From the Beginning to Plato

410 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
apparent casualness, in the whole corpus, and never appears as a character). But
this in itself raises a familiar question. If poetry is such a bad thing, and he attacks
it so regularly, why does he so regularly borrow (or appropriate) its methods?
That he does so will be true even without the argument just derived from the
Symposium and the Laws, if it is an essential feature of poetry that it appeals to
the irrational in us, 75 since the dialogues themselves frequently combine
reasoned argument with techniques which rely directly on an emotional response
from the reader (stories, persuasive descriptions, analogies, and so on). 76 The
answer is straightforward enough: Plato uses such methods precisely because he
recognizes their power, and because he is in business to persuade us. In any case
he repeatedly suggests that poetry itself might be useful. It is only because
existing poetry embraces ideals and teaches notions which are so different from
his own that he must reject it (reluctantly, if he is anything like his Socrates). In
particular, it portrays life in all its complexity and plurality, when—as he sees it
—it should be describing the single, simple, best life. 77
In the Phaedrus, Plato formulates a theory of philosophical writing in terms of
‘rhetoric’, the art of addressing audiences through the spoken and written word.
In the ideal Platonic world, rhetoric too— normally the property of politicians
and others allegedly more interested in style than in substance—would be
reformed and become the ally rather than the opponent of philosophy. 78 The
ideal writer will be someone who knows about both his subject and the nature of
the soul, who is able to ‘discover the form [of discourse] which fits each nature,
and so arrange and order his logos [i.e. what he speaks or writes], offering a
complex soul complex logoi containing all the modes, and simple logoi to a simple
soul’ (Phaedrus 277b–c). The ‘simple’ soul here appears to be the one dominated
by reason, while the ‘complex’ or ‘variegated’ (poikilos, ‘many-coloured’) soul
for its part recalls the democratic type of individual in Republic VIII, in whom no
single element or desire is in firm control; for the latter, Plato acknowledges that
a purely rational mode of address will not be sufficient, and will need to be
supplemented by other means. Playing on the emotions of one’s audience will
cause nothing but trouble in the hands of the ignorant, whether he is an orator or
a poet; for the knowledgeable writer and teacher, it is an indispensable tool if he
is to address any but those already persuaded of the value of philosophy.
A distinction of the sort in the Phaedrus passage, between the simple and the
‘many-coloured’ is central to Plato’s thinking about literature and art in general.
The simple, straightforward, and unmixed tends to be identified as good; the
varied, and especially what is innovative, as bad. The most extreme statement of
such an idea is probably in the Philebus, where Socrates is identifying ‘true’, i.e.
pure and unmixed, pleasures. These are related to beautiful colours and shapes;
they include ‘most pleasures of smell, and those of hearing’, all those cases
where there is no antecedent or concomitant pain. He then explains what he
means by a beautiful shape in this context. It is not what ‘the many’ would mean
by it, pointing to a living creature or a painting, but rather