May Our Gods be (un)Poetic
By: Chaidie Petris
Tags: Plato, Religion, Classics, History, Education

May Our Gods be (un)Poetic

Justice and religious education in Plato’s Republic

Image from Prospect Magazine.

Perhaps the only entities more revered than philosopher-kings in Plato’s Republic are the gods. Perfection, to him, is defined as the epitome of justice, virtue, goodness, and other ideals Plato categorizes as forms (abstract and immortal concepts that transcend the human perception of time and space). Since the gods epitomize all these ideal values in the Ancient Greek world, Plato’s education of the guardians provides the gods as a model for such qualities as justice.

In an exchange between Socrates and Adeimantus in Book II of Republic, Plato argues that ‘imitators’ or poets, who portray the gods as fallible, are misrepresenting the gods and shouldn’t be allowed. In other words, the value of poetry is measured in its ability to correctly portray (models of) justice and such values to the guardians (imperfect citizens). But why must the guardians assume the gods are good?

Plato removes the poet because he either assumes the gods’ inherent goodness or considers guardians mentally incapable of pondering it. However, the capacity to genuinely know justice inherently involves personal puzzle-solving, so I would argue that a) we cannot know whether the gods are really good, and b) it would be necessary to encourage the guardians’ exposure to many imitations to maximize their knowledge of potential truths in order to educate them (and have them educate themselves) in justice.

Plato uses the gods as a model of justice for the guardians, but I would argue that not only do we not know if the gods are really good, but that the fact that Plato says guardians are capable of justice necessitates their ability to form their own conclusions about the gods. Plato argues that we learn justice from good examples of gods in stories, and proposes that there are right and wrong ways to portray the gods. The following argument emerges:

P1) Gods are completely good. (Republic 379a10)

P2) Things that are good don’t cause bad effects. (Republic 379b1)

C1) Gods don’t cause bad effects. (from P1, P2) (Republic 379b2-c5)

The premises support the conclusion that gods don’t generate bad effects, but the first premise that the gods are good isn’t necessarily true because 1) he offers no justification for this assertion and 2) if the gods embody the perfection of the forms, then perhaps they hold the negative perfections as well (forms must, in addition to beauty, include ugliness) — we cannot really say as forms are, even to philosopher-kings, something spectated. This renders the argument unsound, while valid (only if its premises are true will its conclusion be true also).

His neglect of justifying the gods’ goodness is perhaps partly cultural — the existence of gods was not only an acceptable but a necessary assumption in Ancient Greece. Plato might here posit that for practicality’s sake we should stick with the conception of a perfect god to teach justice since the guardians aren’t capable of higher reasoning, regardless of whether Plato himself believes in good gods (or any gods at all). But he also allows that guardians are capable of justice, and I would argue that only a superficial understanding of justice would be possible under a superficial framework of understanding;[1] in order to achieve an ideal of justice, guardians are not only capable but obliged to use their own reason to discover what justice is for them.[2] This problematizes the restrictions Plato imposes on literature, which provide a limited scope of information on which guardians can stake their beliefs.

Plato argues that poetic works that misrepresent justice must be removed, but he assumes philosopher-kings can differentiate good from evil representations, and further neglects that even ‘good’ lessons about justice can be used to inform injustice. For an education in justice, Plato opines that it is necessary to portray gods, who can only do good, as only doing good. In summary, his claims on Homer continue the previous argument (new elements in bold):

C1) Gods don’t cause bad effects. (from P1, P2) (Republic 379b2-c5)

P3) Homer says that gods cause bad effects. (Republic 379d1–5)

C2) Homer’s depiction of the gods is false. (From C1, P3) (Republic 379c7–379e1)

Further, he generalizes this argument from Homer’s representations to all ‘false’ poetic representations:

C2) Homer’s depiction of the gods is false. (From C1, P3) (Republic 379c7–379e1)

P4) Homer is a poet.[3]

C3) Homer’s representation of the gods is a poet’s untrue representation of the gods. (From C2, P4) (Republic 379c7, 380a)

The problem with his arguments for removing the poets based on misrepresentation of the gods is twofold. 1) If we cannot know whether the gods exemplify only good traits, we do not know if Homer (or any other poet) misrepresents them, and 2) even if we assume that Homer misrepresents the poets, there is no guarantee that only providing a positive model will encourage positive actions.

To elaborate, teaching stories with good examples of just gods to the guardians doesn’t automatically mean that they will use that knowledge to be more just, they could just as easily use it to inform acting more unjustly. Whether or not you remove the negative example, moral choices still exist. This problematizes Plato’s argument for only good examples, so perhaps a more genuine understanding of both justice and injustice would put guardians in a more knowledgeable position to choose whether or not to act justly.

The need for poets to reason their own way to justice suggests that guardians would need more ‘imitations’ or poetic representations rather than Plato’s preference for censorship. We have shown that the true nature of the gods is like a puzzle that we have an excess of pieces to solve; we should consider them all and then create the picture that makes the most sense to ourselves out of them. This is because there is an active element to knowledge and acting justly, so genuine justice is something you have to discover on your own. Clearly, this problematizes the following argument that Plato makes:

C3) Homer’s representation of the gods is a poet’s untrue representation of the gods. (From C2, P4) (Republic 379c7, 380a)

P5) False representation should only be allowed when it is useful. (Republic 377e6–7)

P6) False representation is useful only when it is a lie of words and not a true lie.[4] (Republic 379d)

C4) No poet’s false depiction of the gods is helpful. (From C1, C3) (Republic 380a-b)

P7) Homer’s depiction of the gods can’t be allowed. (From C4, P5, P6) (Republic 379c5-d5)

C5). Any poet’s false depiction of the gods can’t be allowed. (From P5, P6, P7) (379d-380a)

To meet Plato on his own terms, let us assume that ‘useful’ or beneficial can here be equated to lending as complete an education as possible of justice. Unfortunately, he does not here provide an instance of when exactly lies of representation are acceptable, but later in “Book II” he differentiates “true lies” from “lie(s) in words” (382a, 382 b-c). A true lie is a lie misleading reason and a lie of words a sort of useful lie to serve an ultimate end of justice and truth.

Plato, assuming the gods were good, likely categorized poetic imitation under the first kind of lie, but as we have shown that we cannot assume the gods are good, it moves to the second: poetic accounts can serve as a useful means to an end by allowing us to see as many potential truths as possible. By potential truths I mean interpretations of justice that poets have composed, that may or may not really be true. Plato famously argues that identifying your own ignorance is pivotal to his wisdom. In that case, shouldn’t the student be exposed both to Homer and Plato’s versions of the truth? And, for that matter, as many other accounts on gods as there are people to imagine them — in order to come to more of an understanding of the many possibilities of truth?

One might argue that we should stick to Plato’s assumption of the gods’ goodness for education’s sake, but I think that this minimizes the usefulness of poetic art. For one, it assumes that ‘imitators’ cannot be knowledgeable about justice (what if the poet is a philosopher-king?), and secondly, poetry and other art forms have value in creating puzzles that people have to solve. Guardians are capable of solving these puzzles because in order to be just they have to understand justice, and in order to understand justice they have to reason it out for themselves. The philosopher kings can be part of this, by supplying different poetic forms. But the art forms have to be diverse (cannot be limited) in order for the guardians to have a genuine puzzle to solve. A real sense of justice is one you have to find on your own. In summary: to study a truth that we cannot definitively know, we should not limit perspectives as Plato suggests; we should rather increase them and allow each to come to their own conclusion.

Plato’s argument that justice can only be reached by teaching ‘correct’ versions of the gods provides a superficial framework insufficient for teaching genuine justice and hinges on the assumption of the gods’ goodness. In order to reach genuine knowledge of justice, it would be necessary to increase the guardians’ access to potential truths — since Plato acknowledges they can be just, they must also be able to reason to get there. It would seem that while Plato’s idea of censorship might work in theory, in reality, teaching someone only good doesn’t prevent them from doing evil.

Plato presents a black and white view of good and bad poetry and trusts only philosopher-kings to discern between them. But perhaps he gives the guardians too little credit by saying they can act justly (understand justice) but are not able to reason to get there. He assumes that to understand true knowledge you must hide yourself from bad or false knowledge. However, I would posit that your understanding of the good would be much more complete if you learned all the possibilities and then selected the knowledge that you deemed most appropriate. This is where the idea of personal puzzle-solving comes in; the philosopher-kings can’t solve all the puzzles for everyone or it would be just the philosopher kings, not the guardians, who are just.

Perhaps, if Plato were to read this, he would discard it as yet another false representation. But to me, it’s just my own way of puzzling out the truth, and as for whether or not the image I’ve pieced together is true for you as well, I’ll leave that up to you.

Appendix

Plato’s full argument, in premise-conclusion form: *(P, premise; C, conclusion)

P1) Gods are completely good. (Republic 379a10)

P2) Things that are good don’t cause bad effects. (Republic 379b1)

C1) Gods don’t cause bad effects. (from P1, P2) (Republic 379b2-c5)

P3) Homer says that gods cause bad effects. (Republic 379d1–5)

C2) Homer’s depiction of the gods is false. (From C1, P3) (Republic 379c7–379e1)

P4) Homer is a poet.

C3) Homer’s representation of the gods is a poet’s untrue representation of the gods. (From C2, P4) (Republic 379c7, 380a)

P5) False representation should only be allowed when it is useful. (Republic 377e6–7)

P6) False representation is useful only when it is a lie of words and not a true lie.

C4) No poet’s false depiction of the gods is helpful. (From C1, C3) (Republic 380a-b)

P7) Homer’s depiction of the gods can’t be allowed. (From C4, P5, P6) (Republic 379c5-d5)

C5) Any poet’s false depiction of the gods can’t be allowed. (From P5, P6, P7) (379d-380a)