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He even allows them to imitate bad characters provided they do so not seriously - only in play, in order to ridicule them (396ce). Plato not only allows, but he requires his young Guardians to imitate - to play the part of, to act like - various good characters. The long account of the expurgation of stories that attribute immorality to gods and heroes depends on the necessity of poetic imitation to their upbringing. Plato, as the long discussion of poetry in Books II and III has made clear, depends crucially on poetry, which he considers mimesis or imitation, that is, acting like someone else, to educate the future leaders of his city. (398a)īut note that Plato, though not everyone remembers it, goes on:īut, for our own good, we ourselves should employ a more austere and less pleasure- giving poet and story-teller, one who would imitate the speech of a more decent person and who would tell his stories in accordance with the patterns we laid down when we first undertook the education of our soldiers. We should pour myrrh on his head, crown him with wreaths, and send him away to another city. It seems, then, that if a man, who through clever training can become anything and imitate anything, should arrive in our city, wanting to give a performance of his poems, we should bow down before him as someone holy, wonderful, and pleasing, but we should tell him that there is no one like him in our city and that it isn't lawful for there to be. In Book III, a famous passage is usually quoted as proof that Plato banished the artist: The Republic's main discussion of art occurs in Books II and III and then again in Book X.
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It implants the wrong values its power is itself a reason we find the Republic repugnant today: if our souls were free of Homer's heroes, we would realize that the work's depressing austerity is really transcendent harmony. Plato, on this picture, believes that art perverts and corrupts: being simply "imitation", it makes us attached to the wrong things - things of this world rather than eternal Forms - and depicts vile and immoral behavior on the part of the gods and humans as if it were normal or admirable. One of those reasons, which is also a main reason the Republic has disturbed so many people over the centuries, is supposed to be the fact that the ideal city will contain no art. Plato really believes his world is the best there is and that its people are as happy as human beings can be. A combination of 1984 and Brave New World, the Republic is more disturbing than both not only because of its immensely larger scope but also because it is completely free of their cynicism. And, Plato argues, we would be happier with their choices than we ever could be if we chose our lives for ourselves under the circumstances of our everyday world. That choice would be left to the philosophers among us - a small class, definitely not that of philosophy professors today, who know what is good, just and right for every citizen.
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Plato's Republic, I hope, is one of the most disturbing books you have ever read: a casual conversation about old age, through an immense series of small steps, to which, though most seem reasonable, we are never allowed to object (Glaucon and Adeimantus are always there ahead of us with their unending "Yes, of course, Socrates"), results in an obsessively detailed description of a social organization in which most people in this room, despite our qualifications, would have ended up either as laborers or soldiers through no obvious choice of our own.