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| Travis Wilson |
By Travis Wilson, Class of 2016
Book X of Plato’s Republic centers around the importance of philosophy and the negative effects of poets on the attainment of justice. Socrates recounts why he was required to banish the poets from the city. His argument is not limited to his specific city, but to society as a whole. This raises questions regarding the role of modern media in our society.
There is no question that the expansive range of media that the population has access to today affects us in many ways. Plato’s argument revolves around the fact that poets do not represent the most realistic aspects of the world and corrupt the soul through their supposed knowledge of great topics, of which they only actually have minimal understanding. Their representations are far removed from reality and often focus on lower ideas than Plato deems acceptable and nurturing to philosophy. This only destroys the souls that come in contact with poetry, while a strict focus on reality and not fictional representations is positive and feeds rationality. Plato recognizes the importance of “changing the pictures” in the minds of the people. The outside influences have an enormous effect on our souls, and negative influences such as the poets, prevent us from living a philosophical life of justice.
In today’s culture, poets are generally replaced on a massive scale by our fictional representations of life conveyed through television, music, movies, and even certain books and visual arts. We are much more bombarded by images and far-flung ideas only appealing to our lowest sensibilities. How must we avoid this problem today? Can we avoid this problem today? Is it possible to keep your soul uncorrupted while maintaining relevance? These are questions that I am not personally qualified to answer, but should remain an important concern for anyone who takes Plato’s philosophy seriously.
Travis Wilson, of Burlington, Ky., is a sophomore McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He is studying history and economics.
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1 comment:
Travis, this is an interesting connection to the modern world, highlighting continued relevance of the ancients to the modern world.
As you say, Plato believes that poetry does not realistically represent the world. For as Plato sees it, poetry is imitation of the representation of the true forms – thus thrice removed from reality. Since poetry is then the furthest from the forms (reality) it is the easy for it to be false (Rep 597e). The implication is then that since Plato believes the intellect indiscriminately absorbs whatever is presented, it is far too easy for someone to believe poetry at face value, without considering to see if it accurately corresponds to reality (Raymond Barfield, The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry page 14: http://tinyurl.com/mxkxzas). Thus poetry is too easily accepted and too easily false.
Your connection between Plato’s view on poetry and modern media is particularly relevant to Plato’s critique of poetry at the beginning of the Republic. He complains that poetry quite often depicts the gods behaving badly (Rep 378b-c). In fact he flat out calls them lies (Rep 377a) and suggests the poets are reveling in their shock value (Gerald Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry page 19: http://tinyurl.com/lgpnops). If modern media (especially TV) likes to do anything, it is revel in shock value – I would even argue to the point that it is no longer shocking. I can certainly see why you and Plato are concerned about this form of expression.
While you don’t see an answer, I have one, or rather Aristotle does. While Plato holds that the intellect accepts depictions at face value, Aristotle believes that we learn through experience, even through imitated experience. In other words, poetry (he focused especially on tragedies) provides us the opportunity to experience events which we would never otherwise be able to know. There is a detailed process for poetry to be beneficially educational which Aristotle lays out in the Poetics. In brief, the viewer perceives some action (usually horrible – such as a man killing his father and marrying his mother – as in the case of Oedipus) and shares in the experience of feeling both pity and terror. The cycle is completed by the catharsis in which the audience realizes that the experience did not actually occur to them, and yet they are able to retain the lesson from the imitated event. It is through this process that Aristotle suggests that poetry can be saved for educational purposes, although he does not deny that it can be used poorly and dangerously. Even though the depictions are of horrible and wicked events, there is a lesson to be learned from the imitated experience.
Television is for us Americans what poetry was for the ancient Greeks. Paul Cantor notes that “Television is constantly creating the myths of contemporary America, stories that exemplify our common experience” (“The Art in the Popular,” page 37: http://tinyurl.com/l2qzmfq). Of course we can experience problems with our own particular medium, just as Plato noticed serious lies expressed in the poetry shared during his time. I think though that the solution for keeping your soul uncorrupted is to seek out the benefits of imitated experience as Aristotle suggests, and learn the lesson easy way. While this will certainly entail trashing the unworthy imitations, it also provides a challenge for producers to supply worthy imitations of experience which are both profound and true.
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