Great Authors - Literature of Ancient Greece and Jerusalem - Plato and Poetry

[Music] people plato was one of the greatest poetic and philosophical talents of ancient greece and yet he has a very ambivalent relationship with poetry in the republic probably plato's greatest dialogue he accuses the poets of being dangerous miseducators of youth and he thinks that the poets ought to be censored he thinks that we ought to prevent dangerous and bad myths from being transmitted to the youth of the ideal city on account of the fact that it will deform their souls and undermine their philosophical education and yet it's strange for someone whose work is replete with poetry and metaphor and non-literal image to be so negative and so critical of the poetic tradition that comes out of greece much of it comes from the fact that plato thought that homer had had a bad effect on greek culture in the sense that homer miseducated young men to try and become something like the homeric heroes heroes of wrath heroes of passion men of violence rather than men of philosophical morality and philosophical virtue so it's not that plato necessarily disapproves of poetry because he himself is one of the great poets of ancient greece in fact what he wants to do is allow for a certain kind of poetry poetry which properly educates youth and on the other hand limit that the access of youth to poetry limit limit the access of youth to poetry that is good for their souls that will give them a good education now the greatest of plato's poetic constructs is i would say socrates and socrates is very interesting things to say about poetry he can be very hard on the poets some of the things that he says in the republic lead to censorship and kind of closing off the society many critics of socrates and the platonic tradition have pointed that out but it's worth considering that just before his death socrates wrote poetry and that's written by plato i mean it's not a matter of historical fact actually it's found in the dialogues that are that come just before the death of socrates particularly in the phaedo socrates says that he had a dream and that in his dream he was told socrates study poetry practice and cultivate the arts and socrates is taken aback at this because all through his life he had practiced and cultivated the arts but he thought that he could practice and cultivate the arts by cultivating the one single highest art the philosophical art the art of dialectic but just to make sure that he's got all the bases covered to make sure that he's appropriately following his diamonds and junctions socrates decides that what he's going to do is going to write some poetry just before he dies a very surprising thing because socrates isn't the sort of man to get rattled he's a man of philosophical courage and fortitude who has the the option of escaping from jail and running away but he's not afraid of death he is afraid of disobeying the injunctions that he gets in his dreams and in particular he wants to make sure that he's done what he ought to have done he decides to write poetry he takes the hymn to apollo and turns it into verse and he also takes the fables of aesop and turns those into verse and it's interesting that socrates at the very end of his life should turn poet i don't think we can read this as a kind of rejection of socrates life but it's a way of acknowledging socrates piety he wants to make sure that he's done the right thing by the spirits that move him or that make him go there's also an apocryphal story about plato himself which is quite interesting it's probably not true but it may carry in it a germ of truth which tells us something about plato's relationship to socrates about which we know rather little it's said that plato first made the acquaintance of socrates after he'd written a cycle of tragedies and he wanted to enter these tragedies in the competition that they held during religious festivals and he wanted to win the prize for tragedy and socrates had already always been rather critical of tragedy and epic and the influence of poetry on society so it's alleged the story is apocryphal that they had a dialogue that they talked to each other and that plato read him some of these tragic poems and that after reading the tragedies to socrates and talking with socrates about the nature of tragedy apparently he went home and burned his tragedies and never wrote tragedy again a fascinating turn of events probably not true but just because it isn't literally true doesn't mean it isn't instructive and important it suggests i think rightly that plato was one of the great poetic talents of ancient greece it also suggests again rightly i think that socrates had great misgivings about the influence of tragedy and epic on society and it also suggests that the platonic dialogue is in some respects a moving beyond the form of epic and tragedy which had been characteristic of the high culture of pericle in athens and in fact it's a new art form which tries to remedy some of the defects which socrates pointed out in tragedy as a whole in other words plato was such a profound and gifted poet that he was able to construct a new kind of poetic mode or a poetic genre called the socratic dialogue and ever since no one has ever written a really good dialogue i mean perhaps hume wrote a few but the really poetic and gripping and yet philosophically important dialogues are essentially restricted to plato himself perhaps it's the case that all the greatest of poets not only have to come up with their own subject matter and their own material they also have to come up with their own form and they don't have to patent the form no one else can do it nearly so well as they can so although the story is apocryphal it does tell us something about the relationship between socrates and plato and about their ambivalent views of poetry now on the other hand for someone with such misgivings about poetry the platonic dialogues are shot through of with myth if you think of something like uh oh the myth of atlantis and the timaeus or the myth of the latter of beauty and the symposium or any any of the important dialogues have some sort of myth in them and they move from one to another they kind of form a coherent ring of platonic teaching which is given in both a literal sense in many of the back and forth dialectics but also given a poetic representation some of the time in various passages from these dialogues now the big change that we see when we move from tragedy to the platonic dialogue is that instead of having a tragic hero who has some fatal flaw and this fatal flaw leads to a downfall and we get a catharsis of fear and pity what we get instead in the platonic dialogues is a new kind of hero not a tragic hero but a philosophical hero in other words socrates himself is the supplanter of the tragic hero in other words we have a new alternative hero instead of the hero of tragedy that we get and say aeschylus or sophocles or the epic hero that we get in homer we get a new kind of hero a philosophical hero who instead of killing people and being a man of passion and violence the way the homeric hero is we get a hero of reason a hero of insight and logic who improves men rather than harming them who benefits the world rather than destroying it who has an obligation to improve those around him rather than gratify his own individual passions and lusts now the argument that plato made in the republic has been criticized by many people and it deserves that criticism i don't think anyone nowadays would want to advocate a closed society in which we were unable to speak our minds freely in which some kind of platonic censor prevented us from encountering the art forms and the examples of art that we wish to on the other hand it is worth noting that the argument that plato makes about the homeric heroes about the tragic heroes about the epic and tragedy which had been so important a part of the artistic life of greece is exactly the same argument that the accusers of socrates made against him socrates was condemned to death because it was said that he corrupted the youth of athens and that it made them disbelieve in the traditional gods and that it harmed there and that he harmed their souls well plato turns that around in the republic when he talks about censoring the poets and limiting the myths that the young the children will get and he says no the real corrupters of youth are these poets who perhaps are divinely inspired but don't really understand what they're doing they have a kind of sacred madness which leads them to generate stories and artistic constructs that they don't themselves comprehend and that may or may not be good for people and often the harm that they do is irrevocable and can't be taken back so in other words he turns the tables on the accusers of socrates in the republic charges them with the very thing that they condemn socrates for now in the platonic hierarchy in other words plato has a very detailed and complicated conception of ontology ontology as i said before speech about beings it's the kind of quality that different beings have and it's found in the republicans something called the divided line and at the top of this hierarchy we find uh the form of the good which is a source of all being and the source of all reality below that are the forms and forms our pure essences of the individual things that we encounter here in the world of space and time um this cup exists only by virtue of its participation in an eternal form of the cup which is somehow outside of space and time and all the cups that you have in front of you to drink coffee from all participate in this form of cupness well below that we come to the level of space and time physical objects and below that at the very bottom of the ontological hierarchy what we see is that down there is the realm of shadows and imitation and under imitation plato places all works of art in other words this cup only exists by virtue of the fact that it participates in the eternal form of cupness which is someplace in heaven or up in the sky or outside the world of space and time but if i were to give you an oil painting of this cup what i would have is something even less real than that because what i would have is actually an imitation cup a representation of the cup which itself i mean this physical space spatiotemporal cup isn't real in the platonic sense it's a a thin or less real image of the eternal cup so at the very bottom of this hierarchy are the representations we have three levels then reality which is the realm of the forms the world of space and time the world of objects and then at the very bottom of that at the bottom of our ontological hierarchy which is also an epistemological hierarchy we'll find out later on do we have the representation of the cup now if i were to write you a poem about the cup and talk about the cups properties and whatever it is that i might want to versify with regard to the cup that also would be a representation or imitation of a cup and that poem like my oil painting of the cup would be at the very bottom of this ontological hierarchy so in other words plato devalues poetry he says look this world of space and time that isn't real even less real than that is the world of imitations and the whole world of art is the world of imitations so that means that artists are those people who create imitations of a world that isn't even real because the reality that of the world of space and time is all derived from the realms of forms so at the very bottom of the ontological and epistemological hierarchy is the realm of art the realm of imitation or representation how then do we find so much poetry in plato in others what's all this stuff doing there you would imagine that somebody that liked math as much as socrates and plato appear to and disapprove or at least devalue poetry to such a great extent would give you a books full of theorems would give you things like the theorem of pythagoras would give you geometry or some other really existing thing some formal knowledge at the very least it would be dialectic which leads you to ultimate truth and ultimate knowledge about the forms and yet the platonic dialogues are shot through with poetry how did that stuff get here if plato isn't to be accused by his own observation about the nature of poetry it's not real stuff often it leads people astray it has many many potential evils to it it's a hard question to to answer because of the complexity and difficulty of some of these myths but i think it's worth our consideration because it gives us a certain degree of insight into the platonic project and will tell us things that we would otherwise not notice about the structure of the platonic dialogues and the way in which plato thinks about the world now first off we should note the fact that plato acknowledges the power and significance of poetry while it is potentially very dangerous and might mis-educate people it is at least a moderately helpful friend and a very dangerous enemy so the true philosopher is going to want poetry on his side he just wants it tamed and sort of house broken so it doesn't make a mess of his philosophical system and so it doesn't undermine his attempt to educate the people that he's talking to because the the good man is always the educator and the philosopher feels an obligation or knows that he has a moral obligation to do what he can to improve the world by educating it we'll come back to this when we talk about socrates himself now we might want to think about the idea that there are different functions performed by the myths in plato one function would be to protect stupid people from themselves in other words perhaps you don't have the ability or perhaps you're just a child or perhaps you're just your character is vicious there are a number of possible contingencies in which a person may not be fertile ground for the platonic teachings in other words they may be in ex they may not have access for one reason or another to true rationality suppose you're talking to someone that's crazy suppose you're talking to a six-year-old suppose you're talking to someone that has some sort of problem in the way they think and you can't at least at this point in time give them access to reality the next best thing you can give them if you can't give them knowledge is to give them what plato would call true opinion which is like knowledge it'll get them to behave as if they had knowledge but all they'll have is the shadow or the semblance or the imitation of knowledge a representation of knowledge so one reason why plato introduces myths into his dialogues is to insulate the feeble interlocutor and protect him from himself if you think about any of you've read the dialogue called the amino which is probably the most accessible of the dialogues if you're going to start reading the plutonic dialogues it's short and pithy and a very good introduction well mino is one of the dumbest guys socrates ever talked to i mean he's obviously stupid he won't think you can't get him to do anything at the end of the discussion they come to the ironic conclusion that virtue comes from the gods it can't be taught nobody knows what it is nobody knows where it comes from and it doubtless comes from the gods now that ending is ironic that's not meant intentionally it's a fiction or a lie or a myth if you see what i'm saying he's engaging in a poetic imaginary flight on the other hand good poetry like the platonic myths are lies that tell the truth the truth that they tell is a moral truth not a literal truth and you have to be able to read between the lines to get beyond the literal meaning now mino is such a dumb guy who's been miseducated by a sophist named gorgius that he's that he refuses to think plato or socrates can't get him to use his head no matter what he says to him the next best thing is an ironic ending which he sends uh mino toddling off thinking well the goods virtue comes from the gods i used to think that i didn't know what it was or what it was about or how it worked but now i know it comes from the gods he remains stupid but he has now been moved towards an opinion which gets him to act almost as if he had philosophical knowledge it's the next best thing so you can protect people from themselves feeble interlocutors or perhaps children when he talks about education in the republic since the reasoning power of children is different in degree and different in kind from that of adults well perhaps the best thing you can give them is salutary myths it makes a certain amount of sense that's one reason a second reason that plato introduces myths into his dialogues is to protect not stupid interlocutors but stupid readers in other words the platonic dialogues are written in an intentionally obscure multi-layered style in other words there are meanings below meanings and within meanings it's like peeling an onion and not all the meaning is going to be accessible to everyone not everyone is called to be a philosopher not everyone has that gold in their soul which gives them the potential to truly understand the platonic teachings and god knows a great deal of misuse could be made of these teachings particularly by people who don't understand them but think that they do a feeble interlocutor poses the same problem that a feeble reader does potentially philosophical arguments are dynamite they upset tradition they are potentially a danger to the person's activities in life and their behavior towards others the best thing to do then if they are not if they don't have the capacity to truly understand the platonic dialogues give them true opinion give them some idea that'll get them to behave the way they ought whether they are capable of understanding the point of the platonic dialogue or not and i think that we're going to see an example of that when i talk a little bit later about the myth of earth the end of the republic there are two other reasons why i believe we might see myth and poetic invention introduced into the into the platonic dialogues one reason is propa-dutic if you have a person who has not yet reached philosophical insight who doesn't yet have socratic philosophical understanding it is possible to hasten their absorption of philosophical understanding and increase their capacity for knowledge and learning to set them upon the road of true philosophical knowledge by using a myth which kind of sets the ball rolling in the right direction it will in that case be a lie that tells the truth i will call these myths the propaguetic myths the myths that move a student of philosophy in the direction of true philosophical knowledge which of course is knowledge of the forms in plato's view a final reason or perhaps not the final but one more reason why we see myth and poetry introduced into the platonic dialogues is that plato is very well aware of the fact that there is no such thing as presuppositionless thought in other words we can't bootstrap ourselves into the stratosphere where the forms are kept without making certain assumptions without taking things as axiomatic remember that plato had great admiration for the achievements of geometry and he had great admiration for mathematics as being a kind of real knowledge of real mathematical entities but if you've ever studied math and i assume that most of us have you notice that even euclid when he begins his elements starts by stating certain axioms and axioms don't get proven they just plain get stated let x be the set of all rational numbers or let y be a plane or something like that it simply has to be stated dogmatically you can't prove axioms they are prior to rational proof well that's not just true about mathematical systems it's also true about political systems it's true about moral systems it's true about epistemological systems it's true about ontological systems and when stating the presuppositions or fundamental axioms of his unders of his philosophy what plato does instead of simply pounding the desk and stating these things dogmatically let the let reality be the realm of the forms he gives you a charming myth which is pro-pedutic towards understanding what his policy and intention really is he's trying to move you in the direction now remember that plato even though he uses quite a few myths never mistakes myth for reality in other words plato doesn't say at the end of the republic that er is a real guy is a real man who came back down to earth and you know had seen the fate of people who die and things like that he says i think the truth might be something like this now whenever plato understates his case he's waving a flag towards the philosophically sophisticated saying look this isn't conclusive it's just meant to be persuasive i can't give you conclusive arguments about my fundamental axioms about my basic assumptions for example in the myth of the metals he talks about the fundamental assumption of his political and uh epistemological system that all souls are not equal that human beings are basically inequal but this is just an axiom or a dogma and plato would like to avoid that insofar as possible so it gives you a pretty myth to wrap it up in it's more accessible it prevents the philosophically illiterate or the philosophically dangerous from comprehending it and yet those of us who are philosophically sophisticated who have some idea of what is going on here are not intended to take this as being a as a demonstrative proof plato knows that it's not that he's trying to put one over on us he's just trying to put one over on the ones that you can't do anything else with okay that's very important the primitives the basic entities which don't get a definition or which don't get a demonstration are wrapped up in poetic myths right and every system has its primitives imagine if uh in 10th grade when your teacher was telling you let this be a line and let this be a three-dimensional space suppose you ask the teacher what is space well you know space i mean no one's going to define space for you it's a kind of intuitive basic primitive idea all axiomatic systems work that way and so does plato's or sort of plato's ideas so he has to have some starting point and these starting points are usually flagged with these myths poetry can persuade where reason is not able to demonstrate things for you and that's the next best thing since all systematic thought has starting points has primitive elements has axioms which are not susceptible to demonstration it turns out then that myths really aren't an option they're a necessity i mean you could state it dogmatically but one way or another you have to make this jump and myths as a way of doing that are easiest and they cover a number of other bases like preventing the philosophically dangerous or the foolish or the unwise from really grasping the full significance of what's going on it gives them as much as they can possibly handle and since myths are necessary our judgment of whether we want to accept or reject a myth will come on a couple of different grounds the first ground will be whether it's adequate to our experience of the world another ground will be whether it's logically continuous with the other things that we know and the final and most important ground for judging myth is how do we anticipate people will behave if they believe this myth a good myth is one that gets people to do good stuff and a bad myth is one that gets people to do bad stuff and now can you see the point of why plato has such an animus towards the homeric myths it persuades young men that they ought to be achilles that they ought to be wrathful that they ought to be heroic in both the good and the bad sense of that term they ought to be self-indulgent prima donnas that's the bad element of the myth plato wants to replace that myth with a set of myths that are going to have better consequences yet are equally logically coherent now let's think about some of these myths a great many of them are found in the republican i'd like to look at four of the four main myths in the republic because they're very instructive and they also shed light back on the act the philosophical activity that's going on in the republic itself let's take number one the first of the big myths in the republic is called the myth of gaichi's ancestor and it's found in the beginning of book two where socrates is talking to glaucon and it turns out that the myth is very short but very compact there's quite a bit going on in this myth and most of my students when i teach the republic just whip right through this and it looks like something just got thrown in let me tell you in advance nothing just gets thrown into the platonic dialogues every word every syllable every idea is there for a reason and this particular myth is what i will call a propaguetic myth it's going to help us onward towards the process of getting real philosophical sophistication here's the myth gaiji's ancestor gaijis was a lydian was a shepherd for the king and he took care of the sheep and he was out in the field one day there was an earthquake and the earth opened up and he saw down at the bottom and when he went down to investigate a hollow bronze horse which was hollowed out and the sides of it you could see through because it was glad there were glass and inside he saw the body of a hero and on that hero's hand there was a gold ring and gaiji's ancestor stole this gold ring went up and said wow you know this is kind of a nice thing to have in playing with the ring he found that when he turned it back to front when he turned the collet around towards the inside of his hand it made him invisible as a consequence of that iges was able to go back to the king of lydia make himself invisible have sex with the king's wife kill the king and become the king of lydia and that's the whole of the story that's it now it wouldn't seem to be an all that suggestive a myth but in fact every word and every idea and every image is chosen very carefully first off we have two kinds of metals mentioned in this myth gold and bronze whenever you read the republic when you see gold it means philosophical insight and rationality education real knowledge connotes all those things and bronze inside remember what happens gaiji's ancestor goes down and sees a hollow bronze horse now first of all you may have heard of another greek poem that features a hollow horse right it's not an accident that got in it's a real nasty dig at homer right the bad educator it's a parable about bad education what happens to a man who goes down now remember that later on when we get to the divided line going up and going down going up is always going up the divided line towards the realm of philosophical knowledge and philosophical insight so when we learn when we are truly educated we go up and what happens when we go down we go from the natural normal desirable state of things towards miseducation towards ignorance down he goes he goes down and finds inside this hollow horse i mean it could be anything it could have been a hollow elephant think about what the hollow horse means finds inside this hollow horse the body not the soul but the body of a hero why soul juxtaposed to body you get the whole platonic idea here finds the shell of a hero but not the reality of a hero because the reality of human life is the soul which is immortal the body doesn't matter the body is what appeals to the bronze which is why he's in a bronze horse and why this bronze man is now subverting the order of nature he steals a gold ring and then turns the gold ring around opposite to the way that it's supposed to be an inversion of the normal order of things and what happens our shepherd becomes king kills his master commits crimes and transgressions takes control of the state engages in adultery in other words it's a very carefully compacted parable about education and miseducation and you really can't understand plato's republic until you've read it three or four five times i mean the first time you go through this since you haven't gotten to the myth of the cave yet you haven't gotten to the divided line and the myth of the medals you really can't completely understand this but when you go back and look at that myth of gaijis it is very clear that what he is saying is that this will lead you on to the right path if you go back and read this with new eyes after you've looked at the republic very carefully once or twice this myth is meant to be propa-dutic and it's also meant to be illustrative of a number of the themes it compacts many platonic ideas or ideas of the wrong way platonic concepts in ways in which it would be very hard to do in a dialectical literal way it's a beautifully elegant myth there are no throwaway lines in the republic it's too well crafted now what are we going to learn about after we finish this discussion about gaiji's ancestor education propa-dutic towards our understanding of what real education is moving from philosophical insight up and down right up and down the various metals the hollow horse all connect to the other themes in the republic now a second myth of the republic which is also very suggestive and very important we find this in book three it's the myth of the medals now in the myth of the medals what socrates says is that we are going to teach in our ideal city we're going to raise the gold the silver and the bronze children the children with gold that have the appetite souls and the spirited souls and the rational souls the children who are going to become guardians and auxiliaries and common people in their public craftsmen and artisans and farmers we're going to tell these people that the process of their education was not real that it was like a dream that it was in fact something not consistent with reality we're going to tell each of these people that while they thought they were being educated in fact they weren't what was really going on is that they were hidden in the earth and that their mother earth placed in each of their souls gold silver or bronze and this rather than the process of education is what fits them for their particular role in the ideal city in the perfect platonic society now what's the point of this well couple of points are made here in the first case it's meant to be what plato calls a sort of noble lie it's a lie that tells the truth they do in fact have aptitudes for different functions in society but we don't want to have society take the blame or bear the onus of creating these these inequalities artificially so instead we say that your mother is the earth and the gods put these metals into your soul that's why we structure society in the way that we do the point of course is to under to first of all assert the basic axiom of platonic politics and platonic ethics and platonic epistemology which is that souls are basically not equal now you could assume either some systems like the system that we have today is that there's we assume the equality of all people plato wants to assume the opposite but whatever you assume there's no way of demonstrating that souls are not equal i don't know what would count as a proof of such a thing so rather than try and give you a demonstration which plato couldn't possibly provide what he gives it to you is a myth which wraps it up like a package and it's something that you can open later on when you complete the platonic dialogues and make some sense of this so we keep society quiet and stable by preventing people from rebelling against their state and society by telling them a useful and appropriate myth if it is good for individual people and if it is good for the society as a whole then it is what plato would call good poetry a lie that tells the truth now we may think today that that's a very evil thing to tell people lies but we do it all the time right in other words it's not that mythology or poetry is an option in society we all have it um we have the assumption our basic uh belief about our or basic myth about our society is that people are equal we allow for equality before the law and things like that but is that a literal factor is that one of the myths we've we've accepted i mean if we were to say that people are equal rather than unequal we mean they're equally tall they're equally virtuous that they're equally learned no what we mean is that they're equal before the law where this actually comes from as a matter of historical fact is the idea that all souls are equal in the sight of god right it's a judeo-christian myth now what i'm saying here is not that this is false i mean i think that in a literal sense it is a myth but rather that this is a lie that tells the truth we choose to believe that people are equal and that they have equal rights or equal acts equal rights before the law things like that because we think the consequences of this belief are good that it gets people to behave well and we think that the consequences of believing people are unequal of accepting that myth are the people behave badly if you think about nazism and things like that there's a you know good reason to believe that but my point is is that we have a different set of gen of observations and a different set of experiences so we come to a different conclusion but the reason why we come to a conclusion that's different from plato's is at bottom the same plato thought that believing in human inequality would make society better and would make individual people behave well we think that that holding on to the myth of human equality would make society better and make people behave well we have some dispute about what we think would result in good behavior but our reason for holding on to one myth or the other turns out to be quite the same other myths which are quite benign and we believe and we still give to our children aesop's fables remember that socrates when he was in prison just before he died could have chosen any fictional any lie any poetic myth to turn into verse he chooses aesop's fables why because they have a morally educative point they're didactic and we tell kids about the tortoise and the hair all the time and it doesn't strike me as the worst thing that we tell them it doesn't follow from that that i think that the tortoise is a real person or a real thing and that the hair is a real thing i don't really think that they had a marathon race but i think that it does carry across the children who aren't able to grasp the idea that diligence and perseverance are good things if you tell them the story of the tortoise and the hare they understand it and they work hard in first grade and that's the point of the story isn't it it's not a story about zoology and once you realize that it's not a story about zoology and that the fact that there is no such thing as the tortoise and the hair is more or less beside the point well if it gets the kids to work hard in first grade i think it's just great and it's not the only example i mean our society and every society is replete with such myths let's think about the fact that in the early part of december all over america or not all over but in many parts of america at dinner tables mothers and fathers tell their children that if the kids don't eat their spinach santa claus isn't coming he only comes for good girls and boys who eat their spinach and it doesn't follow that i believe that santa is a literal thing but it seems to me a useful myth in order to get kids to eat their spinach and if they eat their spinach since they're getting toys at christmas anyway why not tell them that santa only brings toys to good girls and boys if it does the job if it improves the hearer if it has that pragmatic advantage well then it's a good myth we've judge a myth on the basis of whether it's consistent and stuff like that but also ultimately on the basis of whether we anticipate good behavior as a consequence of it right just think about the fact that we swear people in they're going to give testimony in a court of law we asked the the ancient god the the sky daddy the ancient god of the semites to come down and supervise the giving of this testimony it doesn't follow from that that i want people not to be sworn in i think swearing people in probably does a certain amount of good to our judicial processes but it doesn't really follow that i believe that god is watching them and he's going to strike them dead or some such thing you see what i think it's a useful myth and since we have to have myths we can't entirely dispense with them let's have ones that get people to behave well i think plato's got a good point here now the most arresting and important and moving of the myths in the republic i would say is the myth of the cave and the divided line once you've read books four and five five and six and seven of the republic you see platonic ontology it becomes real for you it grips you not just by your rational faculties but also by your imagination and why should the devil have all the good poetry why shouldn't the good guys have good poetry once in a while if it does the job well let's have poetry on our side if it advances the cause of philosophic insight the myth of the cave works something like this plato says that the unphilosophic human condition is like a person who is stuck in a dark cave and they're chained by the neck and chained by the legs so they can't take their eyes off a screen on a wall of the cave behind them there is a fire and there are certain people who bring out objects which cast shadows on the wall and these poor wretched benighted people in the cave believe these shadows to be reality and as a result they are manipulated by these people their fellow dwellers in the cave and of course the the people who are locked in who believe shadows to be reality are the average deep person of athens the demos of athens the people who manipulate them are the demagogues and the politicians and the poets who themselves are in the realm of darkness who really don't understand true philosophical reality and yet at the same time they are somehow manipulators of this darkness they are the kind of the kings of the darkness now plato says that the philosophical activity the activity of coming to real knowledge is like breaking the chains of illusion and gradually by by slow degrees using the dialectic it turns out later moving up out of the cave into the realm of philosophical light and of course the sun is analogized to the form of the good which generates all our knowledge and all our being and all reality once the philosophical thinker has been released from the realm of shadows and goes up out the mouth of the cave he has gotten to real knowledge and there's all kinds of nice things that you can build into this myth which plato does for example we often don't believe the first results of our philosophical inquiries it sounds too queer it sounds too strange it makes too great a strain on our on our credulity plato says well this is like a man who's lived in a cave all his life coming out into the sunshine and the lights hurt his eyes like like these hurt mine as a matter of fact and he says well we squint a little bit and it takes some getting used to but after you start thinking about it you become accustomed to the real light you would never trade the realm of reality the realm of philosophical insight and light for the darkness and shadows no matter how many people are down there no matter how many people tell you you are wrong no matter how many people say that's absurd there's no such thing as sunshine that that shadow on the wall that's reality look all of us believe that you begin to think for yourself because you've finally seen the light and nothing can take the place of that another nice part of this myth which dovetails so beautifully you only get one or two ideas like this in your life and plato really milks this for all it's worth we really can't talk about the form of the good i mean it's the source of all reality and the source of all knowledge and all kinds of great stuff but you can't say a great deal about the form of the good you get immediate apprehension of it perhaps when you have that ultimate philosophical insight but the fact of the matter is it's hard to talk about any kind of sensible way it's like theologians trying to talk about god good luck what plato says is that you know even though we all agree that there is some such thing as the sun and the sun is what when we go outside if the sun is what informs us about the facts of the world because we you know it illuminates the world for us we can't look directly at the sun well not being able to look directly at the sun is like not being able to talk directly about the form of the good you can apprehend it and you know that it's there and you know that it generates the reality of all the other things that you could possibly be knowledgeable about but the fact of the matter is you can't look directly in the eye of the sun and you can't directly talk about the form of the good it is somehow outside our capacities we know it's there and we can have no sensible doubt about the existence of the sun look at the world around us on the other hand plato on the other hand we can't talk about it plato wants to say that that's analogous to the form of the good the good is like the sun now that's not the most illuminating statement you could possibly make the good is like the sun i've thought about that an awful lot and the more i think about it the more i think well that gets me nowhere not exactly nowhere at one time it helped me climb the ladder so that i could understand uh plato's philosophy it's a little bit like what wittgenstein says about the philosophy of language that you climb this ladder to get to the roof but once you're there you really don't need the latter anymore that's what plato wants his myths to be used for he wants you to climb the ladder of mythology so that you can get up and out of the cave but once you're there he doesn't expect you to be a blockhead and to think that the good is really the son right that's for kids and for dopes if you are a kid or a dope it's the best you can do well that's fine but the idea is that we would like you to have real understanding this is proppidudic it tries to move you in that direction this is surely the greatest of the platonic myths and it connects back to all the other platonic dialogues and all the other platonic doctrines the idea that that philosophy is for the few the idea that the world that most people believe in is a world of shadows remember that with the ontological doctrine the world of space and time isn't real stuff like that all dovetails beautifully it's an inspired conception and it's one of the most important and famous passages in all of plato there's a very interesting final myth in the tenth book of the republic the concluding book and this is the myth of er er was a man who died and came back most of the great world religions have somebody like this or a couple of people like this maybe a whole bunch of people but he comes back and tells us about the afterlife because apparently we find the myth of an afterlife useful in many respects and what happens is it turns out that er found out that after you die you go to a place of rewards and punishments and everybody's requited tenfold for their goods and their evils and if you were good in life then you get supreme bliss and if you are bad in life you get supreme you get the appropriate torment but since the soul is immortal after a certain period of time i forget if it's three thousand years or ten thousand years if you see what i'm saying the number of years isn't all that important after a whole bunch of time of being either happy and rewarded or sad and punished you're forced to come back and here's how you come back you're reincarnated each person is given the chance to choose the life they will lead in the next life to choose the status to choose to choose their circumstances and what they do is this they are allowed to choose the life of an animal or the life of a man and the different kinds of men that they might choose bad men people who have bad educations and bad souls they choose the life of a tyrant because they think that's good and of course they're wretched now and they're wretched then and that's just what they deserve perfect justice homeric heroes silver men great spirited men it turns out choose the life of predatory animals another dig at homer he never lets up on homer he's so jealous achilles decides to become a lion and i think ajax becomes an eagle and you get well whatever i mean they become predatory animals again it's not all that much of a question of what they become the idea is you get paid back and then you're dipped into a river which makes you forget the fact that you chose what does it mean it means that everyone is responsible for the life they choose you can't blame it on the gods don't slough this off it's not fate the point here is that this is what i would say one of those myths that plato wants to fence off his doctrines with in other words if you if you read the whole republic perhaps just once perhaps more than once more than once if you have any brains suppose you're just too stupid or too busy or too evil to really comprehend what's going on here well then he's got a scary story for you check this out the scary story is this is a place of eternal rewards and punishments you want to be a bug you want to be a worm you want to be an eagle and be good and don't blame it on the gods it's your fault the point here is is that this is one of those myths which is to prevent the feeble interlocutor from hurting himself and other people and to prevent him from hurting his society plato's myths are a way of giving access to knowledge it's the next best thing

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Ancient, Greece, Jerusalem, Plato, Poetry

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Length: 46min 42sec (2802 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020