This reader begins, appropriately, with a section from the most famous philosophical work of all, one which contains the first sustained discussion of art in Western literature and the most abidingly influential. Few subsequent discussions of artistic representation and the relations of art to psychology, ethics and politics have failed to engage with Plato on these, the two main topics of Book 10 (595a–608b). The great Athenian philosopher, pupil of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, who lived from c.427 to 347 BCE, remains the most robust advocate of art’s “heteronomy”, its answerability to standards outside itself, for Plato insists that artistic values be subordinate to those of truth and moral virtue. This insistence should not be confused with the demand of Tolstoy (Chapter 13 below) and some Marxists that these values be defined in terms of moral or social ones. Plato’s subordination of artistic to other values presupposes that they can be independently identified.
Book 10 is not the only place in The Republic, let alone Plato’s dialogues as a whole, in which art and literature are discussed. Earlier, in Books 2–3, he has examined their role – or, rather, lack of one – in the education of the young, especially of the future “guardians” of the ideal State which it is The Republic’s task to describe. By the end of Book 3, he has concluded that most representational poetry, and certainly the enactment of dramatic verse, should be kept out of education, primarily because of the “lies” it tells and the baleful influence on the young of “impersonating” evil or corrupt characters. The question is left open, however, as to whether there should be a more stringent, indeed universal, ban on poetry in the State.
The issue is resumed in Book 10, supposedly a conversation between Socrates (“I”) and Plato’s brother, Glaucon (“He”). By this stage Plato is armed with his theory of the Forms (or “types” in the present translation), and his accounts of the just State and its ideal citizens. The Forms, which constitute “true” reality, are abstract entities, ideal exemplars to which everyday objects are at best approximations. The élite in the Republic are the “philosopher‐kings,” whose supremely rational capacities afford them knowledge of the realm of the Forms. In ruling others, however, they do what everyone in the just State should do – that is, to stick to performing the socially beneficial task for which one is cut out by nature and education.
All these Platonic views play crucial roles in the Book 10 onslaught on art and literature. Thus the painter – whom Plato discusses before turning to the more important case of the poet – produces only a perspectivally constrained representation or imitation (mimesis) of, say, a bed which is itself merely a “copy” of what is truly real, the Form of beds. Hence, “representation and truth are a considerable distance apart.” Moreover, the argument continues, producing representations of representations is surely a trivial occupation, no serious and useful contribution to the State. Unlike the people who make and use things, after all, artists have no expert knowledge of what they represent. “Those who can, do it; those who can’t, paint it,” so to speak. Worse still, artists trade in and pander to the least rational sides of human nature: the painter to perceptual capacities all too prone to illusion (which he exploits through devices like perspective and shadowing),a and the poet to emotions which are typically disreputable and which anyway detract from the controlled life of reason. That last point is behind Plato’s “most serious allegation against representational poetry”: its “terrifying capacity for deforming” people.
In assessing Plato’s contemporary relevance, it is important to avoid anachronism: to recognize, for example, that the works of Homer and the tragedians whom he would “banish” were not considered, as they are today, “highbrow” art, but the popular literature of the time as well as educational texts and conduits for the dissemination of information and the shaping of public opinion.b When like is compared to like, it is easy to understand why Plato should continue to attract or repel. Whether or not they recognize the debt, he should surely appeal to those who would censor pornography on the ground that it presents a false and corrupting image of women; to those who are worried by the modern trend to regard novelists and playwrights as founts of wisdom on politics and the human condition at large; and to those who wonder if another modern fashion, for “letting it all hang out” or emotional and public “self‐expression,” is as healthy as its champions assume. Equally, Plato will surely repel those who feel that any strictures on the “autonomy” of art have, as their logical conclusion, the dead hand clamped upon human creativity by Stalin or the ayatollahs.
