SOURCE: O'Rourke, James. “Mythos and Logos in the Republic.” Clio 16, no. 4 (summer 1987): 381-96.

[Characterizing the Republic as a “foundational text in Western thought,” O'Rourke contends that the emphasis accorded to logic over myth in this work imbues it with an inherent structural instability.]

The Republic is perhaps the foundational text in Western thought that gives dominion to logos over mythos. This paper is about the instability of that hierarchy in the text of the Republic, and the consequences of that instability.

The justifications Socrates gives in the latter part of the Republic for why the philosopher should rule and the poet should be exiled seem quite straightforward. The philosopher, he contends, by “associating with divine order will himself become orderly and divine in the measure permitted to man” (500c),¹ and unless “political power and philosophical intelligence” are joined in the figure of a philosopher king “there can be no cessation of troubles … for our states, nor … for the human race either” (473d). The poet, on the other hand, contradicts the divine order which exalts the intellectual over the erotic. In treating “the emotions of sex and anger, and all the appetites and pains and pleasures of the soul,” poetry “waters and fosters these feelings when what we ought to do is to dry them up, and it establishes them as our rulers when they ought to be ruled, to the end that we may be better and happier men instead of worse and more miserable” (606d).

Socrates' earlier description of the exiling of a poet is, however, a good deal more mixed between admiration and condemnation:

If a man, then, it seems, who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wool, but we ourselves, for our souls' good, should continue to employ the more austere and less delightful poet and tale-teller, who would imitate the diction of the good man.

(398a-b)

If one were to place beside this passage the section from Book II in which Socrates compares philosophers to dogs, one might get an entirely different idea of who is exalted, and who is condemned, in the Republic:

And does it seem to you that our guardian-to-be will also need, in addition to the being high-spirited, the further quality of having the love of wisdom [philosophos] in his nature? … This too … is something that you will discover in dogs. … The sight of an unknown person angers him before he has suffered any injury, but an acquaintance he will fawn upon though he has never received any kindness from him … surely that is an exquisite trait of his nature and one that shows a true love of wisdom … in respect … that he distinguishes a friendly from a hostile aspect by nothing save his apprehension of the one and his failure to recognize the other. How, I ask you, can the love of learning [philomathes] be denied to a creature whose criterion of the friendly and the alien is intelligence and ignorance? … [and] you will admit that the love of learning and the love of wisdom are the same.

(375e-376c)

The opposition between the poet and the philosopher in these passages is all to the advantage of the poet. Here it is the poet who seems almost godlike in his protean capacities, while the philosophic style of mind is equated with a canine addiction to certainty.

Perhaps it should not be surprising to find an irony of inversion in a text in which a dramatic character attempts to legislate against writers' speaking in the voices of dramatic characters. In a recent essay on the description of philosophers in Plato, Harry Berger suggests that an economy of ironic inversion should be applied to the entire political text of the Republic. Berger argues that “the Republic as a whole is a refutation of the argument of utopian misanthropy” and that “Socrates' portrait of the philosopher … embod[ies] wrong responses, dangerous responses to life.”² Berger believes that Socrates and Plato are aware of the problems with “utopian misanthropy” (406) and he contends that “Socrates and the philosopher are not merely different; they are opposed to each other” (386).

Berger's reading depends on hearing a greater degree of irony in Socrates' words than Plato's previous commentators have allowed, and the distance between his reading of the text and Karl Popper's rejection of Plato's totalitarianism can be measured in Berger's critique of Popper's analysis of the passage in which the philosopher king is to be asked to rule. Where Plato says

For it's not natural that a pilot beg sailors to be ruled by him … The truth naturally is that it is necessary for a man who is sick … to go to the doors of doctors, and every man who needs to be ruled to the doors of the man who is able to rule, not for the ruler who is truly of any use to beg the ruled to be ruled,

(489b-c)

Popper complains “Who can miss the sound of an immense personal pride in this passage? ‘Here I am,’ says Plato, ‘the philosopher king who knows how to rule,’” but Berger comments that “Popper catches the tone of the statement with perfect accuracy, and then throws away the insight by transferring it from the injured soul mimicked by Socrates to Plato himself” (399). In Berger's account of the text, if any education results from a dialogue in the Republic, the dialogue must be between the figure of Socrates playing a role and a reader who will offer a good deal more resistance to “utopian misanthropy” than do Socrates' interlocutors within the text. This is, Berger contends, Socrates' intention: “The very act of giving play to the utopian alternative, giving voice and doing full justice to the enemy's position, is an anti-utopian act,” Berger argues, which “expresses trust in the ability of men to discern the alternatives and choose between them” (406).

Berger claims that he has come to the Republic as a literary critic, and he has certainly enlarged the range of potential irony in the text beyond that found in traditional Platonic interpretation. But he has reinscribed the unity of the text within a univocal intention, and there, I believe, he has underestimated the literary quality of the Republic. Believing that Socrates means to educate the reader to relinquish such power fantasies, Berger writes “Only by giving play to utopia in speech can Socrates hope to forestall the soul's powerful drive to embody it in deed,” and he laments that “the general response of Plato's commentators would seem to indicate that Socrates' effort did not succeed with them” (406). Berger's belief that there is sufficient rhetorical data to allow the inference of an attitude (“trust”) and a motive on the part of Socrates and Plato does not survive his own barbed comment on the failure of previous Platonic criticism to discern the subversive tendencies within the text of the Republic. The history of misreading of the Republic would seem to indicate either that Plato's commentators have shown a signal lack of perspicacity as readers, or that Socrates and/or Plato had very little insight into human nature if they expected the Republic to be read ironically. If this second hypothesis is discounted, it might be more reasonable to assume an attitude of disdain, rather than trust, on the part of Socrates when he describes a state that is to be ruled by philosophers and in which the roles of the other citizens will be as “watchdogs” or “sheep.” If people are willing to accept this as a just society, perhaps Socrates thinks they deserve to be treated like dogs and sheep.

Before attempting to supersede Berger's reading of the Republic, I would like to acknowledge what I see as its strengths in addressing what I shall call the political text of the Republic. Berger's contention that the Republic is “an anti-utopian act” can easily be tested in the classroom. If students are asked to respond to the fundamental political syllogism of the Republic that, Most people want power; But the state would be better off if it were ruled by someone who does not want power; (We) the philosophers have no interest in power; therefore, (We) the philosophers should rule, any intelligent undergraduates who are allowed to break through an aura of reverence about Plato can tell that this is a con game. Glaucon raises this objection when his first response to Socrates' advocacy of the philosophers' rule is to warn Socrates that “many and not slight men” (473e) will respond with physical resistance to what looks like a naked grab for power. It can be argued, as Berger does, that the reader, like Glaucon, is meant to suspect the motives of Socrates when he seems to speak as the philosopher. When Socrates asks, “Do you think that a mind habituated to thoughts of grandeur [megalopropeia] and the contemplation of all time and all existence can deem this life of man a thing of great concern?” (486a), Berger contends that “Megalapropeia connotes the sense of what is owing to a great man, and is not necessarily or exclusively an honorific term” (396). The paradox that, if Socrates were taken literally, those who care least for “this life of man” would determine the shape of human social institutions suggests the potential richness of the ironic dialogue. But the action of the text does not remain within this irony of inversion. Glaucon, and Socrates' other listeners, finally assent to the essential justice of the state described by Socrates. If the Republic is meant to act as a prophylactic to “utopian misanthropy,” it must be said that just as Plato did not succeed with his commentators, Socrates did not succed with his immediate audience.

What Socrates does succeed in doing in the Republic is in taming his audience, and in dominating them as thoroughly as the philosopher king is imagined to do to the citizens in the state Socrates describes. Socrates accomplishes this by exercising as much license for deception with his listeners as he grants the philosopher king. Although Socrates warns his listeners about “those who have their opinions stolen from them … those who are over-persuaded and those who forget, because in the one case time, in the other argument strips them unawares of their beliefs” (413b), Socrates repeatedly practices such theft upon them. Cephalus, at least, knows when he's been practiced upon. When Socrates twists Cephalus' belief that justice consists of helping one's friends and harming one's enemies into the formula that “justice, according to you and Homer and Simonides, seems to be a kind of stealing, with the qualification that it is for the benefit of friends and the harm of enemies,” and disingenuously asks “Isn't that what you meant?”, Cephalus responds “No,” but has to add “I no longer know what I did mean” (334b).

This is a relatively trivial example, but a more serious case occurs in the establishment of the definition of justice in the Republic. After Glaucon proposes the social contract theory that “justice” is only the name given to a form of compromise that arises from a precivilized struggle for survival (358e-359b), when Socrates claims to begin to look for justice he suggests an entirely different origin of society, in a cooperative sharing of talents. He asks his listeners if “they think any other principle establishes the state?” (369b). “No other,” says Adeimantus, with no contradiction from the other listeners. Where has Glaucon's earlier hypothesis, the less benign possibility for the emergence of society, gone? It has simply been forgotten. The consequence of Socrates' establishment of the origin of civilization in the division of labor is that, when the time comes for the discovery of the principle of justice, Socrates claims that

all the time … the thing was apparently tumbling about our feet from the start and we couldn't see it, but were most ludicrous, like people who sometimes hunt for what they hold in their hands. … For what we laid down in the beginning as a universal requirement when we were founding our city, this … is justice. And what we did lay down … was that each one man must perform one social service in the state for which his nature was best adapted. … This, then … appears to be justice, this principle of doing one's own business.

(432d-433b)

A problematic story about social origins passes into the status of historical fact, and then into metaphysical principle. This is precisely the method Socrates proposes that the philosopher kings use to insure social stability. Just after he warns that it is a kind of theft when time or argument “strips [people] unawares of their beliefs,” he creates the “noble lie” of the Allegory of the Metals and asks “Do you see any way of getting them to believe this tale?” Glaucon responds “No, not these themselves … but I do, their sons and successors and the rest of mankind who come after” (415d). Although Plato is usually considered the founder, and Nietzsche the arch-deconstructor, of the logocentric tradition, here it is Plato who acknowledges the role of a collective amnesia in providing social values with the aura of the natural and the necessary.

Just as this slippage from story to metaphysical fact—from mythos to logos—is advanced by Socrates as a means for exerting social control, it is also the method repeatedly used by Socrates to persuade his audience in the action of the Republic. It occurs in a flagrant, almost taunting, way in Socrates' description of the principle of the Good, and if Plato truly wanted the discussion of the Good in the Republic to stand as an illustration of the existence of a realm of the Ideal available to the true philosopher, he has given the discussion of the concept a strangely self-subverting, and sometimes self-parodic, context. After Socrates asserts the necessity of “demand[ing] the greatest precision for the greatest matters” (504e), he disparages those sophists who falsely claim to know the Good as people who descend into tautology and “say it is the knowledge of the good as if we understood their meaning when they utter the word ‘good’ [agathon]” (505c). One expects, then, that Socrates will offer some better explanation of this concept. Socrates seems headed on this path when he provides a description of the method of the true philosopher as one who approaches the realm of the intelligible, crowned by the Good, through the use of a dialectical method which “mak[es] no use whatever of any object of sense but only of pure ideas moving on through ideas to ideas and ending with ideas” (511c). But his ensuing, and only, account of the Good is the Allegory of the Cave, a story which uses as an image of the Good the sensible object the sun.

After the Allegory of the Cave, Socrates reiterates a disdain for those unskilled in dialectic, asking whether “men who could not render and exact an account of opinions in discussion would ever know anything of the things we say must be known” (532a), and he restates the formula that

when anyone by dialectics attempts through discourse of reason and apart from all perceptions of sense to find his way to the very essence of each thing and does not desist till he apprehends by thought itself the nature of the good in itself, he arrives at the limit of the intelligible.

(532a-b)

Glaucon seems to express a reader's expectation that some such process of dialectic culminating in an account of the Good should be forthcoming. He asks Socrates to “bring us to … the end of our journeying,” but Socrates demurs, saying

You will not be able, dear Glaucon, to follow me further. … If I could, I would show you, no longer an image and symbol of my meaning, but the very truth, as it appears to me—though whether rightly or not, I may not properly affirm.

(533a)

Socrates seems to be confessing that his own conception of the Good is a matter of opinion [doxa] rather than knowledge [episteme] (506c). This should, however, disqualify him from being called a philosopher according to his own distinction between a true dialectician and those who wander in the fog of appearance; the “name of dialectician” is given to “the man who is able to exact an account of the essence of each thing,” while “the one who is unable to do this, insofar as he is incapable of rendering an account to himself and others, does not possess full reason and intelligence about the matter” (534b). We may reasonably ask whether Socrates' use of the term Good in any way transcends his own critique of those who “say it is the knowledge of the good as if we understood their meaning when they utter the word ‘good’” (505c), but, true to Socrates' critique of writing in the Phaedrus, the text of the Republic will not answer our question.

While one could contend, following Berger's analysis, that since the metaphysical text of the Republic operates under the same principles as its politics, the entire illogical exposition of the Good in the Republic falls within the economy of inversion in which Socrates plays a role that is meant to be seen through, there is one particular allusion in the story of the Allegory of the Cave that cannot be brought within that economy of inversion. At the end of his story of the Allegory of the Cave, Socrates suggests that the inhabitants of the cave would kill anyone who tried to lead them up into the sunlight. This is an obvious allusion to the manner of Socrates' death. While at the level of “story” this image clearly identifies Socrates as the philosopher who sees the Good just as the one figure in the cave allegory sees the sun, and it valorizes him as a great man in opposition to the rabble who murder him, it is also a use of the literary device of dramatic irony on the part of Plato; the characters' words contain implications which are apparent to the reader but of which the characters themselves are unaware.

The effect of this allusion only comes into being when the words spoken in the voice of Socrates are transposed out of that voice of the living, speaking Socrates and are heard from the perspective of Plato writing after Socrates' death. The notion that all of Plato's writing comes out of the death of Socrates must be taken quite seriously; it is precisely the transposition of the words of the Republic from the perspective of Socrates (who lives and speaks) to the perspective of Plato (who writes and knows of Socrates' death) that brings into being what I shall call the literary text of the Republic. This is a text that inhabits the same space as the political and the philosophical text of the Republic, but it operates under different, and often contrary, principles. Simply put, the political and philosophical Republic belong to logos, and the literary Republic belongs to mythos.

The principles of the Phaedrus, the text in which Socrates opposes dialectic and speech to writing, can be useful to an understanding of the literary Republic. The Phaedrus is in a way a complement to the Republic as it moves outside the city walls (to where the poet would be exiled) and admits, in its action, an indulgence in at least the idea of physical passion which is proscribed in the Republic. Socrates claims to be interested, in the Phaedrus, in the sowing of ideals such as “the just and the good and beautiful” (276c)³ in the soul of Phaedrus, but the action of the text seems to suggest a double, and partially veiled, intention, on Socrates' part; he also seems to be trying to seduce Phaedrus through the eloquence of his discourse. He enters into his ironic discourse, with one explicit (philosophical) and one hidden (personal) intention, through a trope that turns him into a “writer” in the nonempirical, Derridean (and perhaps Platonic) sense of the word: he covers his face and makes himself absent. A reader cannot ask whether he means what he says or if he simply means to seduce Phaedrus, and will say anything at all that will further that end.

The action of the text thus supports Socrates' contention about the impossibility of identifying a single, correct intention in a piece of writing. This is, says Socrates, characteristic of all “writing.” In a famous passage in the Phaedrus, Socrates complains, or at least seems to complain, that “Writing … is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence (275d),” and he tells Phaedrus that “he who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful … will not, when in earnest, write [about] them in ink, sowing them through a pen with words which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually” (276c). The supposed superiority of speech over writing in this argument depends on the presence of the speaker to the hearer in speech; dialectic can be pursued, and the clarity of full understanding of truth attained, through the questioning of a speaker by his audience. The absence of a writer from his audience means that a reader, in the presence of several possible interpretations of a text, cannot ask the writer which of those possibilities is meant. Polysemy is thus said to originate in this empirical difference of writing from speech: the absence of the writer.

That Plato and/or Socrates actually privilege the clarity of univocality in speech (and whether they even believe in the exemption of speech from the potential misunderstandings of “writing”) cannot be assumed. The Platonic dialogues commonly assert phono- and logocentic themes in a rhetoric of univocality, but this may simply illustrate the results of a rhetorical tendency rather than asserting the truth of an ontological zero degree figuration. The gains, from the perspective of Plato the writer, in the multiplicity of effects deriving from the ironic and hypothetical resources of writing are opposed implicitly (since that is the method of writing) throughout the dialogues to the philosophical ideals of clarity, of full understanding, and of speech.

Just as Socrates speaks in the voice of the philosopher and veils his sexual desire in the Phaedrus, he may be said to speak in the voice of the philosopher in the Republic, and to veil his desire for power. But at the same time (or, more properly, in the same space but in a different temporality), Plato speaks in the voice of Socrates in the Republic. This is the more difficult text to unravel; it is more deeply veiled, more faceted in its ironies, and less constrained by the unity of an intention. I will begin to account for this text with the image of the pharmakon that is central to Derrida's discussion of “Plato's Pharmacy.”⁴ Curiously, Derrida does not mention the two instances where the image of the pharmakon occurs in the Republic. The word is employed on the two occasions in which Socrates describes the necessity for the rulers' use of lies to preserve the stability of the state. In the first case, Socrates says that

We must surely prize truth most highly … if falsehood is in very deed useless to gods, but to men useful as a remedy or form of medicine [pharmakon], it is obvious that such a thing must be assigned to physicians, and laymen should have nothing to do with it … The rulers of the city may … fitly lie … for the benefit of the state.

(389b)

As Derrida suggests, it is nearly inevitable for a translator to adopt one meaning of the word to suit a local context, and so pharmakon becomes, in this case, a remedy rather than a poison, even though to a contemporary sensibility the poisonous overtones of this political practice are all too obvious. Such connotations become even more obtrusive in Socrates' next use of the word. As he prepares to describe the breeding arrangements in this ideal state, he acknowledges that, in order for these procedures to be accepted, the rulers “will have to employ many of those drugs [pharmakois],” which he identifies as a “considerable use of falsehood and deception for the benefit of their subjects” (459c-d).

The first allowance for the rulers' lies functions as a preparation for the creation of the “noble lie” of the Allegory of the Metals, and so these two passages are linked not only through the image of the pharmakon but in the advancement, in each case, of perhaps the most pernicious (or, as Berger would say, the most misanthropic) political ideal in the Republic, the creation of a Master Race. This pharmakon is a volatile image that seems to recur whenever Plato discusses Socrates' conflicts with the Athenian polis. As Derrida points out, “the hemlock, that potion which in the Phaedo is never called anything but a pharmakon, is presented to Socrates as a poison” (126) and so when Plato has the philosopher, as king, administer the pharmakon in the Republic rather than having it administered to him, he goes beyond the passive irony of the Crito, in which Socrates shows his reverence for the law of the polis by dying for it, and the polis shows its character by killing him; in the Republic, the irony, and the philosopher's revenge, become active.

It is hard to say whether this symmetry is meant to deserve the name of “justice,” but a literal answer to this question is not available from a piece of writing. One dimension of the literary text of the Republic is the transformation of the political text of the Republic into a revenge fantasy by Plato on behalf of his teacher, as considerations of its “justice” are seen through the eyes of Plato; those he imagines subjecting to a poisonous political system are those who were willing to poison Socrates. Whatever the justice of the Republic, where citizens are bred like dogs and routinely lied to, Socrates was seen by Plato as a great man who was murdered, and the pharmakon of the Republic is his revenge. Just as in the Phaedrus Socrates' veiled sexual desire shows through his philosophical discourse, in the Republic the desire for power of the character of Socrates shows through his metaphysical principles. The images of the text serve a double function as they fit, first into the political text which imagines Socrates as ruler and then into the literary text which constructs the relation between the life of Socrates and the writings of Plato. When Socrates says that justice means “to do one's own business and not to be a busybody” (433a), this serves an obvious political function for a philosopher king who prefers not to be troubled with voices from below.⁵ When Plato permits Socrates to get away with such an imposition of his will upon the non-philosophical reader, he allows that reader as much, and as little, justice as the non-philosophers of Athens allowed Socrates.

The same principles can be applied to that strange supplement seemingly tacked on to the end of the text of the Republic, the Myth of Er. Although the Myth follows what seems like the conceptual end of the Republic at the conclusion of Book IX, where Socrates has proved both that justice is good in itself and profitable to those who practice it, the Myth of Er arises quite naturally from the political and philosophical text of the Republic. It serves an obvious political function as it teaches the citizens subservience and counters the fear of death in the guardians, and it follows Socrates' consistent valorization, as he speaks in the voice of the philosopher, of the metaphysical over the material. But it also serves the function of the supplement by seeming superfluous yet filling an essential lack in the discourse to which it is appended. In the political text of the Republic, the myth of an afterlife addresses the problem Socrates identifies early on in the power of literature and its place in the training of the Guardians. “If he believes in the reality of the underworld and its terrors,” asks Socrates, “do you think that any man will be fearless of death and in battle will prefer death to defeat and slavery?” (386b). As a result, he concludes that Achilles' description in Book 11 of the Odyssey of his feelings about the underworld,

Liefer were I in the fields up above to be serf to
                    another
Tiller of some poor plot which yields him a scanty
                    subsistence
Than to be ruler and king over all the dead who have
                    perished,

must be censored. Although Socrates pursues a reasoned argument throughout the Republic that leads to the conclusion that death is not to be feared, the most effective means of extirpating that fear, he acknowledges, is not reason but a story that might, like the Allegory of the Metals, pass into common and unquestioned belief.

The power that death poses to the teachings of Socrates does not reside only at the conceptual level. Socrates the philosopher comes to the comfortable conclusion that the man who best reproduces the divine order in himself (500c) will be the favorite of the gods, and he believes that

all things that come from the gods work together for the best for him that is dear to the gods … and for him all these things will finally prove good, both in life and in death.

(613a)

But the principle of the divine justice of the cosmos is most severely challenged, from the perspective of Plato, by Socrates' death, as this great man did not seem to receive the favor of the gods in this life, and the imagining of an afterlife represents the only possible arena in which Socrates would get his justice. It takes this piece of mythos which imagines an afterlife to redeem the failure of the metaphysical principle of justice to explain the course of human events, and, if this is put into more personal terms, the imagining of an afterlife is the arena of Plato's hope that his severance from Socrates might not be permanent.⁶

I believe that this last speculation can be justified by the treatment of the opposition of poetry and philosophy in the Republic and elsewhere in Plato's dialogues. As Plato teaches in the Phaedrus through the difference between the words of Socrates the philosopher and the veiled desires of Socrates the character, the writer hides himself even (or especially) when the discourse is produced out of his desire. If one presumes that this principle should apply to Plato himself, it would be reasonable to assume that the relation between Socrates and Plato would be more complicated than a simple intellectual continuity of teacher and disciple. If one looks for Plato in the Republic, he might most obviously be found in the discussions of passages from the poets which Socrates proposes to censor because of their effect on the soul. In the first arraignment of poetry, Socrates affirms that literature will not show “the wailings and lamentations of men of repute” because “a good man will not think that for a good man, whose friend he also is, death is a terrible thing” (387d). According to the principle that that which is best is least subject to outside influence, Socrates goes on to contend that since “such a one is most of all men sufficient unto himself for a good life and is distinguished from other men in having least need of anyone else,” that “least of all then to him is it to lose son or brother or his wealth or anything of the sort” (387e). These words may sound inhumanly cold, but they take on a different sort of chill if we listen to them not as they are stated as a matter of principle by Socrates the philosopher but as they are written by Plato in the voice of Socrates after his death. As in the case of the dramatic characters protesting against their own existence, the principle and the action are at odds when Plato writes, in a text that, like most of his writing, is devoted to Socrates, that the best man most easily overcomes his own grief; he “makes the least lament and bears it most moderately when any such misfortune overtakes him” (387e).

The intensity of the revenge fantasy of the Republic in the imagining of a state in which the poisoners of Socrates could be treated as dogs and sheep is not an expression of such stoicism, however. The irrepressibility of feelings of loss seems to show through the return in Book X to the idea that poetry needs to be constrained because of its “power to corrupt, with rare exceptions, even the better sort” (605c). Socrates returns in particular to the case in which “Homer or some other of the makers of tragedy imitat[es] one of the heroes who is in grief, and is delivering a long tirade in his lamentations or chanting and beating his breast” as an example of how poetry betrays the divine order in the soul, since, he says, “when in our own lives some affliction comes to us … we plume ourselves … on our ability to remain calm and endure, in the belief that this is the conduct of a man, and what we were praising in the theatre that of a woman” (605d). The effect of this passage passes from the statement of a metaphysical precept to high drama if one recalls the death scene from the Phaedo:

He raised the cup to his lips and very cheerfully and quietly drained it. Up to that time most of us had been able to restrain our tears fairly well, but when we watched him drinking and saw that he had drunk the poison, we could do so no longer, but in spite of myself my tears rolled down in floods, so that I wrapped myself in my cloak and wept for myself; for it was not for him that I wept, but for my own misfortune in being deprived of such a friend. Crito had got up and gone away even before I did, because he could not restrain his tears. But Apollodorus, who had been weeping all the time before, then wailed aloud in his grief and made us all break down, except Socrates himself. But he said, “What conduct is this, you strange men! I sent the woman away chiefly for this very reason, that they might not behave in this absurd way; for I have heard that it is best to die in silence. Keep quiet and be brave.” Then we were ashamed and controlled our tears.

(Phaedo, 117c-d)⁷

As in the case of the allusion to the death of Socrates after the Allegory of the Cave, the words in which Socrates would proscribe poetic representations of grief gain a poetic resonance as they are transposed from the voice of Socrates to the perspective of those who know of his death.

The censorship of poetry is announced in the voice of the philosopher, but Plato surreptitiously writes mythos in the very words that the philosopher speaks. This poetic resonance creates the countering force to the coldly logical exposition of a utopia in the Republic, and the instability of the dominance of logos over mythos is exacerbated when the last, and most lyrical, attack on poetry in Book X of the Republic is phrased as a matter of happiness, and not ontology, even though “this life of man” is supposed to be of little concern to the philosopher. “In regard to the emotions of sex and anger, and all the appetites and pains and pleasures of the soul,” says Socrates, “the effect of poetic imitation … waters and fosters these feelings when what we ought to do is to dry them up, and it establishes them as our rulers when they ought to be ruled, to the end that we may be better and happier men instead of worse and more miserable” (606d-e). The metaphoric vehicle here is, it need hardly be noted, the same as the primary image of the death scene in the Phaedo, and it suggests that the author of the Republic is not writing in a spirit of stoicism.

As the values of poetry come to rival those of philosophy in the text of the Republic, it must be remembered that Socrates himself is a mixed figure in this text, one who preaches justice and pursues power. Although Socrates is consistently depicted in Plato's dialogues as a great man in the sense of being larger than life, he is not always faithful to philosophical ideals, and when he overturns the divine order of his soul it is usually on behalf of the erotic (as in the Phaedrus, Symposium, and Charmides) rather than the political. Plato employs the image of the veiled speaker to represent the one who departs from philosophical principles; in the Phaedrus Socrates veils himself in order to pursue his erotic desires, while in the Phaedo Socrates acts in accordance with the metaphysical principles of the philosopher, but the unnamed speaker veils himself when his tears betray the philosophical ideals of Socrates. In order to close in on the veiled figure behind the poetic whole of the Republic I would like to cite the description of poetry by Socrates in his final arraignment of it: “Mimetic poetry,” he says, “imitates human beings acting under compulsion or voluntarily, and as a result of their actions supposing themselves to have fared well or ill and in all this feeling either grief and joy. Did we find anything else but this?” (603c). The answer, of course, is “Nothing.” If this is a true description of the Republic as a literary text, the poetry of the text should deal with Socrates and Plato not as philosophers, with all of the restrictions that that term entails, but as human beings, with all of the attendant complications.

In his approach to the proof that poetry appeals to the inferior part of the soul, Socrates reminds his listeners “did we not say that it is impossible for the same thing at one time to hold contradictory opinions about the same thing?” (603a). This logocentric principle recalls the earlier assertion that “the same thing will never do or suffer opposites in the same respect in relation to the same thing and at the same time” (436b), where this principle of noncontradiction led to the conclusion that the soul is composed of three, and not two faculties, since the thumos seems to be a passion, but one which most often takes the side of reason. The thumos is necessary to complete the homology in the political Republic as it functions as an analogue to the guardians who buffer the rulers from the common herd, but it also has its place in helping to determine the strange shape of the literary Republic.

It has been the assumption of the history of ideas that Plato's obsession with Socrates was entirely intellectual, but the primacy of intellectual ideals has been taken far too easily at face value in Platonic interpretation, and Plato's dialogues show, most explicitly in the figure of Socrates, the instability of the suppression of the erotic in the name of the intellectual. The Republic shows Socrates as being capable of being not only a recipient but a dispenser of a pharmakon, and this is not an entirely flattering portrait. Socrates is here, as elsewhere in Plato, depicted as being capable of pursuing personal interests even when they contradict his stated philosophical ideals. That Socrates succeeds in the Republic in persuading his audience, and centuries of commentators, that he is interested in establishing justice for all even as he parodies his own procedures and makes himself king expresses Plato's scorn for the rabble who scorned and murdered him. They laughed at him as a cloud-dweller, but, Plato seems to say, if this man had turned his talents to the pursuit of power his eloquence would have reduced the Athenians to sheep.

Anger, or thumos, also sits at the heart of the true literary Republic, the story it tells of Socrates and Plato. If the literary whole of the Republic is primarily concerned with human beings, their griefs and their joys, the obsession with Socrates here and throughout the dialogues makes it apparent that the intellectual part of Plato idolized Socrates, and that this intellectual appreciation caused a deep anger in Plato at Socrates' poisoners. But, true to the polysemy of “writing” and its ability to mirror the contradictions within human beings, this is not the only focus of Plato's anger. Plato was, as his writings attest, Socrates' best pupil, but the record of Socrates' life in these writings shows no evidence that Socrates bestowed the interest on Plato that a pure devotion to a life of the mind should, according to the ideals of Socrates, have earned. If the “highest” part of Plato's soul idolized Socrates, what of the other faculties? What part of Plato could possibly have resented the relative disinterest Socrates expressed toward him as Socrates became infatuated with beautiful young men? It could not have been a simple matter of erotic competition; the erotic part of himself could not have hated and loved Socrates at the same time, according to logocentric principles of noncontradiction. The existence of another faculty besides the intellectual and the erotic, a thumos, is a logical deduction but it is an answer that does not really address the problem.

All of these passions and contradictions are subdued in the Republic, where the absent Plato does not have to do anything; as a writer, he does not have to commit himself to any single intention. The Republic is the myth of a world in which the intellectual entirely dominates the erotic, and it concludes in a myth of an afterlife in which everyone has a chance to choose another life which would repair the errors of a past life. If the end of the Republic is read in terms of the relation between the life of Socrates and the writings of Plato, it comes to express all the ambivalence associated with those complicated emotions of eroticism, anger, and idealism, as Plato imagines not only a world where he could be reunited with Socrates, but a world in which Socrates could choose another life in which he would repair the errors of his betrayal of his own intellectual ideals, and recognize the true worth of Plato.

Notes

1. Paul Shorey, trans., Plato's Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1953), 2:69. All citations from the Republic are from this edition in the Loeb Classical Library.

2. Harry Berger, Jr., “Plato's Flying Philosopher,” The Philosophical Forum 13 (1982):386.

3. Harold North Fowler, trans., Plato, With an English Translation: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960), 569. All citations from the Phaedrus and Phaedo are from this edition in the Loeb Classical Library.

4. Jacques Derrida, “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), 61-171.

5. “The principle embodied in child, woman, slave, free, artisan, ruler and ruled, that each performed his one task as one man and was not a versatile busybody” is said to “rival wisdom, soberness, and bravery” as a “contribution to the excellence of the state” (433d).

6. “Hope” must be taken here as a description of a hypothetical literary structure rather than of a psychological phenomenon.

7. In Fowler, 399-401.