Musical Mimesis and Political Ethos in Plato’s Republic
| Author | Nina Valiquette Moreau |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591715591587 |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
research-article2015
Plato’s Attachments
Political Theory
2017, Vol. 45(2) 192 –215
Musical Mimesis and
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591715591587
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Republic
Nina Valiquette Moreau1
Abstract
This essay argues that Plato’s Republic includes a widely overlooked
meditation on the affective dimension of political judgment. This meditation
occurs in the passages on music. In music, Plato identifies the possibility
of an extra-rational aesthetic activity that prepares the soul for reasoned
judgment: he makes musical mimesis the precondition to logos (speech,
reasoned account) because of its ability to actualize in the soul the very
ethos required of sound judgment. Music is able to do this because it is
not imagistic; music does not produce mediated representations but rather
produces alterations in the condition of the soul itself. These alterations
are made possible because the soul itself is structured musically. If music
actualizes the conditions of the soul, so too does the soul instantiate the
conditions of music. In his treatment of musical mimesis, Plato thereby
makes disposition, or affect, the defining feature of sound judgment.
Keywords
Plato, Republic, aesthetics, judgment, music
We usually frame the aesthetic question in Plato in relation to the banishment
of the poets from the ideal city in speech of the Republic and the claim here
that there is a “famous quarrel” between philosophy and poetry (607b). 1 This
1University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Nina Valiquette Moreau, University of Chicago, Gates-Blake 439, 5845 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL
60637, USA.
Email: ninavmoreau@uchicago.edu
Valiquette Moreau
193
claim suggests to most scholars that there is an antipathy between poetry and
philosophy that bears significantly upon the Platonic political project. Yet
insofar as Plato is in varying ways hostile towards poetry even while he
engages in a manifold philosophical assimilation of it—Plato writes in a kind
of poetic form and creates poetic myths within the dialogues, where in certain
instances he also seems to allow for the pedagogical and political usefulness
of poetry—this antipathy also appears to require resolution. Although schol-
ars identify two great themes that dominate Plato’s treatment of poetry in
various places in the corpus, namely, inspiration and mimesis, the Republic
itself addresses only the latter. Thus mimesis, which we understand to mean
artistic imitation or representation, is not only believed to be central to the
quarrel but is also generally understood to be the correct “aesthetic lens”
through which to resolve the complications the quarrel brings to bear on
Plato’s philosophy of art and Platonic political philosophy, more generally.2
I argue in this paper, however, that Plato treats of another kind of mimesis
in the Republic—namely, musical mimesis—in the service of developing a
more nuanced form of civic judgment (krinein).3 I develop the argument in
three parts. First, I turn to existing contemporary scholarship to show that
scholars who examine mimesis in the Republic stay within certain passages
of Books 2, 3, and 10, on the one hand, and understand the quarrel between
philosophy and poetry named at Republic 10 to circumscribe Plato’s mimetic
concerns, on the other. I show that the power Plato ascribes to music to model
the soul according to aesthetic and ethical content outside of these passages,
most notably in the education of the guardians of the city in speech, poses a
serious challenge to these interpretations.4 Next, I marshal the historical
sources to which Plato makes reference in the musical passages of the
Republic, to show that his philosophical treatment of music is grounded in
fifth-century BCE musical debates that were also deeply political. I show
here that for the ancient Greeks, music and politics were intimately con-
nected: most particularly, music was understood to share in the same intrinsic
properties as law, namely, the capacity for order, establishment, and restora-
tion. Finally, I turn back to the Republic to delimit Plato’s philosophical treat-
ment of musical mimesis. Plato’s treatment of music, I argue, not only
underscores the mutual embeddedness of aesthetics and politics, but also ulti-
mately shows that the presence of disposition, or affect, is a defining feature
of political judgment.
Poetic Mimesis
Scholars who study mimesis in Plato generally agree on the significance of
the following narrative: First, in Book 2 of the Republic, Socrates advances a
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critique of poetry that focuses on its content: the poets are here accused of
creating false stories (muthoi) about the gods that set bad examples for the
young who cannot yet distinguish between truths and falsehoods (377e-392c).
In Book 3, the focus shifts from the content of poetry to its form or style
(lexis): these stories are told through straight narration (diegesis), mimesis, or
some combination of the two (392d; 394c). Socrates here isolates the mimetic
component of poetry as its deceptive part: when Homer narrates in his own
voice in the Illiad he does not hide himself whereas when he speaks “as if he
were” Chryses, begging Agamemnon to release his daughter, he engages in a
kind of deceptive impersonation (392d-394c). Finally, in Book 10, the dis-
tinction between impersonation (mimesis) and straight narration (diegesis)
collapses: here all poetic discourse is characterized as mimetic, where mime-
sis now denotes a kind of image-making comparable with painting. The
painter is like someone holding up a mirror (596d-e); he produces mere
reflections of objects in the sensible world, objects which are less real than
the Forms, which are true reality. The tragic poet is just this sort of artist: he
paints verbal images of people, events, and things that are also a third removed
from the truth (597e; 600e-601a); the poet has “no worthwhile knowledge of
the things he imitates” (602b-c) precisely because he appeals to our “desires,
pleasures and pains” (607d). Poetic mimesis thus corrupts the soul. It uses
“trickery” rather than truth and appeals to the base appetites and passions
rather than rationality (602c-608b). The poets are thus banned from the city
in speech with the famous claim that there is an “ancient quarrel” between
philosophy and poetry (607b).
There are significant and extensive controversies regarding what in fact
Plato is saying about mimesis in Books 2, 3, and 10, as well as how these
relate to one another and whether they are ultimately compatible.5 These con-
troversies fall outside my immediate concerns, but I do want to underscore
three interrelated points of scholarly consensus germane to the topic at hand.
First, scholars of mimesis in the Republic all look primarily to the three sec-
tions outlined in the brief exposition above in order to articulate, on the one
hand, what they think Plato meant by mimesis and, on the other, the compat-
ibilities or incompatibilities between the different senses of the term which he
elucidates. Second, the terms of the quarrel between poetry and philosophy,
as articulated by these scholars, depend upon the intervening tripartite divi-
sion of the soul (in Book 4) and theory of the Forms (in Books 5 and 6).
Accordingly, mimetic poetry is banned from the ideal city in speech by some
scholars on psychological grounds (it appeals to the destabilizing appetitive
and desiring lower parts of the soul and thus subverts reason),6 and epistemo-
logical grounds (poets are regarded as possessing and conveying knowledge
when in fact they only produce pleasurable images of images)7 or because it
Valiquette Moreau
195
works through imaginative identification, which is considered dangerous by
Plato.8
These interpretations of the quarrel all depend on a general understanding
of poetic mimesis as a primarily logocentric activity, where logos is under-
stood in its narrow sense as speech, or reasoned account. Socrates certainly
identifies language as the poet’s imitative tool: on the one hand, the poet
engages in mimesis when he speaks in the voice of another, and on the other,
he creates mimetic images painted in speech. Whether through imperson-
ation, or representation, or both, the poet uses language mimetically; this
activity is particularly dangerous precisely because of the psychological,
epistemological, and metaphysical deceptions made possible through “false-
hoods in words” (382b-d).9 Of course, one significant problem with focusing
on a logocentric mimesis as the point of distinction between philosophy and
poetry is that Platonic philosophy, presented in dialogue form, is itself
mimetic. It is thus not mimesis per se, but the mimetic relationship of lan-
guage to reality that appears to be at stake in the quarrel. In order to recuper-
ate mimesis in the service of Platonic philosophy, certain scholars thus draw
a distinction between good and bad mimesis, where good mimesis is under-
stood as the philosophical imitation of the Forms, and where the Platonic
dialogues and the myths created therein are the only type of poetic represen-
tation accepted by Plato.10
I argue, however, that there is a non-logocentric characterization of poetic
mimesis in Book 3 of the Republic, having to do with musical...
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