Article المقال ( Septembre )

A Republic with No Poetry?

Written by : Prof. Essam Fattouh

Department of English

Faculty of Arts – University of Alexandria

 

O

ne of the most iconic and widely read texts of the ancient world, studied and discussed by students of philosophy and literature, globally and down the ages, is surely Plato’s Republic. In this, one of the very first known works of utopian literature – written c. 380 BC, centuries before the term ‘utopian’ was ever invented – the great philosopher gives us his vision of an ideal society. Ruled over by a benign philosopher-king, who determines the laws by which the citizens are to live, and who rules over a class of ‘guardians’, who direct people’s lives from day to day, it is a state in which women have few or no rights –  they and their children being held as a common resource for the state as a whole; and where slaves have none.

In discussions of the Republic, it is not always remarked to what extent, in Plato’s emphasis on the presence of a citizen army of war-ready males, his ideal society draws not only on the legal requirement in Athens, for each freeborn citizen to be trained and prepared for war, but on the far sterner, more aggressively militaristic ideals of Athens’ rival state of Sparta.  Any society that pursues militarism as an ideal of manhood, and that maintains a standing army, is likely, sooner or later, to assert itself in military conflict with neighbouring states – as economic expansion and competition lead to war.

The quasi-militaristic ethos of Plato’s imaginary state sternly discourages anything that might tend to undermine the martial spirit of the citizens.  This is why even the epic poetry of Homer –although it tells of heroic actions undertaken in the cause of a Greek victory over Troy – is to be outlawed in Plato’s ideal republic. Such poetry may, it is argued, lead to ethical confusion, blur the distinctions between fact and fiction – and, in the last resort,function as an escape from full participation in the life of the state. Poetry in general, according to Plato, tends to undermine the fighting spirit of the citizens – to render them emotional, dreamy, lacking in decisiveness and courage for action. (The sound of the flute, too, is to be outlawed, as making men soft-hearted and effete.)

We may well ask, then: what are the implications of Plato’s recommendation to ban poetry from his world?  Poetry – any imaginative literature – that evokes states of emotion, that describes human motives, that asks us to imagine other lives, and situations different from our own, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, is surely capable of broadening our understanding of human nature, of widening our perceptions, of endowing us with greater empathy for other people. The Athenians themselves turned to their great tragic dramas by Sophocles and Euripides, to do just that.  Plato would cut his citizens off from poetry’s great life-giving fountain of the human imagination.

One has to ask oneself, therefore: Is his world – a world without poets – one in which life would even be worth living?

 

Beirut, 18/9/2020