Plato: The Poet-Philosopher

Today, “more scholars argue…that Plato’s philosophy is interwoven with myth.” Even though popular misperception casts Plato as an enemy of the poets, the reason for Plato’s criticism of the poets in his corpus has less to do with his rejection of myth and imagery as much as it does the moral instruction inferred and implied by the poetic past. In his new book, Paradigm, Logos, and Myth in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman, Conor Barry (re)introduces Plato as a man who “makes space for the possibility of philosophical poetry.”

Although Barry’s book is titled after the Sophist and Statesman, the work addresses more than these two dialogues and is really an exposé into the use of paradigm, logos, and myth—or more simply, the dramatic and poetic devices and tropes—throughout much of Plato’s writings. The purpose, though, is to lead into an examination of the Sophist and Statesman which shows that these dialogues “do not introduce a completely new or different approach, as is often held by the developmentalist interpreters. Rather, the Sophist and Statesman supplement and deepen Plato’s existing treatment of image and myth.” To this extent we, as readers, are extremely grateful since Barry gives us a full portrait of Plato as “poet and composer of philosophical dialogues.”

Reading Plato and contending with his view on the poets is often a troubling pursuit. For one, the common (mis)interpretation is, as already stated, that Plato was anti-poetic. After all, doesn’t he banish the poets in the Republic? Furthermore, isn’t Plato the origin of philosophy with the implication that philosophy—beginning with Plato—supersedes myth and poetry as the new medium of intellectual communication and teaching? Moreover, as the aforementioned “developmentalist” approach takes, the reliance on image and myth in some of Plato’s dialogues is supposedly revised as time goes on—Plato becomes more a philosopher and less a dramatist as he gets older and his philosophy more mature.

The crude interpretation of Plato as anti-poetic is wrong on numerous accounts. First, Plato wanted to be a dramatist before turning to philosophy. Rather than a split, Plato’s dialogues offer a revised outlet for dramatic dialogue; after all, Plato relies on myth, imagery, and dramatic form to communicate his new “philosophy.” Second, “The ideas, images, myth and drama,” Barry writes, “are all connected in Plato’s work as a literary artist. If we read him closely, we can see the extent to which Plato is a fully self-conscious and self-critical artist.” The developmentalist approach fails to see Plato’s own dramatic and philosophical refinement of myth and image in his works, there is no severe break. Third, most of Plato’s famous stories that functionally serve a philosophical end are themselves myths (stories) filled with images: the allegory of the cave being the most famous and the charioteer being another.

Plato’s actual struggle with the poets had to deal with the crisis of morality. Plato was a moralist, a moral philosopher, who understood that the politics of liberty and justice were related to the moral health of the soul. Insofar that the preceding poets of lore gave troubling examples for the next generation to follow (especially true of Hesiod’s graphic and violent divinities in Theogony), the poets had to be suppressed not for poetry as poetry but for poetry as immorality. The amoral (at best) or immoral (more accurately, in Plato’s eyes) poetry promoted by the poets and playwrights would lead to demagoguery, despotism, and injustice writ large. This, Plato could not abide by.

Barry’s work proceeds to examine some of the principal Platonic myths and how the use of myth and image in Plato permits the rise of logos, rational dialogue, by working with the myths and images utilized in the various dialogues and how this prepares the way for the crowning paradigm shifts in the Sophist and Statesman. As Barry notes, rereading Plato’s Republic and Socrates’s essential role as both man of myth and man of philosophy, “Socrates, in this way, emphasizes the power of reasoning (logistikon) over the power of appearance. Discursive reasoning and argumentation, along with a grasp of the essential nature of the natural or artificial entity that we encounter, is a kind of remedy to poetic trickery and the distortions of sophistic illusion and eristic.” Socrates, in the Republic, doesn’t eliminate mythic imagery. He teaches us how to more fully engage with it rather than remain propagandized and awestruck by the poets and sophists.

Plato’s emphasis, then, on how rational dialectic can be advanced to get closer to the truth of nature through myth and imagery leads to the so-called “paradigm” shift in Plato, wherein myth and imagery becomes the template for logos rather than rhetorical and imagistic wordplay and ecstasy. It is Barry’s thesis that this culminates in the Sophist and Statesman, representing the clearest maturation of what is visible in early and middle Plato. For instance, the “[Eleatic] Visitor affirms in the Statesman that a paradigm (παράδειγμα) provides a rational account by which correct judgement or accurate representation of an entity is achieved. Such a philosophical practitioner of representation could generation, through speech or verbal images, a form of inquisitive mimesis which could produce insight and understanding.” This is what Plato’s dialogues have been about: turning poetic artistry and all that it relies upon on its head in the service of philosophy. This is how “Plato makes space for the possibility of a philosophical poetry.”

The task of the philosopher is a type of art criticism, a criticism of the poets and their myths, whereby the truth of nature contained in those myths can be deconstructed and shown to be true or false. Where false, explanations are given. Where true, the dialectic advances. The Myth of Kronos features prominently in Barry’s analysis.

As we know from Hesiod’s Theogony, Kronos is the titan who challenges his tyrannical father, Uranus, at the behest of his mother, Gaia. With a sickle in hand, Kronos castrates Uranus and the birth of the Olympian deities (beginning with Aphrodite) commences. The implication of Hesiod’s cosmic theology is that the order of the cosmos is born from violence and upheld through violence. This, however, poses serious moral and political problems. Plato’s rearticulation of the Myth of Kronos rejects the Hesiodic phantasmagoria. Rather than violence being the governing spirit of the cosmos, rationality is.

In rearticulating myth in the service of logos, or in having a new mythic paradigm from which logos emanates:

Plato uses the dramatic form to show his characters making use of logical techniques like induction and deductive refutation, without always signaling that he is using these specific methods. In a similar manner, Plato shows characters composing mythic narratives, in various dialogues, without examining the principles of poetic and narrative construction or presentation. However, in the Statesman, the Visitor actually signals to the Younger Socrates that he is engaging in mythic construction when composing the Myth of Kronos. In this, the Eleatic Visitor is unusually overt and didactic not only in his presentation of myth but in his explanation of how to narrate and compose one.

Plato was not an enemy of poetry as poetry as sometimes crudely portrayed. He was an opponent of the irrationality, immorality, and sophistry that some poets promoted through their myths. Plato believed that the irrationality and immorality of the poets had led to the crisis of the soul and politics he was living through—a crisis which had led to the unjust arrest and death of Socrates. Poetry, however, as Barry shows, was not rejected by Plato but refurbished in the service of reason, truth, and justice in the Platonic dialogues. This refurbishing of poetic myth and imagery reaches its climax in the Sophist and Statesman, wherein Plato’s new use of poetic devices leads to a paradigm from which rational dialectic can emerge. Plato was, therefore, a poet-philosopher, not just a philosopher and certainly not a prudish enemy of poetry.

Paradigm, Logos, and Myth in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman
By Conor Barry
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022; 328pp

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