Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present

An Introduction

M. A. R. Habib

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405160353, 9781405160346
• eBook ISBN: 9781444351569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present provides a concise and authoritative overview of the development of Western literary criticism and theory from the Classical period to the present day

• An indispensable and intellectually stimulating introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory
• Introduces the major movements, figures, and texts of literary criticism
• Provides historical context and shows the interconnections between various theories
• An ideal text for all students of literature and criticism

 

Part I

Classical Literary Criticism and Rhetoric

Chapter 1

Classical Literary Criticism

Introduction to the Classical Period

The story of Western literary criticism begins shortly after 800 bc in ancient Greece, the era of the great Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as the poets Hesiod and Sappho. The so-called “classical” period, starting around 500 bc, witnessed the great tragedies of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and the comedies of Aristophanes. It was around this time that the foundations of Western philosophy were laid by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the discipline of rhetoric and the political system of democracy were established in Athens. The classical period is usually said to end in 323 bc with the death of Alexander the Great. After this is the “Hellenistic” period, witnessing the diffusion of Greek culture through much of the Mediterranean and Middle East, a diffusion vastly accelerated by Alexander’s conquests, and the various dynasties established by his generals after his death. The city of Alexandria in Egypt, founded by Alexander in 331 bc, became a center of scholarship and letters, housing an enormous library and museum, and hosting such renowned poets and grammarians as callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Aristarchus, and Zenodotus. We know of these figures partly through the work of Suetonius (ca. 69–140 ad) who wrote the first histories of literature and criticism.

The Hellenistic period is usually said to end with the battle of Actium in 31 bc in which the last portion of Alexander’s empire, Egypt, was annexed by the increasingly powerful and expanding Roman republic. After his victory at Actium, the entire Roman world fell under the sole rulership of Julius Caesar’s nephew, Octavian, soon to become revered as the first Roman emperor, Augustus. During this span of almost a thousand years, poets, philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, and critics laid down many of the basic terms, concepts, and questions that were to shape the future of literary criticism as it evolved all the way through to our own century. These include the concept of “mimesis” or imitation; the concept of beauty and its connection with truth and goodness; the ideal of the organic unity of a literary work; the social, political, and moral functions of literature; the connection between literature, philosophy, and rhetoric; the nature and status of language; the impact of literary performance on an audience; the definition of figures of speech such as metaphor, metonymy, and symbol; the notion of a “canon” of the most important literary works; and the development of various genres such as epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and song.

The first recorded instances of criticism go back to dramatic festivals in ancient Athens. A particularly striking literary critical discussion occurs in Aristophanes’ play The Frogs, first performed in 405 bc. This comedy stages a contest between two literary theories, representing older and younger generations; it is also a contest in poetic art.¹ The two competing poets are presented as Aeschylus and Euripides. Aeschylus represents the more traditional virtues of a bygone generation, such as martial prowess, heroism, and respect for social hierarchy – all embodied in a lofty, decorous, and sublime style of speech – while Euripides is the voice of a more recent, democratic, secular, and plain-speaking generation (Frogs, l. 1055). Aristophanes’ play reveals that for the ancient Greeks poetry was an important element in the educational process; its ramifications extended over morality, religion, and the entire sphere of civic responsibility. By the time of Plato and Aristotle, poetry had achieved considerable authority and status. Plato rejected poetry’s vision of the world as unpredictable, ruled by chance, and always prone to the whims of the gods. Much of Plato’s philosophy is generated by a desire to view the gods as wholly good, to impose order on chaos, to enclose change and temporality within a scheme of permanence, and to ground our thinking about morality, politics, and religion on timeless and universal truths. So Greek philosophy begins as a challenge to the monopoly of poetry and the extension of its vision in more recent trends such as sophistic and rhetoric which offered a secular, humanistic, and relativistic view of the world. Plato’s opposition of philosophy to poetry effectively sets the stage for more than 2000 years of literary theory and criticism.

Plato (428–ca. 347 bc)

It is widely acknowledged that the Greek philosopher Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy. The mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead stated that Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes” to Plato, who indeed gave initial formulation to the most fundamental questions: how can we define goodness and virtue? How do we arrive at truth and knowledge? What is the connection between soul and body? What is the ideal political state? Of what use are literature and the arts? What is the nature of language? Plato’s answers to these questions are still disputed; yet the questions themselves have endured.

At the age of 20, like many other young men in Athens, Plato fell under the spell of the controversial thinker and teacher Socrates. In a story later to be recounted in Plato’s Apology, Socrates had been hailed by the Oracle at Delphi as “the wisest man alive.” He devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue. Using a dialectical method of question and answer, he would often arouse hostility by deflating the pretensions of those who claimed to be wise and who professed to teach. A wide range of people, including rhetoricians, poets, politicians, and artisans, felt the razor edge of his intellect, which undermined conventional views of goodness and truth. Eventually he was tried on a charge of impiety and condemned to death in 399 bc. After the death of his revered master, Plato eventually founded an Academy in Athens.

Most of Plato’s philosophy is expounded in dialogue form, using a dialectical method of pursuing truth by a systematic questioning of received ideas and opinions (“dialectic” derives from the Greek dialegomai, “to converse”). Socrates is usually cast as the main speaker. The canon attributed to Plato includes 35 dialogues and 13 letters. The early dialogues are devoted to exploring and defining concepts such as virtue, temperance, courage, piety, and justice. The major dialogues of Plato’s middle period – Gorgias, Apology, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic – move into the realms of epistemology (theory of knowledge), metaphysics, political theory, and art. What unifies these various concerns is Plato’s renowned theory of Forms, which sees the familiar world of objects which surrounds us, and which we perceive through our senses, as not independent or real but as dependent upon another world, the realm of pure Forms or ideas, which can be known only by reason and not by our bodily sense-perceptions. Plato says that the qualities of any object in the physical world are derived from the ideal Forms. For example, an object in the physical world is beautiful because it partakes of the ideal Form of Beauty which exists in the higher realm. And so with Tallness, Equality, or Goodness, which Plato sees as the highest of the Forms. The connection between the two realms can best be illustrated using examples from geometry: any triangle or square that we construct using physical instruments is bound to be imperfect. At most it can merely approximate the ideal triangle which is perfect and which is perceived not by the senses but by reason: the ideal triangle is not a physical object but a concept, an idea, a Form.

According to Plato, the world of Forms, being changeless and eternal, alone constitutes reality. It is the world of essences, unity, and universality, whereas the physical world is characterized by perpetual change and decay, mere existence (as opposed to essence), multiplicity, and particularity. A central function of the theory of Forms is to unify groups of objects or concepts in the world by treating them as belonging to a class, by referring them back to a common essence, and thereby making sense of our innumerably diverse experiences. A renowned expression of Plato’s theory occurs in the seventh book of the Republic where he recounts the “myth of the cave” where people have lived all their lives watching shadows of reality cast by a fire, with their backs to the true light of the sun.² Plato makes it clear that the cave in which men are imprisoned represents the physical world, and that the journey toward the light is the “soul’s ascension” to the world of Forms (Republic, 517b–c). In his later dialogues, Plato himself severely questioned the theory of Forms.

Plato on poetry: the Ion

Plato’s most systematic comments on poetry occur in two texts, separated by several years. The first is Ion, where Socrates cross-examines a rhapsode (a singer and interpreter) called Ion on the nature of his art. The second, more sustained, commentary occurs in the Republic. In the Ion, Socrates points out that the rhapsode, like the poet himself, is in a state of “divine possession,” and speaks not with his own voice which is merely a medium through which a god speaks. The Muse inspires the poet, who in turn passes on this inspiration to the rhapsode, who produces an inspired emotional effect on the spectators (Ion, 534c–e). Socrates likens this process to a magnet, which transmits its attractive power to a series of iron rings, which in turn pass on the attraction to other rings, suspended from the first set. The Muse is the magnet or loadstone, the poet is the first ring, the rhapsode is the middle ring, and the audience the last one (Ion, 533a, 536a–b). In this way, the poet conveys and interprets the utterances of the gods, and the rhapsode interprets the poets. Hence, the rhapsodes are “interpreters of interpreters” (Ion, 535a).

The poet, insists Socrates, is “a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him” (Ion, 534b). Not only poetry, according to Socrates, but even criticism is irrational and inspired. Hence, in this early dialogue, Plato has already sharply separated the provinces of poetry and philosophy; the former has its very basis in a divorce from reason, which is the realm of philosophy; poetry in its very nature is steeped in emotional transport and lack of self-possession.

Poetry in Plato’s Republic

Plato’s theory of poetry in the Republic is much less flattering. His main concern in this text is to define justice and the ideal nature of a political state. Interestingly, his entire conception of justice arises explicitly in opposition to poetic authority and tradition. Socrates mentions “an ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry (Republic, 607b). Plato views poetry as a powerful force in molding public opinion, and sees it as a danger to his ideal city, ordered as this is in a strict hierarchy whereby the guardians (philosophers) and their helpers (soldiers) comprise an elect minority which rules over a large majority of farmers, craftsmen, and “money-makers” (415a–b; 434c). The program of education that he lays out for the rulers or guardians of the city consists of gymnastics and music. The Greek word mousike, as its form suggests, refers broadly to any art over which the Muses preside, including poetry, letters, and music (401d–e).

Just how seriously Plato takes the threat of poetry is signaled by the fact that it is music which primarily defines the function of guardianship: “It is here… in music… that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch” (IV, 424b–e). Plato advocates an open and strict censorship of poetry on the grounds of: (1) the falsity of its claims and representations regarding both gods and men; (2) its corruptive effect on character; and (3) its “disorderly” complexity and encouragement of individualism in the sphere of sensibility and feeling. Socrates stresses that poets must not present the gods as deceitful since “there is no lying poet in God” (II, 382d). This phrase suggests that poetry by its very nature is a falsifying rhetorical activity. What also emerges here is a conflict between philosophy and poetry in the right to name the divine, to authorize a particular vision of the divine world: for poetry, that world is presented as an anthropomorphic projection of human values centered on self-interest, a world of dark chance, irrational, in flux, and devoid of a unifying structure. The project of philosophy, in Plato’s hands, is to stabilize that world, drawing all of its scattered elements into the form of order and unity under which alone they can be posited as absolute and transcendent.

Plato draws a powerful analogy between the individual and the state. In book X, it will emerge explicitly that poetry appeals to the “inferior” part of the soul, the appetitive portion (X, 603b–c). It is, in other words, an encouragement toward variety and multiplicity, toward valuing the particular for its own sake, thereby distracting from contemplation of the universal. In projecting this model onto the state as a whole, Plato aligns the mass of people with the unruly “multitude” of desires in the soul, and the guardians considered collectively with the “unity” of reason. The individuality of the guardians is to be all but erased, not merely through ideological conditioning but through their compulsory existence as a community: they are to possess no private property or wealth; they must live together, nourished on a simple diet, and receiving a stipend from the other citizens (III, 416d–417b). collectively, then, the guardians’ function in the city is a projection of the unifying function of reason in the individual soul.

We now approach the heart of Plato’s overall argument concerning justice and poetry. The definition of justice in the state is reached in book IV: justice is a condition where “each one man must perform one social service in the state for which his nature was best adapted” (IV, 433a–b). Predictably, justice in an individual is defined as a condition of the soul where “the several parts… perform each their own task,” and where reason rules. In political terms, poetry’s greatest crime is its refusal or inability to confine itself to one kind of task. Plato urges that the same man ought not to imitate “many things”: any poetic imitation involving “manifold forms” will, says Socrates, “be ill suited to our polity, because there is no twofold or manifold man among us, since every man does one thing” (III, 397b–e). Plato then arrives at the renowned passage urging banishment of the “manifold” poet:

If a man… who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wool. (III, 398a)

This general charge against poetry is elucidated in book X, where Plato presents the poet as a “most marvelous Sophist” and a “truly clever and wondrous man” who “makes all the things that all handicraftsmen severally produce” (X, 596c–d). The political implication here is that poetry can have no definable (and therefore limited) function in a state ordered according to a strict hierarchy of inexchangeable function. Poetry literally does not know its place: it spreads its influence limitlessly, dissolving social relations as it pleases and recreating them from its own store of inspired wisdom whose opacity to reason renders it resistant to classification and definition. In this sense, poetry is the incarnation of indefinability and the limits of reason. It is in its nature a rebel, a usurper, which desires to rule; and as such it is the most potent threat to the throne of philosophy, which is also the throne of polity in the state of the philosopher-king.

In political terms, Plato sees poetry as pandering primarily to a democratic constitution (VIII, 568a–d). Like democracy, poetry fosters genuine individuals, “manifold” men who are “stuffed” with differences and resist the reduction of their social function, or indeed their natural potential, into one exclusive dimension. Also, like democracy, poetry nurtures all parts of the soul, refusing obeisance to the law of reason. By implication, then, poetry itself is spurred by the “greed” for liberty which is the hallmark of a democratic society (X, 604e–605c).

All in all, Plato’s indictment of poetry has been based on (1) its intrinsic expression of falsehood, (2) its intrinsic operation in the realm of imitation, (3) its combination of a variety of functions, (4) its appeal to the lower aspects of the soul such as emotion and appetite, and (5) its expression of irreducible particularity and multiplicity rather than unity. The notion of imitation, in fact, complements truth as the basis of Plato’s opposition of philosophy and poetry. In book X the poet is held up as a Sophist, a “marvelous” handicraftsman who can “make” anything (X, 596c–d). And what the poet imitates is of course the appearance, not the reality, of things, since he merely imitates what others actually produce (X, 596e, 597e). Plato elaborates his famous triad: we find three beds, one existing in nature, which is made by God; another which is the work of the carpenter; and a third, the work of the painter or poet. Hence, the carpenter imitates the real bed and the painter or poet imitates the physical bed. The poet’s work, then, like that of the rhapsode, is the “imitation of an imitation.” It is thrice removed from truth (X, 597e).

The influence and legacy of Plato

The influence of Plato on many fundamental areas of Western thought, including literary theory, continues to the present day. First and foremost has been the impact of the theory of Forms: discredited though this may have been since the time of Aristotle, it nonetheless exerted a powerful attraction through its implications that the world was a unity, that our experience of manifold qualities in the world could be brought under certain unifying concepts, that the physical world itself is only a small part of, or manifestation of, a higher reality, and that there exists a higher, ideal pattern for earthly endeavors. Some of these elements have been integral in both Judeo-Christian and Islamic theology and philosophy. The distinctions between reason and sense, reason and emotion, soul and body, while not original to Plato, continued through his influence to provide some of the basic terminology of philosophical and religious thinking. Plato’s impact on literary critics and theorists has embraced many issues: the doctrine of imitation; the educational and didactic functions of poetry; the place of poetry in the political state and the question of censorship; the treatment of poetry as a species of rhetoric; the nature of poetic inspiration; and the opposition of poetry to various other disciplines and dispositions, such as philosophy, science, reason, and mechanism. We are still grappling with the problems laid down by Plato.

Aristotle (384–322 bc)

The most brilliant student at Plato’s Academy was Aristotle, whose enormous contribution to the history of thought spans several areas: metaphysics, logic, ethics, politics, literary criticism, and various branches of natural science. In 343 bc King Philip of Macedon invited Aristotle to serve as tutor to his son Alexander at his court in Pella. Later, Aristotle opened his own school of rhetoric and philosophy, the Lyceum, in Athens. Plato’s Academy placed emphasis on mathematics, metaphysics, and politics, while at the Lyceum natural science predominated.

At the heart of Aristotle’s metaphysics and logic is the concept of “substance,” which he views as the primary reality, underlying everything else. Aristotle basically holds that there are 10 categories through which we can view the world: whatness (substance), quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection.³ A mere glance at these categories tells us that they still permeate our own thought about the world at the profoundest levels, especially the notion of substance.

Reversing the Platonic hierarchy, Aristotle urges that universals (qualities, such as “redness” or “tallness”) depend on particular things for their existence, not vice versa. Though Aristotle would agree with Plato that reason has access to a higher knowledge than our senses, he insists that the senses are the starting point and the source of knowledge. He attempts to balan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Classical Literary Criticism and Rhetoric
• Part II: The Medieval Era
• Part III: The Early Modern Period to the Enlightenment
• Part IV: Romanticism and the Later Nineteenth Century
• Part V: The Twentieth Century: A Brief Introduction
• Index