the domain of true being; from what seems to what is; from what comes into being and passes away to what is unchanging; from affects, emotions, opinions, and desires to thought and insight; from the cave of politics to the light of philosophy.

Taking the ideas to promote philosophical and also political authoritarianism, for, as she explains, “the source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to its own power,” Arendt identifies Plato with his representation of the philosopher-kings to tell a familiar story.4 It is one according to which, in the wake of Socrates’ death at the hands of democratic Athens, Plato excoriates democracy and seeks to insulate philosophy from politics.5 On this account, what has come to be called the Republic’s “two-world” view presents what appears in the imperfect sensible human world of politics as mere replicas of “real” and perfect “Forms” or philosophical ideas, which exist safely and apart in a separate, intelligible, invisible world.6 Some interpreters see philosophy’s insulation from politics as a good thing. To Arendt, it comes at an unacceptable cost. For when extrapolitical sources of authority govern human affairs, particulars, the world of appearances that they inhabit, and its politics are ordered by what Arendt calls “the tyranny of reason.”7

Thinkers across the last two centuries endorse versions of this broadly “authoritarian” reading of the Republic.8 For good reason. The dialogue does introduce the philosopher-kings’ access to the ideas to exemplify extrapolitical authority. It does claim that the superior reason of the philosopher-kings, evidenced by their privileged access to ideas, justifies their rule in Republic 5’s ideal city. And it does present a series of dichotomies—universals vs. particulars, reason vs. desire, truth vs. appearance—that, as Arendt claims, have become authoritative for traditions of Western political thought.9

These are features of the Republic, to be sure. The focus on them has, however, obscured other aspects of this text that press us in different directions. If the Republic exemplifies extrapolitical authority by way of the philosopher-kings’ access to the ideas, it also conspicuously subjects to scrutiny and critique that very same authority, its associated universalism, rationalism, transcendentalism, its hostility to what appears, and the ideal city it governs. Over the course of this book, I make the case that the Republic’s sun-good analogy, line simile, and cave allegory depict particulars and universals as more mutually implicated than the two-world view suggests. I argue that the dialogue presents logos—speech and reason—as intimately bound with practices of aisthēsis, the sensation of particulars, and as depending critically and self-consciously on poetry, persuasion, and erōs. Highlighting these features of the dialogue’s philosophy, more usually associated with Athenian democratic practices, alters how we understand its politics. Rather than legitimating the authority of philosopher-kings and celebrating their rule, the Republic, I argue, invites a circulation of authority among the dialogue’s interlocutors and also between the dialogue and its readers.

Reading, Writing, Fathers, and Kings

The persuasiveness of my account of the Republic depends on how it is read.10 “Authoritarian” readings of the Republic take the relation between Plato and his readers to parallel the one between governor and governed depicted in the ideal city. On this approach, Plato seeks to effect a transfer or displacement of the authority of his readers to himself, that is, to establish for himself, in relation to his readers, the political and philosophical authority attributed to the philosopher-kings.11 This way of reading brings to mind what Socrates calls “soul writing” in the Phaedrus. There, “the good logos” is the product of a “father whose legitimate word is begotten first in his own soul and then in the souls of others, where it defends not only itself but also its father.”12 As a practice of sowing seed (in Socrates’ metaphor, Phaedr. 276b ff.), soul writing is teaching by implantation or “transmission.”13

Implying “the learner’s passivity,”14 soul writing pairs well with the practice of reading presented in the Protagoras, Sophist, and Statesman, as discussed in this book’s prologue, whereby students learn to read by tracing over prewritten letters, repeating syllables, or following rules of grammar, all given to them by their authoritative teachers. When Plato’s dialogues are read as a kind of soul writing, Plato is, in Arendt’s word, the “father” of political theory as the father of the Good (logos), which, by being inscribed in the souls of his readers, produces and reproduces itself, and thereby the authority of its father, along with his authoritarian politics and philosophy.15

As Socrates explains in the Phaedrus, however, the medium for soul writing, despite its name, is not writing at all, but oral teaching (276a). Indeed, Socrates’ account of soul writing, along with its teaching, sowing, and fathering, as just described, is part of an argument leveled against actual writing. Writing, Socrates says, cannot secure the transmission of logos because, like paintings, and unlike what Phaedrus calls “living breathing words” (276a), written words are like images that go on saying the same thing forever (275d-e). Socrates says that writing is static, but we might wonder whether that is true. Letters on a page may remain unchanged, but unless those letters, once they join to make words, signify univocally or determine their own interpretation, and/or unless the sentences and texts these words comprise can somehow, in virtue of being written, defend themselves against interpretation and/or misinterpretation, written words seem not to say the same thing forever at all. On the contrary, in written words, as Socrates’ and Phaedrus’ disparate responses to Lysias’ “love” letter in the Phaedrus make plain, it is possible for the same person over time and/or for different people at the same time to see and hear different things. The variety of interpretations of Plato’s dialogues suggests the same, namely, that people interact with written texts differently.

That Plato has Phaedrus use the term “image” to describe the written word suggests the same as well. Like other “images” populating the lowest segment of the divided line, written words are not static or univocal, but multivocal and in motion. Indeed, it is the very multivocality of written words that informs another argument against writing in the Phaedrus. This one appears in an exchange Socrates reports between the Egyptian god Theuth, the inventor of writing, and Thamus, “the king of all Egypt,” including the Egyptian gods (274d).16 When Theuth defends writing as a helpmate of memory and wisdom, Plato has him use, in tension with Socrates’ claim that written words are static and univocal, the polysemic word pharmakon, poison and/or cure. Thamus, for his part, agrees that writing is a pharmakon, but, using it in its other signification, as poison, he disagrees about writing’s effect:

You provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its truth, sophias . . . doxan, ouk alētheian. Your invention will enable them to hear much, poluēkooi, without being taught, aneu didachēs, and they will imagine that they have come to know much, polugnōmones, while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so, doxosophoi gegonotes anti sophōn. (275a-b)

Framed as an argument about the negative effects of writing on a reader’s memory and wisdom, Thamus’ disparagement of writing seems to be equally about writing’s effects on the power of a king. For if Thamus is right, and by way of writing a king’s subjects can learn without being taught, and/or can hear not only the king’s voice but “much,” and/or can know not only what he says but many things, then, as Harry Berger Jr. has argued, they may well become hard to get along with for him, as he will no longer be assured of their obedience.17 Perhaps Thamus argues against writing, then, because it can weaken if not thwart his authority.

Maintaining, on the one hand, that writing is univocal and static, and also agreeing with Thamus’ claims about writing’s multivocality and mobility (275e), Socrates contradicts himself, a point I return to below. Nonetheless, the arguments against writing presented in the Phaedrus converge on the claim that writing does not produce or secure the authority of oral teaching/soul writing.18 Perhaps Plato, himself not a soul writer but a writer, writes, then, not to effect a transfer of the authority of his readers to himself, and not to establish for himself, in relation to his readers, the authority of a (philosopher-) king, but instead to open the possibility of a different practice of authority.

As noted earlier, soul writing invites a passivity similar to the one involved in the practice of learning to read offered in the Protagoras, Sophist, and Statesman. Actual writing, which is to say, multivocal writing in motion, by contrast, pairs well with the second, more active and experiential, mode of learning to read described in this book’s prologue, the one recommended by Socrates in the Theaetetus and Republic. Learning to read in that way calls not for tracing someone else’s letters or being inscribed by their logos, but for coming to know by trial and error, forming opinions about letters and syllables based on fallible sensible experiences, looking at everything everywhere. In this mode of reading, authority lies in the capacities of writing’s readers to see, hear,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Learning to Read
• 1  Reading Plato
• 2  Poetry: The Measure of Truth
• 3  A Life without Poetry
• 4  The Power of Persuasion
• 5  Erōs: The Work of Desire
• 6  Dialectics: Making Sense of Logos
• Epilogue: Poetic Justice
• Work Cited
• Index
• Footnotes