From the Beginning to Plato

PLATO: AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 405
mimēsis, sneak past our reasoning selves undetected. 48 The rulers of a good city
will take advantage of this powerful instrument, and turn it to good. But this would
involve a major reform of poetry. Existing poetry is powerful and dangerous. 49
This explains the space which is devoted to the criticism of literature in the
Republic, and specifically the way in which Socrates returns to it in the last part
of this mammoth work: it is a subject of vital importance. Book X begins with a
direct reference back to Books II–III: ‘we were absolutely correct in the way we
proposed to found our city, and I say this not least with the subject of poetry in
mind’ (595a). More precisely, Socrates means ‘our complete refusal to allow in
all that part of it which is mimetic’. This is somewhat puzzling, since that was not
what was proposed (some ‘mimetic’ elements were to be allowed), and it rapidly
becomes clear that the target is going to be all existing poets. Thus a little later we
find him saying ‘So shall we lay it down that all poets [or “experts in the poetic
art”, poiētikoi], beginning from Homer, are mimētai of images of virtue and the
other things they write about, and don’t grasp the truth?’ 50 This sentence,
however, suggests a solution to the puzzle: Socrates is now attacking poets in so
far as they are involved in ‘imaginative recreation’, but at the same time he is
treating them as if that were the whole of poetry. The point that poetry could,
ideally, contribute to the good life, or even sometimes actually does contribute to
it, is now set aside, in favour of all-out attack. The attack in large takes its start
from a negative reassessment of the whole idea of mimēsis: it is not now a neutral
process, taking its colour from what is represented (or represented), but is itself
something to be suspected and deplored. It is as if the stress had shifted from
‘recreation’ to ‘imaginative’. At any rate, the mimētai, the poets, deal in images
(eidōla), by which is clearly meant insubstantial and false images; 51 and these
images, Socrates suggests, they present to one of the inferior elements in us.
That this is the basis of his argument in Book X receives confirmation from the
continuation of the opening exchange, referred to above. We were absolutely
correct in refusing to allow poetry into the city; ‘and that we mustn’t allow it in
seems to me even more evident now that we have divided the soul into its
categories’. 52 The complex argument that Socrates now mounts has the sole
purpose of relating the effects of poetry to the lower part or parts of the soul, and
marking them as bad for that reason. 53 (The usual view is that there are several
different arguments involved; but the signs are that Socrates himself regards it as
one long argument including a number of subsidiary ones.) We begin from the
question about what mimēsis in general is. To find an answer to the question,
Socrates takes the case of the painter, and contrasts his productions with those of
the carpenter, and the Forms which (for the sake of the argument at least) are
supposed to be in the carpenter’s mind when he makes his bed or his table: the
Bed Itself, the Table Itself. These are said to be ‘in nature’, and if anyone made
them, it would have to be a god; by comparison with them, there is something
counterfeit even about the carpenter’s beds and tables, let alone those that the
painter reproduces in his paintings. 54 By Greek counting, this puts the painter’s
products at third remove from the real thing, and the same will go for all other cases