I. Prologue

Plato once wrote a text called The Republic, and it is commonly used today as an introductory text to political thought. It’s a heavy analogue, where a man says to Socrates, ‘What do you think of this?’ and Socrates says, ‘Well, this is what I think…’ and continues for eight or so pages. Then, another man says to Socrates, ‘What do you think of this other thing?’ and Socrates continues. And so it goes.

There are ten chapters, ten books, of this, and it’s very difficult to read. It delves into all manner of politics and social theory, how the heavens are arranged and how humans should be, but the last book, the last piece of ten, is strangely enough, on poetry. Eric Havelock’s amazing Preface to Plato makes clear that since this stands so far out from the rest of the book, that this chapter made people so uncomfortable, that for hundreds of years, a small piece was usually inserted in the margins of the chapter, going along the lines of, ‘It is unclear that this is part of The Republic’. In fact, some printers were convinced that this was not the work of Plato, and did not publish this last chapter, this 10th book.

What Plato said was that in the ideal society, far more nuanced than a mere utopia, there would be no poetry. This was not a totalitarian demand for the elimination of art; far from it. A far more plausible interpretation of what Plato meant is a matter of Homer and his antecedents. In Plato’s analogue of The Republic, in this last chapter, what Plato asks us to think of a society heavily indebted to the poet/leader. Has there ever been a moment in time where a John Wayne was a poet?

There has been, and everyone knows who he is. His name is five letters long. It’s easy.

His name was David. His work was the Psalms, and he held sway over the first military empire of the Israelites.

In what sense can we imagine the poet and the poet’s poetry as central part of the community? This, and I kid you not, was central to Greek society. Plato saw in Homer’s poetry something very wrong, not the poetry itself, but its cultural implications. How can poetry inform people on what is right and wrong?

II. Parados

King Solomon is remembered as being wise. I know I can easily think of situations in my life where I’ve used things on par with King Solomon’s reasoning. In fact, in my family, it grew to such a common occurrence that all one would have to do is call out Solomon! and we’d understand the situation. Keep this in mind.

In Greece, there was a certain judicial practice. You’d appear before the local magistrate and say, ‘My neighbor is a jerk, and he did this.’

Your neighbor would stand up, and in response, say, ‘My neighbor is a jerk, so don’t trust him.’ The ruler would then respond to this with a passage from Homer. He’d point out a literary parallel, or a passage that somehow related to the situation.

’Ah, I am Ajax; my neighbor is Achilles. We all know who was in the right in that situation.’

The decision was not rendered on statutes, but on practices resting on Homeric justice. Thus, a good leader or ruler was a good singer, a good poet. The Greek John Wayne was then seen as one who would listen well, think clearly, and resolve the situation through poetry.

Plato thought that this was wrong. The reasoning behind this – something just wasn’t right. Something didn’t sit with him on this. In the Odyssey, there is an early passage where Odysseus must chose between going off to war and staying to protect his family. He has both an obligation to fight and to stay. He reasoned out his loyalties, weighed his obligations between the small social group and the large society. Odysseus was correct: leaving his family and his community was a poor choice. But so was staying. He did it, for in this conflict, there were no good choices.

But Plato disagreed, not that Odysseus should have stayed home, but that there was an entire alternative notion: the way he arrived there was that Plato realized without poetry, there is only triangles. The alternative to geometry is poetry; for poetry it is geometry.

The options we have to our understanding are actually two: (1) poetry, or (2) geometry.

III. Kabuki

There is the fight between the good itself and the good act. Perhaps I should make this clearer. I see a man help another man, and I tell you to emulate this man. What this man has done is a good act, but it is not good itself. Does this make sense?

There is a lovely message in the New Testament that I find (and many others too) that to be good is to follow Christ. This is the same model as presented to the ancient Greeks. If you were to choose something to follow, you’d follow Christ. But there’s no reason to come to the conclusion that following the works of one man, emulating him, is good in itself. All efforts to solve what is good by good acts is by analogy, and analogy is inherently faulty. What we need is a true triangle. We must see with clarity what sits inside our heads when we see an equilateral triangle. Poetry is looking with the body’s eye, not the ideas that informed the decision. We can learn to reason about things as we do by geometry. The way we do this? We do so by closing our eyes.

The authority of Homer then fails us, for Homeric justice was about good and just acts, not on the good and the just. What are the elements of justice and good? Plato gave postulates, just as in geometry, hints at parameters of the good and the just. Plato seeks the banning of the authority of Homeric justice in society: the emotional, not appeals to reason, for the way the mind responds to poetry, to oratory is different than real debate. Poetry is mimesis, mimicry, joining yourself with another. It is taking your critical thinking, momentarily banning it, and seeing as another would. Poetry is listening with both sympathy and empathy, to such a point where minds join. Reason is not poetry. It is the antithesis; it is about the separation of minds; geometry, reason. What happens when we listen to poetry is we become the poet. It is a willful, uncritical engagement with material, and this is wrong simply because with poetry you cannot critique, cannot observe, because you are part of the story.

IV.

Now there is a division between experience, that of emotion, those of Homeric justice or the ability to see through experience, to see past experience. And how do we systematically see through immediate experience?

I think science is the answer.

In conversation, at times I feel frustrated. I’m denoting far too much, it seems. We all do. We’ve all had to sit someone down at one point in our lives and tell them: Don’t listen to what I’m saying, but listen to what I am talking about; don’t take me literally. This reality is beneath superficial experience. This meaning is implicit. What we have without science is the surface; beyond the surface, beyond poetry, is geometry; science. On the surface, the triangle is only the triangle, but below the representation of the triangle, the image we indicate, is an abstract concept. These conclusions are clear: don’t be distracted by the world of experience. Plato said, ‘If you want to understand the heavens, look at your feet.’ Now, this isn’t the popular view of what he said, but the real view. Plato was talking about triangles, and how we observe triangles. Plato thought that the building blocks of life were triangles. Triangles were the universe – but not just triangles, the abstract concept below the surface of triangles. On the first episode of Car Sagan’s TV show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Sagan said that with this quotation Plato held back science by a thousand years. This is perhaps the most stupid statement made by a very smart man that I respect. Plato wasn’t saying anything like that. Plato was talking about triangles, but not just triangles; about geometry, but not just about geometry; about mathematics, but not just about mathematics; about science.

V.

There is a minor quotation, a translation of Plato’s work, where in the middle of a monologue, Socrates says, ‘I forbid you to say this.’

When you read the sentence, you’re taken aback. It’s as if this whole time a reality TV crew is watching you. What kind of sense is this? I forbid you to say this.

?

…

Ah, but we have graphic ways of signaling things we say. The Greeks did not, as we currently do. If you said the sentence today, it would go something like:

Or, I forbid you to use the word ‘this.’ And it falls into place, and I end my short bit of philosophizing, on why the Bible, or any text for that matter, gives us nothing but temptation to imitate, to fall back to the village. Why the ideal society would not have poetry, or justice derived from imitation of good acts. We should never talk about this triangle, but a triangle, the concept of a triangle. Plato was a true scientist’s philosopher, the antecedent to Popper. We’re looking for abstractions, for general descriptions that agree with all the data, but make future conjectures that work. We’re looking for the triangles, but not the superficial triangles — the real triangles we see after we close our eyes.

What we’re looking for is science.