Art is Bad for You

class notes on Republic 10

Crossover post this morning: I’m giving a short talk today on Socrates’ second critique of art in the Republic for Paul Kirkland’s class on politics and aesthetics at Carthage College. The students are using substack in several ways for the class, and I’m adding a few notes here for them to take a look at, and sharing it more broadly to the general reader as well.

Marble sarcophagus lid with reclining couple, ca. AD 220, Met Museum.

In the course of the Republic, Socrates says many outrageous things, but probably the most immediately obnoxious arguments he makes have to do with the problems he sees in art and poetry. Early on, in Book 3, he attempts to edit Homer down to the bare bones of what would be good for his musical-warrior-rulers; yesterday, Dr. Kirkland presented this section as a way of thinking of what Jacques Rancière calls the “ethical regime” of art, where art exists in service of some kind of normative goodness, not for its own sake or for some autonomous principle of beauty. Socrates is quite clear that while there may be beauties in Homer aside from what would serve his ruler-formation (398a), it’s not worth letting the extraneous and distracting things stick around in his ideal city.

This is frustrating enough: by narrowing the fantastically wide scope of Homer to just his limited purposes, Socrates distorts the work of another human into what can only seem a cartoonish rehash. But outside of the pursuit of the perfect warrior-ruler, it’s fairly easy to take a more moderate point from what he says: we don’t think all art helps people be good, or ourselves get into the right mood at the right time, or unjust things in a way that allows us to see their injustice, and we certainly to this day don’t give the unexpurgated Greek myths to children (did your childhood myth book, most likely to be the 1962 D’Aulaire, describe Daphne? Danae? or what really happened to Kronos?). In an important sense, we live in the house that Plato built on this issue.

But by the time nearly all of his listeners are asleep, Socrates offers a second and more difficult critique of poetry and art generally. Instead of some art being not so great for you or for different people at different times of life, he makes an argument that art itself, imitation or mimesis itself, images themselves, are always going to be bad for you, for a handful of metaphysical, epistemic, and psychological reasons. As a result, he insists that a true city must ban all poetic imagery from itself forever (with microscopic exceptions for prayer and encomium). Everyone is to sleepy to disagree, and so Socrates gets away with it, though he generously ends by encouraging the lovers of art to disagree with him at some future point. Till then, he has his fingers in his ears.

As per usual, no one can live with this extreme sort of Socratic vision. But the very extremity of the argument allows the reader to think through what we miss if we give too rosy a cast to our relation to art, or allow our emotional sense that it makes a vital part of our life to go unexamined. As per usual, Platonists disagree on what we are meant to take from Socrates’ critique; some find the poetic form of the Republic to be refutation enough of Socrates’ arguments, while others continue to insist on even more extreme purging of images and imagery from the soul. For myself, particularly in my days as young aesthete, I’ve always found it to be valuable to take Socrates’ prohibition of images as seriously as possible; at the very least, I don’t think an argument for why art is not bad but good can be made without answering his objections.

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Socrates’ second critique of poetry runs from 595a to 608b in Book 10, and I see three main parts in it.

First, from 595a to 598d, Socrates makes what we can call a metaphysical argument, claiming that art is bad because it is three times removed from the truth. To do this, he invokes his pet metaphysical project of the “forms,” in order to contrast their stronger and deeper way of existing with the lightness and triviality of the way that imagery exists. We can’t see or touch a form, but a form is the underlying connecting thread between all instances of a kind that allows us to point out and think of and refer to any existing thing. His example for a “form,” which is the usual translation of the Greek work “eidos,” which can also mean “shape” or “look,” is the form of Bed, which is everyone’s ideal at the time he is talking, since everyone would probably prefer to go to sleep at that point. Socrates seems surprisingly aware of the fractured nature of visual perception, and on his formal grounds, it’s hard to disagree at least initially with his point. See the bed above: we know it’s a bed even though it is different in visual look from most beds we encounter. The image of a bed or a table or a chair gives us a fraction of what we can uncover once we think seriously about what it means to be each thing.

Second, from 595d to 602c, Socrates then makes an argument based on the relation of poets and tragedians to knowledge and truth. This middle one is, I think, his weakest argument. He appeals to his sleepy listeners, asking them if anyone really would prefer to make images of things like beds, tables, chairs, if they could actually make the real thing. Mostly I think we’d answer that we’d prefer to make a painting or a poem, that these things are more difficult and more cool, so I’m curious to discuss his reasoning here. Indeed, there’s a whole genre of poets praising themselves for their magnificent imitative abilities, including the Homer passage discussed last class and showing here, so Socrates once again is not letting the strongest argument get an airing. A favorite example of poetic exultation is Baudelaire’s The Albatross, where the poet admits he looks foolish in ordinary life, yet still possesses a strength and freedom beyond the ordinary.

Third, from 602c to 608b, Socrates finally makes the most compelling argument he has, however, for why art is bad for you, to the extent that perhaps we should leave it behind entirely. This is what I’m today calling his psychological argument: it seems slightly different from the purely ethical/ethos-driven concerns he introduced previously. In this argument, he claims that the pleasure we take in seeing an image of anything will always be fundamentally different from the way we encounter the same things in action and in real life. This is why, he says, we seek out tragic art, for the pleasure we take in grieving over someone else’s troubles, but our self-indulgence makes it impossible for us to remember how to act when we ourselves experience grief. The classic example of this is Hamlet’s anger at his grief over Hecuba from the Iliad, where Hamlet is able to grieve over fiction but unable to find the motivation to act in his own difficult circumstances after the death of his father and remarriage of his mother. Seems like a problem! Eager to discuss.

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Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his whole conceit

That, from her working, all the visage warmed,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing,

For Hecuba!     

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,    

That he should weep for her? What would he do

Had he the motive and the cue for passion

That I have? He would drown the stage with tears . . .

—-

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2.

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One post-class thought about the problem of moderation. Once you see how dependent on images we are, that what we get through the senses remains fractured and imperfect, and that even our ordinary physical reality might be lacking in the full presence of forms we depend on regularly, the question then becomes, well, what do we do? Socrates offers the impossible choice of doing without images, and it’s easy enough to see that we can’t, really; images in language alone are too much a part of our existence to do without. So then, as several students noted, perhaps we simply have to find a balance between the danger of images and the help we get from them. I do agree: I think (on somewhat aristotelian grounds) that this is true of every decision we make—for questions of courage, for example, we have to find the right mixture of fear and confidence that’s appropriate for ourselves for each new situation, and there’s no doing without either fear or confidence, since both give us real information about the world and how best to act. Fear and confidence aren’t fundamentally good or fundamentally bad; they are what they are and it’s our job to figure out how to deal with them well.

But now I’m intrigued about how the danger of images, and also as the other extreme, the enchantment that images offer us, present us with a choice that’s slightly unlike more ordinary situations that call for balance or moderation. Unlike the case of fear, the image in these Socratic terms is always like poison, a distortion; it’s not sometimes good and sometimes bad but always possesses a chaotic aspect that undermines, like sand slipping out of the hand as you try to grasp it. The same goes, I would argue, for its enchanting and most lovable qualities: the power of art and of imagery is such a strong and disorienting good that it can never be just another factor in an overall decision tree. Both the poison and the pleasure in art are more than they contain. I’m getting to the edge of speech but perhaps you see what I mean.

So, practically speaking as human beings, we will still have to try to balance the power of art, to decide which day to listen to gym music, which television writer to trust, which narrative allows you to make sense of your life while recalling that life has no narrative, not really. Maybe what I mean is art is like fire: you need to keep it in your house but it can always burn the house down. This requires not so much balance as vigilance, but a vigilance that nevertheless lets you keep yourself warm.

Very fun to talk with you all, and best of luck with the rest of the term!