Most philosophers concern themselves with knowledge and truth, and Plato was certainly no exception to this tendency. Plato’s metaphysics required that people not be reliant on replicas found in the visible realm. They must instead gain knowledge from the universal Forms in the intelligible realm. Art however is a form of imitation. Therefore, Plato condemns the work of Homer and other artists because they are deceptive and prevent people from obtaining genuine knowledge.
Plato’s metaphysics revolved around his theory of Forms. Forms being defined as “a realm above and beyond the ordinary world of particular objects that we perceive by the senses,” (69). Plato didn’t find the ordinary world to be a sufficient source of knowledge. Plato believed that we needed to “go beyond the changing world of day-to-day particulars and grasp the timeless and unchanging universal of which ordinary objects are imperfect instances” in order to gain genuine knowledge (69). “The Forms, according to Plato, are abstract universal objects of thought, ideal patterns of which the ordinary objects around us are mere copies,” (695). In other words, everything that we see in our day to day lives are only copies of the originals. For example, the pencil I use every day to do my homework is only a copy of the perfect pencil; a true pencil can only be found in the world of Forms.
Plato’s metaphysics aligned with his theory of knowledge. He deemed it essential that people obtain true and proper knowledge and that in order to do so, they must not be reliant on the replicas of the true Forms found in the ordinary world; They must instead tap into the world of Forms. To explain this phenomenon, Plato introduces the allegory of the cave, which is found in Plato’s famous Republic, a piece of literature on what it means to be a just city-state. Within the Republic, Plato uses the allegory of the cave to explain how copies can be deceiving. In the allegory, there is a cave and within that cave there are prisoners. Because the prisoners are chained up and unable to move, all they can see are the shadows cast upon the cave walls by a fire. As the prisoners could only ever see the shadows, it became their reality. Here, the cave with the shadows represents the ordinary visible world, the world that Plato claims deceives us with its copies. If one of the prisoners were to be released and let out of the cave, their entire reality would shift. The sun would be blinding to the prisoner after being in a dark cave after all that time. At first, the prisoner would only be able to look at reflections in pools of water (as they’d be less blinding), which would help him move away from his reality in the cave. The reflections in the pools represent a reality associated with the world of mathematical objects which is closer to the universal intelligible realm. After some time, the prisoner would be able to turn his attention to the sun and the light and see the true reality, the reality outside of the deceptive cave. The sun and the light here represent the ultimate reality, the source of the truth, and the Form of the Good (60-75).
Plato divides the universe into two realms: the visible realm (opinion) and the intelligible realm (knowledge). The shadows and ordinary objects are found in the visible realm and are therefore said to have a lesser degree of truth than mathematical objects and Forms found in the intelligible realm. The more distinct something is, in other words, the more closely it resembles the Form, the more value it holds. “Let there be four facilities in the soul – reason answering to the highest, understanding to the second, faith (or conviction) to the third, and perception of shadows to the last – and let there be a scale of them, and let us suppose that the several faculties have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth,” (73).
In the Republic, Plato also claims that art has a corrupting influence and “argued for strict censorship of various kinds of music and poetry supposed to be unsuitable for the aspiring rulers of the state,” (Page 695). Plato claimed that rulers had to be controlled and use strong reasoning and be knowledgeable of the forms. However, he found that the goal of the poet was to evoke catharsis and deceive listeners into thinking that poets are speaking of a true Form when they are not. The main issue for Plato was the imitation. In the case of painting, a painter is able to paint something that he has no knowledge of. However, he is able to trick others into thinking that they are looking at the real thing. “The imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example; A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter,” (698).
Plato found poetry to be equally if not more deceiving than paintings. “Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures,” (699). Plato believed that poets shouldn’t be allowed into the state considering their works held an inferior level of truth and because poets were concerned with an inferior part of the soul. Poets, according to Plato, were concerned with strengthening feelings and impairing reason. Homer, in particular, spoke of tragic stories involving love and war and death hoping to evoke emotional catharsis from his listeners. Plato found this problematic because members of the state were meant to push down their emotions when something tragic happened to them in order to appear manly and rational. However, Plato found that when men heard these tragic poems from Homer that they became emotional in ways similar to women.
Plato viewed any signs of emotion to be feminine and believed that being feminine was something to be ashamed of (699). “In all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase happiness and virtue,” (700). Plato believed that the only reason poets were able to evoke an emotional response from their listeners was because of the imitations they produced. Listeners of poetry only felt like being cathartic because they were hearing of tragedies happening to others and not to themselves. “The better nature in each of us, not having been really sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another’s,” (700). Men were used to suppressing their own emotions, but when the misfortunes were happening to others, they were not properly trained to deal with it, which led to their own emotions coming forth. This was entirely unacceptable to Plato because people were having real emotions over something that wasn’t real at all and was in fact an imitation. And in order to achieve happiness and virtue, according to Plato, our emotions should be controlled.
To make matters worse for Plato, Homer was a widely respected and influential poet. Because of the general public’s respect for Homer, Plato assumed the following about the public: ‘The public thinks that because Homer is such a great poet that he must have infinite knowledge about humanity. Therefore the public must think that in order to be a great poet, one must know a lot about their subject’. However, poets need not know a lot about the subject they are speaking on because their works are only imitations and are thrice removed from the truth (698). Plato thought lowly of people who were deceived by poetry’s imitative qualities. He thought that the only artists that should be honored were the ones “who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them,” (700). Plato found anything that had to do with the true reality and the world of Forms to be much more fulfilling.
The only way Plato would ever appporve of the institutions of art and poetry would be that they aligned with his metaphysics. Poetry could only be allowed into the state if it emulated the perfect reality and the world of the Forms. But because this is generally not the case with art and poetry, Plato was unwilling to accept them into the state as they were forms of imitation and were too far removed from the truth. However, eliminating poetry from the state proved to be quite challenging as people were accustomed to and enjoyed hearing epic poems such as the Odyssey by Homer. However, Plato knew that allowing such imitations that were lacking in truth would corrupt the state’s citizens and lead to poor political leaders. Furthermore, anyone who still chose to indulge in art and poetry after hearing Plato’s cautionary words was knowingly engaging in injustice, the ultimate moral wrong. Plato warned anyone who went against his metaphysics that they must be wary of the imitation and distance from the truth that art and poetry perpetuate (700).
Bibliography
Cottingham, John, editor. Western Philosophy An Anthology. Second ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
