Plato: Censorship

Plato famously banishes the poets from his ideal city in book X of his Republic. Yet in this banishment Plato establishes the boundaries of reason, art and poetry — boundaries that have haunted western thinkers since antiquity. In this article I will explore those Platonic boundaries, specifically the intellectual limits of poetic writing as reflected upon by self-identified Platonist Alain Badiou. That being said, I am not attempting, strictly speaking, to look at Badiou’s interpretation of Plato’s banishment of poetry. Instead, (...) I am using the banishment as a springboard for discussion of Badiou’s notion of poetry as the ‘birth of truth’ in his Handbook of Inaesthetics. I will examine the way this text interacts with Plato’s conceptual banishment. I assert that this interaction should illuminate the status of writing — especially artistic writing — in the state. (shrink)

Interpretations of Plato’s consideration of poetry often see his position either as a rejection or an admittance of only a certain kind. This article offers a more complex analysis: questions concerning the nature of justice and poetry should be taken as mutually illuminating inquiries. This constitutes Plato’s hermeneutics which shows how understanding poetry ideally effects a metanoia (new understanding) that requires the harmony between ethical deliberation and narrative self-understanding. The dialogue is a mimesis of this process, and the conclusion in (...) Book X does not represent Plato’s final position but the trajectory of the dialogue when such a metanoia is incomplete. (shrink)

Stanley Rosen's latest book is a collection of essays, the first of which gives the collection its title. The essays are undated, presumably as a way of emphasizing their continuity, but are said to "have been written at various times during the past thirty years" ; some of them are published here for the first time. Although most are on Plato, two are on Aristotle, and two on contemporary continental philosophy. The collection displays Rosen's considerable skill at wide-ranging, scholarly, and (...) insightful philosophical interpretation and criticism, in the service of a fundamental concern about the nature and possibilities of philosophy. It is undoubtedly the best introduction to his work as a whole. The following summaries, necessarily inadequate, observe the order in which the essays appear in the book. (shrink)

The novelist blends philosophy and metaphysics to examine the nature and origin of Plato's hostile views toward art and its role in life.