The Republic
all forms of reading is not more than a century or two old: will the
tale of love a hundred years hence, after so many thousand variations
of the same theme, be still received with unabated interest?
Art cannot claim to be on a level with philosophy or religion, and may
often corrupt them. It is possible to conceive a mental state in which
all artistic representations are regarded as a false and imperfect
expression, either of the religious ideal or of the philosophical
ideal. The fairest forms may be revolting in certain moods of mind, as
is proved by the fact that the Mahometans, and many sects of
Christians, have renounced the use of pictures and images. The
beginning of a great religion, whether Christian or Gentile, has not
been ‘wood or stone,’ but a spirit moving in the hearts of men. The
disciples have met in a large upper room or in ‘holes and caves of the
earth’; in the second or third generation, they have had mosques,
temples, churches, monasteries. And the revival or reform of religions,
like the first revelation of them, has come from within and has
generally disregarded external ceremonies and accompaniments.
But poetry and art may also be the expression of the highest truth and
the purest sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver between two opposite
views—when, as in the third Book, he insists that youth should be
brought up amid wholesome imagery; and again in Book X, when he
banishes the poets from his Republic. Admitting that the arts, which
some of us almost deify, have fallen short of their higher aim, we must
admit on the other hand that to banish imagination wholly would be
suicidal as well as impossible. For nature too is a form of art; and a
breath of the fresh air or a single glance at the varying landscape
would in an instant revive and reillumine the extinguished spark of
poetry in the human breast. In the lower stages of civilization
imagination more than reason distinguishes man from the animals; and to
banish art would be to banish thought, to banish language, to banish
the expression of all truth. No religion is wholly devoid of external
forms; even the Mahometan who renounces the use of pictures and images
has a temple in which he worships the Most High, as solemn and
beautiful as any Greek or Christian building. Feeling too and thought
are not really opposed; for he who thinks must feel before he can
execute. And the highest thoughts, when they become familiarized to us,
are always tending to pass into the form of feeling.
Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and society.
But he feels strongly the unreality of their writings; he is protesting
against the degeneracy of poetry in his own day as we might protest
against the want of serious purpose in modern fiction, against the
unseemliness or extravagance of some of our poets or novelists, against
the time-serving of preachers or public writers, against the
regardlessness of truth which to the eye of the philosopher seems to
characterize the greater part of the world. For we too have reason to
complain that our poets and novelists ‘paint inferior truth’ and ‘are
concerned with the inferior part of the soul’; that the readers of them
become what they read and are injuriously affected by them. And we look
in vain for that healthy atmosphere of which Plato speaks,—‘the beauty
which meets the sense like a breeze and imperceptibly draws the soul,
even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of reason.’
For there might be a poetry which would be the hymn of divine
perfection, the harmony of goodness and truth among men: a strain which
should renew the youth of the world, and bring back the ages in which
the poet was man’s only teacher and best friend,—which would find
materials in the living present as well as in the romance of the past,
and might subdue to the fairest forms of speech and verse the
intractable materials of modern civilisation,—which might elicit the
simple principles, or, as Plato would have called them, the essential
forms, of truth and justice out of the variety of opinion and the
complexity of modern society,—which would preserve all the good of each
generation and leave the bad unsung,—which should be based not on vain
longings or faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into the nature of
man. Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or prose, two in
one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the service of God and man;
and feelings of love might still be the incentive to great thoughts and
heroic deeds as in the days of Dante or Petrarch; and many types of
manly and womanly beauty might appear among us, rising above the
ordinary level of humanity, and many lives which were like poems
(Laws), be not only written, but lived by us. A few such strains have
been heard among men in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom
Plato quotes, not, as Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep
and serious approval,—in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in
passages of other English poets,—first and above all in the Hebrew
prophets and psalmists. Shakespeare has taught us how great men should
speak and act; he has drawn characters of a wonderful purity and depth;
he has ennobled the human mind, but, like Homer (Rep.), he ‘has left no
way of life.’ The next greatest poet of modern times, Goethe, is
concerned with ‘a lower degree of truth’; he paints the world as a
stage on which ‘all the men and women are merely players’; he
cultivates life as an art, but he furnishes no ideals of truth and
action. The poet may rebel against any attempt to set limits to his
fancy; and he may argue truly that moralizing in verse is not poetry.
Possibly, like Mephistopheles in Faust, he may retaliate on his
adversaries. But the philosopher will still be justified in asking,
‘How may the heavenly gift of poesy be devoted to the good of mankind?’
Returning to Plato, we may observe that a similar mixture of truth and
error appears in other parts of the argument. He is aware of the
absurdity of mankind framing their whole lives according to Homer; just
as in the Phaedrus he intimates the absurdity of interpreting mythology
upon rational principles; both these were the modern tendencies of his
own age, which he deservedly ridicules. On the other hand, his argument
that Homer, if he had been able to teach mankind anything worth
knowing, would not have been allowed by them to go about begging as a
rhapsodist, is both false and contrary to the spirit of Plato (Rep.).
It may be compared with those other paradoxes of the Gorgias, that ‘No
statesman was ever unjustly put to death by the city of which he was
the head’; and that ‘No Sophist was ever defrauded by his pupils’
(Gorg.)...
The argument for immortality seems to rest on the absolute dualism of
soul and body. Admitting the existence of the soul, we know of no force
which is able to put an end to her. Vice is her own proper evil; and if
she cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot be destroyed by any other.
Yet Plato has acknowledged that the soul may be so overgrown by the
incrustations of earth as to lose her original form; and in the Timaeus
he recognizes more strongly than in the Republic the influence which
the body has over the mind, denying even the voluntariness of human
actions, on the ground that they proceed from physical states (Tim.).
In the Republic, as elsewhere, he wavers between the original soul
which has to be restored, and the character which is developed by
training and education...
The vision of another world is ascribed to Er, the son of Armenius, who
is said by Clement of Alexandria to have been Zoroaster. The tale has
certainly an oriental character, and may be compared with the
pilgrimages of the soul in the Zend Avesta (Haug, Avesta). But no trace
of acquaintance with Zoroaster is found elsewhere in Plato’s writings,
and there is no reason for giving him the name of Er the Pamphylian.
The philosophy of Heracleitus cannot be shown to be borrowed from
Zoroaster, and still less the myths of Plato.
The local arrangement of the vision is less distinct than that of the
Phaedrus and Phaedo. Astronomy is mingled with symbolism and mythology;
the great sphere of heaven is represented under the symbol of a
cylinder or box, containing the seven orbits of the planets and the
fixed stars; this is suspended from an axis or spindle which turns on
the knees of Necessity; the revolutions of the seven orbits contained
in the cylinder are guided by the fates, and their harmonious motion
produces the music of the spheres. Through the innermost or eighth of
these, which is the moon, is passed the spindle; but it is doubtful
whether this is the continuation of the column of light, from which the
pilgrims contemplate the heavens; the words of Plato imply that they
are connected, but not the same. The column itself is clearly not of
adamant. The spindle (which is of adamant) is fastened to the ends of
the chains which extend to the middle of the column of light—this
column is said to hold together the heaven; but whether it hangs from
the spindle, or is at right angles to it, is not explained. The
cylinder containing the orbits of the stars is almost as much a symbol
as the figure of Necessity turning the spindle;—for the outermost rim
is the sphere of the fixed stars, and nothing is said about the
intervals of space which divide the paths of the stars in the heavens.
The description is both a picture and an orrery, and therefore is
necessarily inconsistent with itself. The column of light is not the
Milky Way—which is neither straight, nor like a rainbow—but the
imaginary axis of the earth. This is compared to the rainbow in respect
not of form but of colour, and not to the undergirders of a trireme,
but to the straight rope running from prow to stern in which the
undergirders meet.
The orrery or picture of the heavens given in the Republic differs in
its mode of representation from the circles of the same and of the
other in the Timaeus. In both the fixed stars are distinguished from
the planets, and they move in orbits without them, although in an
opposite direction: in the Republic as in the Timaeus they are all
moving round the axis of the world. But we are not certain that in the
former they are moving round the earth. No distinct mention is made in
the Republic of the circles of the same and other; although both in the
Timaeus and in the Republic the motion of the fixed stars is supposed
to coincide with the motion of the whole. The relative thickness of the
rims is perhaps designed to express the relative distances of the
planets. Plato probably intended to represent the earth, from which Er
and his companions are viewing the heavens, as stationary in place; but
whether or not herself revolving, unless this is implied in the
revolution of the axis, is uncertain (Timaeus). The spectator may be
supposed to look at the heavenly bodies, either from above or below.
The earth is a sort of earth and heaven in one, like the heaven of the
Phaedrus, on the back of which the spectator goes out to take a peep at
the stars and is borne round in the revolution. There is no distinction
between the equator and the ecliptic. But Plato is no doubt led to
imagine that the planets have an opposite motion to that of the fixed
stars, in order to account for their appearances in the heavens. In the
description of the meadow, and the retribution of the good and evil
after death, there are traces of Homer.
The description of the axis as a spindle, and of the heavenly bodies as
forming a whole, partly arises out of the attempt to connect the
motions of the heavenly bodies with the mythological image of the web,
or weaving of the Fates. The giving of the lots, the weaving of them,