From the Beginning to Plato

406 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
of mimēsis. Because mimētai (now including the poet) are not dealing with
reality, or how things really are, they must inevitably relate to how things appear
to be. People say that in order to write well, poets must know the truth, but in
fact they do not. If they did, they would not be satisfied with recreating mere
images (mere surface views of things), but would prefer to try to recreate the real
thing: thus if Homer really knew about medicine, he would have been a doctor,
and if he knew anything about virtue, he would have been a lawgiver rather than
a poet. 55 This is the route by which we reach the conclusion about ‘all poets’,
that they are ‘mimētai of images of virtue’, without grasping the truth, for if they
do in any way represent good men in their poetry, saying and doing ‘virtuous’
things, it cannot be because of their knowledge of virtue itself. But they have the
techniques which enable them to convince anyone else who is ignorant 56 that
they do know something.
Then, after another piece of persuasive description 57 to establish the poets’
lack of knowledge, we reach the last stage of the argument. If mimēsis operates
at third remove from the truth, Socrates asks, to which aspect of the human being
does it direct itself? Things may appear to have different shapes and sizes from
the ones they really have (so, for example, a stick will appear bent if seen
through water); in such cases, reason tells us one thing, which is contradicted by
appearances. If we use the principle we used before, in the case of the soul, that
the same thing cannot act or be acted upon in opposite ways at the same time,
then it follows that the part 58 of the soul which thinks things are other than they
really are must be different from the one that ‘relies on measure and calculation’
(603a), which is of course the best, reasoning or calculating, part; it must
therefore be one of the low-grade 59 parts. So any sort of art concerned with
mimēsis (so, again, poetry too) will be a low-grade sort of mistress, consorting
with the low-grade.
There are some problems here: it looks as if we shall need some subrational
part which is nevertheless capable of having beliefs (e.g. that ‘this stick is bent’),
and neither the ‘spirited‘ nor the appetitive part, from descriptions of them in
other contexts, looks particularly well suited for having this capacity. In that case,
we shall need an extra ‘part’ of the soul, which is different both from the part
that is reasoning or calculating successfully, and from both of the other parts
which were argued for in Book IV. In the event, when he comes to the question
of which aspect of the mind 60 is affected by poetry, Socrates at first avoids
identifying it with either of these original two lower parts, and again simply talks
about something which is different from what is best, though it does also take on
the features of an individual: ‘as for the part which draws us towards
recollections of our suffering and towards lamentations, and is insatiable for these
—shan’t we say that it is unreasoning, and lazy, and fond of cowardice?’ (604d).
Eventually, however, when he passes on to what he calls ‘the greatest charge’
against poetry (that it can corrupt even the best), he comes clean: ‘And in relation
to sex, too, and anger, and all those aspects of the soul which have to do with desire
and pain and pleasure, 61 which we say accompany every action, it’s the case that