Allowing the Poets into the Republic: Plato’s War Against Public Opinion Revisited

By David Gosselin

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All great art has a naturally hypnotic power. Poetry’s lyrical and musical forms of expression have entranced human civilizations for millennia. Even today’s modern “pop” songs are by-and-large distillations and formalizations (often superficial) of earlier classical and lyrical modes of poetic expression. Take the ancient Greek poets like Sappho, Arion and Stesichorus: their verses were accompanied by a musical instrument like the lyre or kithara. From these arts arose the tradition of the lyric song, as in words accompanied by the lyre. Or consider the Ancient Greek dithyrambs, the ecstatic hymns sung and danced in honor of the god Dionysus, and accompanied by the aulos. Whether epic, lyric or dramatic forms, many of our most common modern musical modes of expression are ultimately derivations and adaptations of these earlier classical traditions. 

Today, anyone hearing a pop song can observe its seemingly magical ability to induce what hypnotists call “altered states.” We drive to work, clean or spend time with friends and family while music breathes life into the moment and allows us to access a world of emotion—one which everyday waking consciousness usually forbids. These quasi-hypnotic states of musical suggestion may cause us to feel things we may or may not intent to feel, to relate thoughts and emotions in new or impassioned combinations or solidify with words and rhythms what may have otherwise been a passing, half-waking fancy.

While many of us may hear the word hypnosis and imagine some cartoonish or Hollywoodian Clockwork Orange-style character being force-fed messages in front of a giant screen, the trance-like qualities of poetry and song have always been there. Plato recognized this going back to the times of Ancient Greece, where he keenly observed poetry’s power over the hearts and minds of Greek citizens. In his Republic, he was explicit about the seemingly magical effects invoked by the imagery of the poets, and how this largely shaped the psycho-cosmological matrix of Greek civilization, from its origin stories and gods to its exemplars of virtue and wisdom.  

Indeed, we can observe that whether in the case of the martial and warlike spirit of Homer’s Iliad or the Dionysian fervor of the 1960s Beat and counterculture generations, music and poetry have tended to reflect the emerging or dominant images of man. But one could go further and argue that in many ways these musical trends often shape the images themselves. For instance, consider the “Gallup-poll” effect: the ostensible goal is to provide people with information concerning what the population generally believes or feels, however, opinion polls in and of themselves subtly shape public opinion and belief by signaling “this is what most people believe or desire.” The effect is to legitimize certain issues or positions, frame the ostensible choices related to various questions, and leverage people’s inborn tendency to rely on “the group” as an authoritative source of information and ideas. 

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However, music and poetry may be said to operate in even subtler ways. They not only suggest various ideas and worldviews, the music and rhythms signal how one might think or feel about a given set of experiences or beliefs. Whether the question of fighting a war or wooing a mate, music, art and poetry largely place us in those altered states of affectation which cause us to emote with a subject or object. They do so without any direct or explicit order, but by altering our emotional states in respect to various experiences and ideas. In a word: music and art cause us to feel; and these feelings lead to thoughts.  

Naturally, these altered states say little regarding whether the dreams we dream are good dreams, or if they might turn out to be nightmares down the line, or whether the thing desired is really our desire, rather than a suggestion deliberately placed in our imagination by some clever magician, whether modern or ancient. Having observed the people of Ancient Athens and its neighboring city states, Plato was wise to this reality. For this reason, he pointed out that no sound leader of any society intent on creating a lasting civilization could overlook the power of song and poetry—and ultimately culture—over its citizens. What one might do about the situation is a different story, but that politics is indeed downstream from culture was obvious to Plato over 2000 years ago, as it should be for us today. 

So, in his Laws Plato spoke of songs and poetry as “charms” which exerted an alchemical-like quality over the populace, especially its young people. The effect was to create visceral experiences which promoted certain desires or emotions, upholding specific narratives while discounting others. Whether in Plato’s Republic, Laws or Western civilization today, no ruling power ever takes the artistic trends and messages they convey lightly. 

The Poetics of Truth? 

The purpose of it is to lead young people of ability, and perhaps older people too, gradually, with Reason for our guide, from the things of sense, to God, in order that they may cling to Him who rules all and governs our intelligence, with no mediating Nature between. ... It is the ascent from rhythm in sense, to the immortal rhythm which is in truth.  

—St. Augustine - De Musica 

In his Republic, Plato famously teased out the paradox of what a society intent on its lasting survival would do regarding the state of its poetry and literature—the lifeblood of its culture. So, he playfully asked whether the poets should be allowed into his ideal republic, given their charming power over the populace. For who were the poets of Ancient Greece if not the chief “image-makers” shaping the population’s understanding of its gods, genealogies, their foundational myths and self-image? What happens to a society on a macroscale when these deeply felt emotional bonds and images are incorrect, misleading or perhaps subversive? 

While virtually always reduced to the binary question of whether Plato came down on the side of censorship in an ideal society—and always overlooking his later and more mature dialogues (such as The Laws)—most modern scholars and critics have tended to either obscure or misunderstand the deeper theme running throughout Plato’s countless dramatized thought-experiments—known as his “dialogues.”

Ultimately, all of Plato’s dialogues hinge on the question of whether an ideal society might distinguish between the real thing and its countless imitations, that is, things that might sound or appear Good, Beautiful and True (or perhaps offer one without the other) but lead to something other than the genuine real thing. Whether in respect to the question of art, Justice, Truth, Beauty, the question would ultimately come down to whether the real thing, or merely clever imitations would govern that society’s system of laws, customs and culture. In a word: burning a witch may not always lead to justice; a pretty face doesn’t always signal good intentions; and a delicious mead may still be spiked with poison.

So, Plato would argue that only a fool relies on appearances—or skilled imitators—to assess their knowledge of reality. To drive this point home, he offered his famous parable of the shadows on the cave walls of his Republic. The denizens inhabiting the world of opinion— “doxa”—were the cave-dwellers largely beholden to their immediate sense-perceptual apprehension of reality, from which they derived their view of what’s what. These were the democratic souls and oligarchical souls, the latter controlling the shadows adhered to by the former. 

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While a formalistic definition of poetry might reduce poetics to a mere question of technical forms and quantifiable elements, as Aristotle’s Poetics does, poetry per se can never and should never be reduced to any of its formal elements, lest we mistake the forest for the trees. For instance, Plato’s metaphor of the shadows on the cave wall is itself a supremely poetic metaphor which suggests a transcendent reality that can never be known directly, but always indirectly, through poetry and paradox.

For this reason, Plato consistently relied on rich metaphors and paradoxes throughout his dialogues, rather than literal or descriptive prose. From this standpoint, while Plato is often cast as a character who viewed poetry as a subversive force in society, the irony not lost on any careful reader is that Plato’s dialogues were themselves supremely poetic and playful. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley recognized this when he observed the following in his “Defence of Poetry”: 

Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style.   

For, what is the purpose of poetry if not the reaching after some transcendent reality beyond the scope of our literal or immediate perception? And if it’s not, one might ask why even compose or read poetry in the first place? Why not just say things outright or give some literal description? The existence of poetry is itself a testament to the fact that there is something else, and that this something else requires its own particular mode of expression, namely, metaphor. Through this mode of transcendent expression, mankind is able to work out the meaning of things beyond their surface level, unearth new insights and preserve a people’s precious wisdom in its most memorable forms. 

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On the other hand, if the purpose of poetry were merely to entertain, feel intensely or express some personal subjective experience, it would essentially be no different than any other Hollywood film or melodrama. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey would simply be an ancient version of modern Marvel movies; Sappho’s sublime lyrics would simply be a kind of old-school Taylor Swift love song. In reality, what gives any genuine poetical work its title as poetry proper is its ability to transcend any given literal or personal experience and unearth the universals underlying any set of ostensible particulars or opinions.  

So, Shelley writes: 

The poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s “Paradise” would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more decisive. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley – A Defence of Poetry 

How does one achieve any kind of transcendent insight if not by some poetical conceit? Whether the Psalms of David or the verses of Paul’s epistles, the choruses of Aeschylus or lyrics of Sappho, Shakespeare’s sonnets or Keats’ odes, the reaching after any kind of transcendent natural law or spiritual reality requires some form of poetical expression. As the Renaissance literary giant Boccaccio surmised, poetry likely originated as man’s attempt to express the divine in some utterable form. Indeed, virtually every sacred text and timeless work of art seems to attest to this reality. Take, for instance, observations by the former poet laureate of California Dana Gioia. In his “Poetry and Christianity,” he points out that a poetic tradition was central to the spread of Christianity across the Western world, writing: 

No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse. Sacred poetry is not confined to the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Lamentations. The prophetic books are written mostly in verse. The wisdom books—­Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes—are all poems, each in a different genre. There are also poetic passages in the five books of Moses and the later histories. Prose passages suddenly break into lyric celebrations or lamentations to mark important events. 

On this question, Shelley writes the following in his “Defence of Poetry”: 

It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of this extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid Poetry. 

Ultimately, the purpose of Plato’s poetical “dialogos”—like all great poetry—was to lift the mind above the apprehension of mere particulars—from the Many to the One. This transcendent One would then allow us to see the Many in a new light. 

Allowing the Poets into the Republic? 

Rather than a series of discreet and quantifiable particulars in time, reality for Plato was a series of timeless principles and poetical paradoxes unfolding in time, which had to be confronted and resolved by any mortal wishing to arrive at some meaningful conclusion regarding the nature of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Doing so would allow one to not merely imitate outward forms or display a set of opinions, whether “orthodoxia” (correct opinion) or false ones, but to embody these timeless principles in time—to bridge the world of the One and the Many. Plato posited that the ability to recognize such transcendent Truth, rather than its mere imitations, would ultimately decide whether any just and good socio-political-cultural system could be built and preserved across the ages, lest it be destroyed by the ebbs and flows of time and opinion. 

While Aristotle’s Poetics contained a mere one paragraph on the question of truth in poetry and its ability to represent the real thing in society, Plato dedicated several books to this question, including the concluding book of The Republic and second book of The Laws, among others.

Quite famously, Plato in his Republic playfully comes for Homer himself, the prince of poets. He does so by calling into question Homer’s representation of Goodness, Truth and Beauty as embodied in the representations of gods, heroes, their origins and struggles. For, the Homeric heroes could be characterized as individuals in the pursuit of honor and glory, represented as legended Bronze Age warriors and the often-fickle gods whom they served. From Plato’s standpoint, while the treatment of such stories by the poets may have been compelling or true in certain respects, they could still be merely artful “imitations,” and be misleading in other respects. Hence, Plato’s playful prodding concerning poetry’s prospects in his ideal republic. 

In Book X of his Republic, Plato begins to tease out his question in following manner:  

...must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures. 

Quite so. 

In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well—such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose. 

Yes, he said. 

They are like faces which were never really beautiful, but only blooming; and now the bloom of youth has passed away from them? 

Exactly. 

Here is another point: The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of true existence; he knows appearances only. Am I not right? 

Yes.  

Here, Plato plays with the idea that just because one can paint compelling images or pleasing scenes that appear true to experience of the world, and feel true, that in and of itself is not a standard for Truth. For, the images we create, however beautiful, may or may not be representative of reality. In Plato’s terms, they could be rooted in genuine knowledge (episteme) or merely opinion (doxa). This is no different than suggesting that just because one has had only pleasing or positive experiences with an individual, that this individual is therefore a good person or holds good, true and beautiful ideas. For, many considered Jesus himself to simply be a subversive rabble rouser calling into question the Laws, and many considered Socrates as simply a good talker skilled at confusing clever sophists. In both cases, opinion ruled that these figures were better off put to death. For Plato everything came down to the question of how a society might move beyond the realm of opinion and finally “exit the cave.” 

So, our positive or negative affectations towards any given person or images may or may not be indicative of what makes a genuinely good or intelligent person in the same way that the collective opinions of a society in respect to what is Good, True and Beautiful may or may not be in line with what actually is Good, True and Beautiful. Unless one sought and desired to know the real thing, Plato observed that individuals and society would ultimately remain the inhabitants of the realm of “doxa” i.e. beholden to the shadows on the cave wall. And that meant that the oligarchs and plutocrats would continue to be the ones manipulating the shadows and shaping the narrative matrix of the age until, of course, that society came apart—and the tyrants came in to restore “order.” 

Returning to the Republic’s playful polemic, Plato does something which many academic commentators ignore: he offers his listeners an opportunity to come to the defense of poetry and clarify any missing elements or nuances concerning poetry’s ability to not only please and entrance audiences but to capture truth and serve the greater good.

From Trance to Transcendence: Reflections on Saving a Dying Republic

So, he writes: 

And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described; for reason constrained us. But that she may not impute to us any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the saying of ‘the yelping hound howling at her lord,’ or of one ‘mighty in the vain talk of fools,’ and ‘the mob of sages circumventing Zeus,’ and the ‘subtle thinkers who are beggars after all’; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between them.  

Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation, that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her—we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the truth. I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as I am, especially when she appears in Homer? 

Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed. 

Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon this condition only—that she make a defence of herself in lyrical or some other metre? 

Certainly. 

And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers—I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight? 

Plato further elaborates the dangers of simply relying on the beautiful appearances of imagery and the emotions they stir, making the point that for just that reason, because they were Beautiful (without necessarily being True or Good), they might be more compelling and exercise an undue influence over the population, its hearts and minds. For, what is Beauty alone without Wisdom, or Goodness? How might such a society behave or be easily led to faulty conclusions, simply by virtue of the “charming” nature of the imagery, and the pleasure they give? 

So, Plato writes: 

If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we after the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle. We too are inspired by that love of poetry which the education of noble States has implanted in us, and therefore we would have her appear at her best and truest; but so long as she is unable to make good her defence, this argument of ours shall be a charm to us, which we will repeat to ourselves while we listen to her strains; that we may not fall away into the childish love of her which captivates the many. At all events we are well aware that poetry being such as we have described is not to be regarded seriously as attaining to the truth; and he who listens to her, fearing for the safety of the city which is within him, should be on his guard against her seductions and make our words his law. 

Yes, he said, I quite agree with you. 

Yes, I said, my dear Glaucon, for great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if under the influence of honour or money or power, aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue? 

However, we should point out that The Republic was far from Plato’s last dialogue. It was in many ways his first great thought-experiment, but hardly his last. For instance, in his later and more mature thought-experiment, The Laws, Plato describes the need for a chorus which meets three criteria: correct knowledge of the subject imitated, truthful portrayal of the imitation, and that the imitations themselves be correctly executed. In this way, the goal of a great performance would not be to offer pleasure so much as to capture the real thing, which when successfully done, would naturally please and uplift the soul, and delight the senses. 

Plato playfully illustrates his example by having an old Athenian’s Cretan and Spartan interlocutors imagine the unfolding of a dramatic event which offers the performance of three different works: a puppet show, a comedy and a tragedy. These would be performed before an audience composed of all demographics of Greek society, including children, young adults and elders. If asked to judge the performances and select their favorite, Plato observed that the children would likely find the puppet show the most pleasing; the young adults would find the comedies most pleasing; and only the majority of the wiser elders would likely prefer the tragedies. So, from this standpoint, pleasure and entertainment itself could never be a standard for judging which was the highest and most developed of the art forms and representations, lest immaturity, vice, and misleading images proliferate and solidify in the hearts and minds of the population—especially the younger ones. 

At this point, one could observe that modern Western culture is arguably a prime example of what happens when pleasing imitations triumph over the real thing.  

This brings us to the question of poetics as such: can poetry capture the “real thing,” or is poetry merely a form of cathartic release, finely crafted images and refined form of leisure for aesthetes? That is, can poetry lead us to knowledge (episteme) of Goodness, Truth and Beauty, or merely opinion (doxa)? What happens to a population which can’t make such distinctions? The possibilities are endless, but no shortage of historical examples exists. 

Whether in respect to poetry, justice or statecraft, all of Plato’s dialogues were essentially dedicated to this One question, which subsumed the Many subjects and themes of his dialogues. At this point, we might observe that the legacy of evil across history may very well be understood as the legacy of imitation. For, the cleverer and more compelling a cause or idea may be made to appear, the more convincing, and therefore subversive, becomes its power. 

But how to resolve this paradox?  

To further explore such questions, let us fast forward to our own modern Western narrative matrix and entertain Plato’s playful paradox a little longer. 

Public Opinion Revisited  

Rhetoric, propaganda, and the “magical” qualities of language have been used to shape mass opinion for thousands of years, going back to the time of Ancient Rome, Greece, Babylon, Persia et al. Plato observed the phenomenon throughout the socio-politico-cultural matrix of Ancient Athens. For this reason, Book X of The Republic paid particularly close attention to the role of dramatic and epic poets—the chief “image-makers” of Ancient Greece.  

Take the Philosopher himself, Aristotle, who like most rhetoricians and sophists of the day, was in the regular habit of citing poets to support his arguments. Like Plato and others, he did so precisely because poets were believed to be vehicles for divine inspiration, their words being dictated to them by the sacred muses, the daughters of Zeus himself. Thus, in his Politics Aristotle cites Euripides’ verse when discussing the role of slaves in the Greek household, writing “So, as poets say, ‘It is proper that Greeks should rule non-Greeks,’”¹ and proceeds with his argument. Aristotle goes on to cite verses by Homer and Hesiod throughout his treatise on the ideal constitution.  

These rhetorical techniques essentially performed the same essential function as modern NLP “framing” practices or modern behavioral science “nudges”: they targeted certain default settings in the human decision-making process, such as the perception of authority. So, leveraging the appearance of divine authority in ancient times served as what modern behavioral scientists would call a “mental shortcut”: they allowed one to make definite decisions in the face of complex problems without having to consider the vast array of underlying variables and information. So, we listen to the doctor’s medical advice because they have studied disease and treatment for years and have a store of information that we haven’t had the time to accumulate or digest. In the same way, the Greeks revered the poets whose sayings could clarify fundamental questions concerning the nature Goodness and the gods by virtue of their function as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine.   

Alas, as the verses of Ecclesiastes remind us: “there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Just like today, the same modern techniques of behavioral science abound in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Take Aristotle’s example of how rhetoricians or politicians could most effectively induce “pity” in their audiences, and therefore use that emotion to influence one’s emotional response and belief: 

We will now state what things and persons excite pity, and the state of mind of those who feel it. Let pity then be a kind of pain excited by the sight of evil, deadly or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it; an evil which one might expect to come upon himself or one of his friends, and when it seems near. 

The Rhetoric, Book II, Part VIII—Aristotle 

Interestingly, most war propaganda can be found to make use of specific hypnotic “sequences” not unlike the kind described in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. For instance, rhetoric to rouse people in support of a war begins by eliciting images of innocent women and children suffering at the hands of cruel dictators; these are followed by vague platitudes to re-enforce agreement and shared values ie, “no one should have to worry about where they will wake up the next morning” and “no one should starve for tyrants”; finally, new suggestions can be introduced: “we can’t let x continue shelling innocent civilians,” “they must be stopped.” From these simple principles emerges an entire art of rhetoric.  

So, an image which holds a positive and respected place in society may be invoked as a preface or anchor for one’s argument, the initial image being used to invoke a specific state of affectation. This would be followed by suggestions regarding how one might feel about a new idea or image—and how one might therefore think about it. These images and their related “felt thoughts” Aristotle termed the “phantasma” of the mind, that is, the “apparitions” inside the heads of human beings. Those whose realities were essentially governed by the manipulation of “phantasma” were Plato’s archetypal “Democratic Man.” The democrat, derived from the word “demos” i.e. the mob, was the soul entirely governed by opinion (doxa), rather than knowledge (episteme). The patterning of affective systems around positive and negative affectations would ultimately determine what images and ideas were good (causing pleasure) and which were bad (causing pain). 

Similar techniques can be used to leverage a whole host of “mental shortcuts” and “automatic motivations.” So, an article might leverage one’s perception of authority by using formulas like “most experts believe” or “new study suggests” before recommending that a population should follow a particular form of guidance or advice. Countless examples exist, but in the case of the poets of Ancient Greece, it meant using the semi-divine status accorded to poets to support one’s arguments about Justice or Goodness. It was simply an ancient expression of today’s more distilled and formalized behavioral science techniques used to govern much of public opinion across Western society today.

But one can go even further.  

A recent book entitled Music to Raise the Dead by Ted Gioia presents another compelling dimension to the question of song and poetry’s trance-formative power across the ages. As Ted Gioia writes: 

A look at the lawgivers actually enlisted tells us the real story: these figures were honored not for their lack of party affiliation but for their special authority. We have already met one of them in the previous chapter, namely Empedocles—the same composer of metered philosophical pronouncements who claimed he could control the weather and bring a soul back from the dead with his musical magic. And the same is true of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Epimenides and other ancient music-obsessed philosopher-shamans. 

They were revered as lawgivers, not because of any reputation for impartiality, but due to their visionary wisdom. And this wisdom was embedded in songs. 

If you go back to the origin of these practices in the Western world, namely the ancient myth of Orpheus—that earliest shaman-musician in the classical tradition, whose journey to the Underworld is the ideal type of our hero’s journey—the connection is unmistakable. Vases depicting Orpheus in Southern Italy show him consulting with the goddess Justice in the Underworld.  

It is clear that the poet who sings about gods is often considered to be singing as one, or as an instrument of one,” literary critic Northrop Frye wisely reminds us in his influential work Anatomy of Criticism. “This usually means that he reveals the god’s will.” To the ancient mind, the notion that Orpheus would return from the other world with wise dictates of justice was an obvious conclusion. 
 

Interestingly, Ted Gioia observes that one of the oldest legal codes was the Locrian code, which also happens to be one of the oldest musical modes: 

Even stranger, there is both a Locrian code—the oldest laws of antiquity—and a Locrian mode, mentioned by music theorists going back to the 3rd century BC. 

The Locrian mode, as it is played in the current day 

The Locrian harmonia shows up even earlier in the poetry of Pindar, where it refers to music composed for the auloi, a Greek reed instrument with dark, magical associations, by a Locrian musician. Pindar treats this music, according to scholar Edward Nowacki, as “a paean fit for Apollo and the Graces, suggesting a noble and dignified style.” 

In other words, both the Locrian legal code and Locrian mode boasted a connection to divine sources, and demanded respect for that very reason. 

One can also observe that the famous constitution of Athens by Solon was also composed in the form of a poem and “sung.”  

Gioia continues: 

...a vibrant musical and oral tradition can’t be eliminated quite so easily. So it makes perfect sense that a law preserved in song would have more impact and permanence than a written one—and especially so in societies where few people read or write. Even at the height of ancient Greek culture, two-thirds or more of the adult population were probably illiterate, but virtually everyone in the community had access to songs and poems. They were the cloud storage of antiquity and traditional societies, ensuring both the preservation and dissemination of important information. 

Alas, were the images cast on Plato’s cave walls none other than the “phantasma” inhabiting the minds of the Greeks—which in Plato’s view may or may not have always been reflective of the real thing? From Hesiod’s Works and Days and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to tragedians like Aeschylus and Sophocles, poets were the original image-makers shaping the psycho-cosmological matrix of ancient Greece. This matrix included the images of the gods themselves, their genealogies, the histories of heroes, and the various “ages of man”—all of which were essentially derived from the poets’ treatment of the gods. In short, there was little of Greek identity and self-image that wasn’t ultimately shaped by these origin stories and the related images fashioned by ancient artists. Naturally, this meant that whoever shaped, changed or controlled these images would be defining the culture and its political currents downstream—whether for good or bad. 

When properly considered, one begins to get a clearer picture of why Plato was himself so passionate about the role of art, culture, and poetry in a genuinely sovereign republic, including whether said art could lead people to “the real thing” or simply artful imitations—a matter that could not be solved by merely considering the technical or formal elements of poetry alone (as Aristotle’s Poetics sought to do). 

Today, one can go even further: consider the history of twenty and twenty-first century stories cast on the modern cave walls of the “Silver Screen.” Hollywood and related online streaming services boast of many “good movies” which are made compelling by their storylines and dialogue, plots and character development—many of them essentially respecting the formal rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. However, what images these films portray, or how they portray their subjects and images, and the manner in which these films may or may not have collectively colored the imaginations of a population, their images of themselves, others and their nations is a much less popular subject of discussion. Although it goes beyond the scope of our essay, we can observe—especially in hindsight—that at different times many different films presented various messages with varying degrees of subtlety, whether cultural, philosophical, or political. Today, outlets and YouTube channels exist solely for the purpose of deciphering what exactly these themes and works of predictive programming actually represent.  

From glorifying the “hero’s journey” in various military industrial complex approved films featuring glossy images of military forces or heroes combatting foreign threats to countless “sci-fi” movies playfully introducing eugenic themes into the imagination through stories of chemically or artificially altered high-performing human beings, the extent to which many of the narratives and stories Western audiences have come to live their lives by is hard to quantify. Whether they have in any significant portion presented audiences with a truthful depiction of how the world works or what the nature of man is remains up for debate—let alone how a completely different kind of cinema might have fundamentally changed the quality of mind and imagination in society. 

As one early marketing and media expert once stated when interviewed to discuss the impact of television on modern Americans:  

I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television. . . . You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV set images. . .  

On the other hand, P.B. Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” reflected on a similar question, but in respect to the positive effects of Western civilization’s great classical artistic traditions:  

But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself. 

The question remains: how might our art and poetry capture the real thing today? 

The Pictures Inside the Heads of Human Beings 

To shed more light on Plato’s playful war against the muses, we might further consider examples from our own twentieth century. For, Plato’s poet predicament makes our own twentieth and twenty-first century culture of public opinion and popular culture the visceral and timely paradox that it was in his day. The only major difference is that today prefabricated images are largely imposed on the population in ways that weren’t possible in former times, thanks to the predominance of the Silver Screen and Hollywood.  

In the early twentieth century, books like Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, Freud’s Mass Psychology, and later works like The Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing—How Evangelists, Psychiatrists, Politicians, and Medicine Men Can Change Your Beliefs and Behavior, Psycho-Cybernetics and The Structure of Magic I & II explored the various relationships between thought, language and imagery, and the many “magical” ways in which these mediums could be used to shape the beliefs and behaviors of a group or mass of individuals. 

For example, in Lippman’s Public Opinion, the author examined the control of mass populations through the manipulation of the “pictures inside the heads of human beings”: 

The pictures inside the heads of human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs and purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion, with capital letters. 

Walter Lippman—Public Opinion (1923) 

Alas, while most academics treat Plato’s famous paradox of “should we allow the poets into our Republic?” as the ravings of a would-be Kim Jon Un intent on banning anyone who doesn’t toe the state’s line, Plato’s thought experiment identified precisely the problem of “Public Opinion.” He recognized that the poets, storytellers and mythmakers of his time were those with the power to shape the “pictures inside the heads of human beings.” What we know as the sophists and rhetoricians of Plato’s day—or today—were simply cheap “imitations.”  

Ironically, while Aristotle’s Poetics held poetry in rather low regard, treating it as something much below Philosophy, Plato’s polemic was above all a testament to how he viewed poetry’s lofty place and function in society. For, since citing poets bestowed one’s arguments with a sort of divine backing, poets being individuals with exceptionally sensitive souls capable of receiving divine and spiritual revelations, their images and the quality of wisdom embodied in their stories had to be held to the highest standard. 

Of course, the “pictures inside the heads of human beings” described by Lippman and others harkened back to the ancient forms of social engineering practiced by oligarchies and their priesthoods since time immemorial. The idea of patterning the images “inside the heads of human beings” can be traced back to Aristotle’s original work on the soul, De Anima. There he outlined his theory of blank slates—the mind as a “tabula rasa.” Rather than beings with immortal souls in which ideas were already present and to be discovered or remembered—rather than imposed—knowledge was in essence nothing other than the derivatives of sense impression, such that there were no “phantasma” that weren’t derived from sense images. Consequently, rhetoric became the special mode of speech that could elicit the various affective states associated with a given set of images or “phantasma,” often achieved by imitating various outward elements of poetic style and trance-inducing eloquence. 

Plato vs Aristotle: Part One w/ David Gosselin | The Courtenay Turner Podcast

As already noted, those whose view of reality was largely shaped by their negative and positive affectations in relation to the collection of various experiences and images were Plato’s quintessential Democratic men—the “demos” i.e. mob (if not the rabble). For, what was Good or True was not the deciding factor, but rather what state of affectation one associated with any given set of images or policies i.e. whether pleasure” or pain. 

Exiting the Cave: Freedom from Shadows 

All great art transcends the limitations of its own maker and material. This is first and foremost accomplished through metaphor, whereby a subtly treated theme or set of images points to the realization of something deeper, something beyond the scope of our ostensible subject or experience. In other words: it calls us into the presence of some more immanent and pregnant reality subsuming the various “snapshots” and “glimpses” of our immediate reality. The Greeks called this metaphor, the power to transport beyond. The etymology of the word metaphor can be traced back to the Ancient Greek word “metapherein,” meaning to transfer. Meta on its own was a prefix used to convey an idea of changing of places, order or nature. So, the ostensible hero’s journey to the depths of the underworld was no mere descent into a shadowy world of the dead, but a deep dive into the very nature of the human psyche and soul. Rather than being a mere literary device, metaphor itself embodied the existence of a transcendent reality and the poetical modes necessary to reach the higher spheres. In a word: through metaphorical and poetical representations, man could express or point towards what is otherwise inexpressible and out of reach.  

The opposite of a society that thinks in metaphorical and poetical terms is a society whose thoughts and behavior are largely confined to the domain of the literal. Without musical recourse to metaphor, all notions of transcendent truth remain outside mankind’s mortal grasp. As a result, the literal-minded become the easiest to socially engineer, since their worldviews must ultimately be defined by the confines of their direct experience i.e. opinion (“doxa”). In such a society, people’s imaginations are shaped and colored not by their genuine exploration and discovery of transcendent reality, their deeper selves, and the many real characters found in the great drama of human existence, but by the various states of affectation associated with their impressions of reality, and the phantasma thereby derived from those experiences.  

For this reason, tragedy was properly considered a key cultural institution by Greeks, since it often portrayed those who clung to their opinions until the end without recourse to any higher faculty or judgement. The beauty of tragedy was that it allowed one to be presented with the many worse case scenarios of sorts, allowing audiences to see the consequence of failed axiomatic thinking played out to its natural conclusion on the stage, rather than in real life. Or, as Schiller described it in his “Theater as a Moral Institution”: 

The stage brings before us a rich array of human woes. It artfully involves us in the troubles of others, and rewards us for this momentary pain with tears of delight and a splendid increase in our courage and experience…What our soul only senses as distant premonition, here we can hear audibly and incontrovertibly affirmed by the startled voice of nature… 

Eternity leaves its dead behind, so that they may reveal secrets which the living could never divine, and the cocksure villain is driven from his final ghastly lair, for even graves blurt out their secrets. 

But, not satisfied with merely acquainting us with the fates of mankind, the stage also teaches us to be more just toward the victim of misfortune, and to judge him more leniently. For, only once we can plumb the depths of his tormented soul, are we entitled to pass judgement on him. 

Only here [on the stage] do the world’s mighty men hear what they never or rarely hear elsewhere: Truth. And here they see what they never or rarely see: Man. 

This was and remains the purpose of great art and tragedy. But we can go even further. In more modern parlance, poetry and drama served as a form of mass education and guided trance. For instance, Neuro Linguistic Programming co-creator Richard Bandler described what he calls “trance-formations.” Dana Gioia in his “Poetry as Enchantment” describes poetry’s ability to induce a mild trance, and therefore enchant: 

In the Western tradition, it has generally been assumed that the purpose of poetry is to delight, instruct, console, and commemorate. But it might be more accurate to say that poems instruct, console, and commemorate through the pleasures of enchantment. The power of poetry is to affect the emotions, touch the memory, and incite the imagination with unusual force. Mostly through the particular exhilaration and heightened sensitivity of rhythmic trance can poetry reach deeply enough into the psyche to have such impact. (How visual forms of prosody strive to achieve this mental state requires a separate inquiry.) When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language. “Poetry,” writes Greg Orr, “is the rapture of rhythmical language.” 

(…) 

All poetic technique exists to enchant—to create a mild trance state in the listener or reader in order to heighten attention, relax emotional defenses, and rouse our full psyche, so that we hear and respond to the language more deeply and intensely. Camille Paglia speculates that “poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.” To borrow Franz Kafka’s more violent metaphor about literature in general, poetry is “the axe to break the frozen sea within us.” 

And this is indeed the case, especially if we consider poetry’s musical origins and the essential trance-like quality induced by virtually all music, from simple percussion drums to an entire Requiem. So, as Plato described in The Laws, the Egyptian musical tradition took the form of rituals designed to consecrate a people’s most sacred and enduring customs. It was seen as a quintessential practice for any society seeking to forge lasting laws, customs and institutions—ones which weren’t simply to be patterned and re-patterned as opinion and sentiment changed from generation to generation. Rather than being some finishing touch, the beauty and music of song and poetry were understood as the power to consecrate and make sacred a society’s most important rites and customs—and to preserve them in their most memorable forms. 

Not to recognize the influence and subtle way in which music and poetry affects one’s dispositions and sentiments, and the natural susceptibility of one’s psyche when found in this heightened state of affectation, is to also largely overlook the great power that today’s modern “pop music” exercises over generations of youth (often in a subversive manner). In fact, modern pop music may simply be understood as the formulaic distillment of classical forms of poetry, but for the purposes of mass consumption and collective repatterning (with some fine exceptions). From the rock, drug sex counterculture of the 1960s to the modern “Top 40” pop charts, the change in sound and genres of music have become emblematic of the change in generational outlook and feeling. From the legended acts who performed at Woodstock to today’s Weekend and Lady Gaga, the impact such musical trends have had on the affective systems of a population, its psyche and soul is hard to quantify precisely because it operates in such subtle and illusive ways. 

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For this reason, Plato’s challenge of asking whether the poets should be allowed into the Republic is a delicious irony meant to provoke serious thinkers to consider poetry’s power more closely, lest it remain hostage to the forces of opinion and the tastes of the age. 

The Rhythm of Truth 

In his attempt to discuss an ideal republic, Plato was not about to ignore the power of poetry, take an equivocating “art for art’s sake” position, or simply treat art and culture as minor matters of entertainment which have little or no impact on the durability of a culture, the lasting power of its institutions, or the resilience of its most sacred customs. In The Laws, Plato went so far as to discuss the importance of the stories that children were told; that once the proper and appropriate stories were established, they should not change, for they were sacred, and every child—individuals at their most vulnerable and crucial stage of development—should be regarded with the same sacredness and exposed to the same timeless stories, lest the stories change and a society finds itself with constantly different generations in which beauty, delight, taste and truth become mere matters of opinion. 

Today, we see the opposite: rather than art being the domain which is most insulated from the changing tastes of the ages, that is, where Truth, Beauty and Goodness thrive unaffected by the vicissitudes of time and corruption of the ages, we see the naturally hypnotic and trance-inducing qualities of art and culture weaponized in an all-out cultural trance war. Rather than being unique articulations of the timeless within our own unique time—song and literature have too often become mirrors for the predictive programming of the mind’s “phantasma.” 

Does man always have to fly too close to the sun? Perhaps it depends on what kind of culture, art and education we have? For instance, what might happen if we have a society committed to staging countless productions of tragic art and drama of the kind outlined by Plato? These representations would offer audiences the unique opportunity to behold the tragic ideas or character of individuals, civilizations—or even themselves—played out on to their tragic conclusion on the stage of their imaginations, rather than collectively or unconsciously acting them out in real life.  

Through visceral experiences that bridge the heart and mind, lessons could be imparted in such a manner that they seep into the deep structures of our entire being. Such art would not only charm and amuse at surface levels, but equip us to undertake even the darkest descents or adversity and remind us, as Robert Frost once said, of “Those things which it would impoverish us to forget.” In a word: by dramatizing tragedy, one is given a visceral example of what stupidity and folly actually look like. Each one of us is afforded the opportunity to become a seer in our own age. Our affectations are transformed from mere momentary and recurring bouts of impulse and entertainment, or momentary escapes into fancy, into fully-fledged and articulated insights and emotions which guide us in the direction of the real thing, distinguishing between ugly and beautiful behaviors, Truth and imitation, evil and Goodness. Our ideas and beliefs are played out until completion and resolved through beauty, rather than folly. 

To quote the poet Friedrich Schiller from his ninth letter on the aesthetic education of man: 

The seriousness of your principles will frighten them away from you, but they will accept them in play; their taste is more chaste than their heart, and that is where you must take hold of the shy one who is fleeing you. You will besiege their maxims in vain, to no avail will you condemn their deeds, but you can try your formative hand with their indolence. Chase away what is arbitrary, the frivolity, the crudeness from their pleasures, and in that way you shall banish these, unnoticed, from their deeds and finally their beliefs. Wherever you find them, surround them with noble, with grand, with brilliant forms, surround them with symbols of what is excellent, until the appearance vanquishes reality, and art vanquishes nature. 

Plato recognized that the corruption of artistic taste and the ease with which subversive ideas could be artfully woven into song and poetry meant that no serious ruler could neglect the role and function of art in society. Today, we can observe that many of the radical transformations in morals, which have now begun spilling into the domain of law, first began with subtle changes in taste, in many ways beginning with the advent of Modernism and “art for art’s sake” where matters of taste were increasingly relegated to the realm of the subjective, secondary to the “objective” and technical aspects of poetic craft, as exemplified by Aristotle’s approach in The Poetics.  

Rather than laying out some final crystalized framework, Plato left the question of his war against the muses an open one. He observed that the psycho-cosmological matrix and socio-poetic constellations governing the Greek mind were inadequate to fully realizing a society in which citizens could distinguish between clever imitations and the real thing. If anything, because of the compelling nature of the great poetry of the time, it arguably made it more difficult. So, the Homeric pursuit of glory and honor, while noble and filled with genuine insights, did not represent the highest good and didn’t necessarily lead one to desiring and having the capacity to distinguish between pleasing imitations and the real thing.  

Conclusion 

Society will always have images and mankind will always seek out stories and art as a means of working out its own story and self. The role of stories and art in shaping the psyche and imagination, the fount of all ideas, is therefore of interest for any genuine question of establishing a lasting civilization centered on bringing forth the timeless principles Goodness, Truth and Beauty which exist in potential within each individual. And the purpose of a classical education is just that: to bring forth the timeless principles of Beauty, Truth and Goodness in time. 

On the other hand, poetry as mere entertainment and distraction, or “art for art’s sake” itself debases the rightful place of poetry and the arts in any truly creative and lasting society which doesn’t just weave stories in a nihilistic or novel, fetishistic manner, but is guided, whether in practical daily life or arts and culture, by the desire to realize and embody the real thing. 

For the democratic soul, art remains essentially subjective, a matter of taste and personal expression, without any higher requirement for Truth or Beauty or Goodness (let alone all three together); for an oligarchical soul, poetry becomes largely ornamentation, a celebration of one’s empire, a means of illustrating one’s own graces and maintaining one’s power. Whereas for the truly aristocratic and philosophical souls, poetry becomes Truth in its most exalted and spell-binding form. Poetry that falls beneath this standard may be beautiful without necessarily reflecting Truth, or it may be true but lack the genuine Goodness or Beauty needed to impart itself in some lasting form; or it may present Goodness without offering the necessary or correct means of attaining the real thing. Said otherwise, philosophy in its most exalted form must necessarily be poetry and poetry in its most exalted form must necessarily be philosophy, or in the words of Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty.” 

How important is it to have a culture which supports such standards? What becomes of a society which abandons such goals? This we trust our readers will have no difficulty imagining. 

David Gosselin is a poet, translator, and editor in Montreal, Canada. He writes on Substack at Age of Muses. He publishes The Chained Muse’s flagship journal of classical arts and letters, New Lyre Magazine.

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