Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Plato on censoring artists — a summary

In my Philosophy of Art course, we are discussing Plato’s philosophy of art, by means of selections from Statesman and Books 3 and 10 of The Republic, along with snippets from Ion, Phaedrus, and Symposium.

In The Republic, Plato makes a systematic case for censoring all arts. The task of the Platonic philosopher is to take up the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” [607b] and to assert the State-enforced dominance of philosophy. To that end, The Republic as a whole is a powerful integration of philosophy, religion, education, and politics, and its argument for the political suppression of most art follows from that integrated system.

Rhetorically, Plato uses Socrates’ discussion with Glaucon and Adeimantus to list a series of grievances against poetry, music, and painting:

* A good portrait of the gods and heroes will show them as worthy and exalted beings — but poets such as Homer and Hesiod often tell tales of the gods and heroes fighting and bickering and acting immorally [e.g., 390b-391e].

* A moral citizen’s soul will be composed and dignified — but many musical modes stir us up inside and make us jangled and unsettled [398e-400d.].

* Good people and gods do not deceive — but painters constantly deceive us by trying to make their fake imitations look real [598c, 602d]. (Meanwhile, Plato allows that politicians (and only politicians) ought to be allowed to lie to their citizens [389b-c].)

* A strong and moral man will not grieve the death of a friend by moaning and wailing like a woman — but poets regularly have their characters issue long, pathetic lamentations [387d-388d].

* Courageous men are willing to die in battle — but the poets tell scary stories about the afterlife and make us fear death [386b-d].

* A proper moral of the story will teach that good people meet good ends and bad men meet bad ends [613d-614a] — but tragic poets have will often have bad men profit and protagonists fail and suffer despite their virtues [392b].

* Decent people respect and strive for worthiness — but comic poets appeal to our basest desires and mock and deride everything [e.g., 395d-e, 606c].

And so on.

The Republic’s overall argument for censorship thus combines a particular conception of morality with religion and authoritarian politics. Formalizing the argument:

1. To have a good society, we must have good citizens.
2. To have good citizens, children must be well educated.
3. To be well educated, children must be exposed to good material and shielded from bad material [386a].
4. So, to have a good society, children must be exposed to good material and shielded from bad material.
5. It is the obligation of the State to educate its citizens.
6. So the State should allow only good material and suppress bad material.
7. The State’s censorship applies also to art.
8. So the State should allow only good art and suppress bad art [401b, 595a].

[Next: Evaluating Plato's argument for censoring the arts. Return to the Intellectual History page.]

Philosophy begins: Thales’ revolution

In raising the question of why philosophy begins with Thales, we first looked at Homer, the great shaper of the Greek mind before the philosophical and scientific revolution: Before philosophy: Homer’s world. In that post, I abstracted five statements from The Iliad:

H1. Supernatural causation is part of the explanation for natural events.
H2. Supernatural causation is more powerful than natural causation.
H3. The supernatural is personal.
H4. Consequently, supernatural causation is sometimes whimsical and so inconsistent and so makes long range prediction unreliable.
H5. Consequently, ethics is a matter mostly of power — revere gods and kings not because they’re just but because they’re powerful.

Now let’s return to Thales and the birth of a new worldview:

“The first principle and basic nature of all things is water.”

Thales’ first principle is water. If it is water, then it is not the gods. The gods have become at most secondary, so we have at least an implicit challenge to H2.

Also, the basic nature of all things is water. Water is a natural phenomenon, not a supernatural one, so we have at least an implicit denial of H1.

Why water? No doubt Thales has observed the weather cycle, the flowing of rain into streams and eventually to the sea, the critical importance of water to all living things, that water can be transformed from liquid to solid and back and from liquid to gas and back — and that it does so with a regularity. It’s not that nobody had noticed regularities in nature before Thales. But if water is the first principle of all of things, then all of reality is regular. So we have at least an implicit challenge to H4.

We are well on our way to thinking of nature as a self-contained, self-governing, regular physical system of cause and effect.

It’s also clear that Thales’ statement is based on observations of transformations from liquid to gas to solids, and so on. So he is not basing his views on traditional stories handed down through the ages. And he is offering an explanatory hypothesis for those observations. Observation integrated with explanation is a hallmark of a naturalist, philosophical approach.

Subsequent Presocratics argued with Thales. (By contrast, who would ever argue with Homer?) Anaximenes held that fire was a better first-principle candidate than water, as did Heraclitus. Anaximander (my favorite Presocratic) held that having only one basic state of being, whether water or fire, was too reductionist, and so proposed that water, air, earth, and fire were in a cyclical transformation in and out of a “boundless” state. And others entered the fray.

The Presocratics are now using reason in a different way. It’s not clear that are self-conscious about the new method of thinking. But they are no longer thinking in Homeric principles and the new thinkers very quickly become incredulous and scornful when the Homeric and other stories are taken as more than fanciful literature. Hecataeus of Miletus (550-489), who died 19 years before the birth of Socrates, is representative:

“What I write here is the account of what I considered to be true. For the stories of the Greeks are numerous and, in my opinion, ridiculous.”

A new way of thinking has begun. Philosophy and the sciences have been launched and quickly flourish.

As for H5 and the development of a philosophical approach to ethics, that story is worth another, later post, and involves the innovations of Hesiod and other giants. Great stuff.

Related: Medical politics in ancient Greece.

Philosophy begins: Why Thales?

The standard claim is that philosophy begins with Thales.

When I teach this to my students, it’s a hard sell, for here are the founding texts in philosophy — ascribed to Thales by Aristotle:

“The first principle and basic nature of all things is water.”

and

“All things are full of gods.”

You can imagine how impressed my students are.

Clearly, some interpretation is necessary. Why do historians of philosophy get worked up over these lines?

To see their significance, let’s set a context by going back to the worldview of the awesomely great Homer. I’ll do this context-setting in the next post in this sequence, and the meantime will give us a chance to brush up on The Iliad, which I want to use as our pre-philosophy-worldview contrast object.

Focus on this question: Why did Hector die?