endobj It is bad because in it the poet, by hiding himself, hides the fictional nature of his work and evades all responsibility for its truth, leaving the actor (or reader) caught in an unwitting imitation. For the narrator, Socrates himself, is always present and responsible, and he keeps himself before us with the ever-recurring phrases “he said” and “I said” (393c11; contrast Theaetetus 143c); nor is he an anonymous mouth-piece whose work a reader reads, as he does the Homeric epics, without ever learning who the poet was. endobj one cannot be courageous without being wise (Protagoras 360d8–e6). 2g. 6. endobj <> <> This is the fourth essay in this series. etc. 2b. This essay originally appeared in the St. John’s Review (Volume 39, Number 1 and 2, 1989 – 1990) and is republished here with gracious permission of the author. At thirty, after another selection, the young philosophers enter upon the long road of dialectic, which again culminates in a synoptic vision, that of the Good itself (540a8). Socrates will not turn this song into expository prose, since “no longer, dear Glaucon, will you be able to follow…for you would no longer be seeing an image of what we are discussing but the truth itself, as it appears to me” (533a1). Socrates’ thus became a celebrated martyr for philosophy. 2d. Nor does it signify much that Plato himself on some occasion did speak to the public in the language of the school, giving out such schematisms as anyone may carry away in his memory or his pocket and as everyone would have heard of anyhow—or that for some students “mathematics had become philosophy, although they say that it should be studied for the sake of something else” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 992a32 ff.). Share with your friends. Rules of Writing Poetry. is abundantly evident in the early or Socratic dialogues, in the fre-quency (I count at least 32 instances. endobj <> <> His image of the Good is the “sun image” or “likeness” (eikona, 509a9, homoioteta, 509c6), which dominates the center of the dialogue. <> The teller is Socrates, backing his own words with the acts of his own life. endobj 3. 12 0 obj 6 0 obj Socrates believed that the virtues constitute a unity – not in the sense that each is identical with the others, but in the sense that they are inter-entailing in such a way that one cannot have any single virtue without having all the others, e.g. First, the gods must always be represented as wholly good and as responsible only for what is good in the world. We must immediately mention an almost paradoxical exception to this: the logos of the cities built “in speech” is, as it were, Socrates’ own myth; he speaks of ”the constitution which we told as a myth in speech” (501e4). endobj Timaeus 29d5, Laws 722c6) And a little later, playing on the double meaning of nomos, law or song, he speaks of the “law which the activity of dialectic fulfills” or the “song which it performs” (532a1). Prince 9.0 rev 5 (www.princexml.com) (We see here, incidentally, one reason why Hesiod, who not only identifies himself but even warns the reader that his source, the Muses, will sometimes lie [Theogony 22, 27], is, if less loved, yet more acceptable to Socrates; Republic 546el, 607c8). 762 0 obj 3 0 obj 789 0 obj 4. The difference between these two views constitutes further evidence for a developmentalist interpretation of Plato. <> endobj Does it have to rhyme or make sense? Repository Citation. Smith, Nicholas D. (2007) "Socrates and Plato on Poetry," Philosophic Exchange: Vol. The very “mathematical” nature of the “Unwritten Teachings” supports this point of view, for it is evidence that there was a live community concerned with what is learnable par excellence, a group for whom the terms of the teaching were pregnant with semi-technical meanings, which, bandied about out of context, become exactly what Plato feared: somewhat fantastic fossils of truth. Consequently, we can distinguish between what Socrates says and what the dialogues say; the most striking example of this is the Phaedrus, which is so written that, when rightly read, it casts doubt on Socrates’ assertion within it that the written word cannot teach (274c ff.)
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