1 Background
This is the tenth and last book of Plato’s Republic, a sprawling dialogue on the nature of justice. One of the centerpieces of Republic is a thought experiment involving a pretend city. The characters of Republic wonder what justice is, and Socrates proposes to construct a pretend city for purposes of discovering what justice would look like in it; this result is then projected to be useful for making sense of justice in an individual.
This parallel structure—the city and the individual, or the individual’s ‘soul’—starts as a fairly articulate one: Questions about the city are posed like this, questions about the soul are posed like that. By book X they get asked, as it were, right on top of each other. For example, Socrates will at once talk about a city ruled by a tyrant and the constitution of a ‘tyrannical soul’.
This matters for us in part because Socrates’ question in the section we’re interested in (595A–608B) is about a certain convolution of those interests: the political stakes of individual taste and character.
2 The video game problem
I think there are two questions we want to wonder about while reading this section of Republic, and they are whether the problem is what I’ll call the video game problem and then whether that problem is actually a problem—and then, additionally, if the problem discussed isn’t the video game problem, what the problem is, and whether it is actually a problem.
What I mean by “the video game problem” is the claim, rather popular when I was younger, that violent video games make people (young people in particular) violent. By introducing this ‘problem’ I hope to give you a sense of the general idea of what Socrates is going to claim here, which is one or more of the following:
- that art has an influence on our character;
- that this influence can be bad for you; and
- that this influence can be bad for a city.
So, for example, violent video games, say, can rot your brain (are bad for you) and can also cause you to be violent (are bad for ‘the city’, that is, the political community you’re a part of).
3 Art as imitation
Socrates’ theory of art in Republic is that it is “imitative,” and that its being imitative makes it dangerous. Thus, see 595A.
“Imitative” here means both, as it were, that art imitates life and that life imitates art, say:
- that art (think in particular of poetry and sculpture) involves an imitation of actual people and things; and
- that audiences (particularly the young) are shaped by exposure to art.
Socrates says it was good to exclude art that is imitative, and then he wonders what imitation is—in other words, questions the basis of his own claim. (Imagine I say: Klezmer music is bad. And then I say: I don’t know what klezmer music is.) This sort of gesture should put us on guard about what Socrates is up to. Is he simply expressing his views about art? or is something more structured and complex in play?
I think there is good reason to think Socrates is doing something more than describing his views, and I think what he is doing is, in short, what Plato is always having him do, which is to try to entice people—those in his dialogues and those reading his dialogues—to study philosophy. One way he does this is by leading his interlocutor to distinctively philosophical questioning. Somewhat fortunately, he here goes on to describe the structure that informs this idea of what I’m calling ‘distinctively philosophical questioning’, namely the theory of ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’.
4 The theory of ideas
The theory of ideas is both a metaphysical and an epistemological idea.
- In philosophy, metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality.
- Epistemology is the study of knowledge.
The theory of ideas, then, is a theory about the nature of reality and about how we come to know about reality.
Socrates begins by drawing a distinction between the ‘many’ things that have the same form or idea, and the form or idea itself. There are many chairs, but—and you could read this as a consequence of the fact that practices of definition require this to be true—there is also just the one chair, that is, the answer to the question, What is it that makes something a chair? The answer to that question, whatever it happens to be, is the ‘idea’ or ‘form’ of chair.
To know what something is, is to know what its form is. This knowledge can come in a number of different forms. Socrates mentions here is a craftsman and sort of superior craftsman (i.e., a god).
See the passage on p. 278.
The craftsman and the divine craftsman both have knowledge of a thing through its form. In the case of craft, we make a thing by ‘looking to’ its form or idea. The divine craftsman, on the other hand, makes the form itself. On this view, the divine craftsman makes the idea of chair (along with all such ideas), and the craftsman makes a material chair by ‘looking to’ the idea.
5 Ideas and imitation
It is not difficult to ‘make’ all things, Socrates notes, but in a highly qualified sense of ‘make’: You hold a mirror up to everything. Glaucon notes however that you would not in fact ‘make’ all things, only reproduce what they look like. See p. 279.
The divine craftsman, the craftsman, and the painter thus ‘make’ three different sorts of things:
- the divine craftsman: an idea
- the craftsman: an imitation of an idea
- the painter: an imitation of an imitation of an idea
Indeed, the painter doesn’t really ‘make’ anything in the strict sense, in Socrates’ view. In this regard, painting is ‘far from the truth’. See pp. 280–81.
The dangers of art, for Scorates, stem from a sort of confusion between imitation and reality in the products of making. As background: Socrates thinks that cities are composed of people doing various jobs for the good of the whole, and that it is critical to the well-being of a city that each individual do their job (and that they cultivate the knowledge requisite to performing it). But artists—writers, painters, actors in particular—seem to be capable of depicting individuals doing every sort of job. (Consider the many different roles actors play, for example.) In this way, art makes the knowledge associated with the many roles and jobs in a city seem equivalent to seeming. (The actor makes it appear as if being a general, astronaut, spy, cook, whatever, involves no actualy competence or knowledge but is just a matter of appearing a certain way.)
See the passage in green on p. 281.
The artist’s perspective on what is is not only partial because it is an imitation of an imitation, but also because art regards things as appearances separate from their use; but their use is what makes them what they are; and it is through use that we learn. This matters moreover because, for Socrates, the beauty of a thing is connected necessarily to its use. Note also in the following passage how it is not even so much things that poets hold a mirror to as it is popular images of things. See pp. 284–5.
6 Art and emotion
Socrates then constructs the view that art is a surrogate for the expression of emotions that we ought to stifle or control.
First consider the ideal theory on p. 287. Let’s keep in mind too the thought that contradictory tendencies can arise in a soul, and that these contradictory tendences produce discord. See the green passage at the bottom of p. 287.
The law, Socrates holds, encourages us to keep our emotions out of affairs; poetry and art provide a vehicle for bringing it to the surface. In that way, poetry is immediately at odds with (the ends of) political community. See pp. 288–89 and pp. 289–90.