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Plato's Republic, Book 10: Imitation, Immortality and the Myth of Er · Mahon McCann

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: So why is there a book ten of Plato's Republic?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: The main quest into justice and injustice has really ended in book nine.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: What the heck's going on with Book 10?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite strange.
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  SPEAKER_00: It covers the critique of imitative art,
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  SPEAKER_00: arguments for the immortality of the soul,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: and then the so-called myth of Ur to finish.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So let's explore.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Book 10 is often very criticised.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Some thinkers like Jared Else argue Book 10 is tacked on on an afterthought
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  SPEAKER_00: that was composed separately to the rest.
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  SPEAKER_00: The main narrative ends of Book 9.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Really, you answer the question of why justice is better than injustice.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: You've identified justice.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: You've got no like explained appearance and reality.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So why have this book and why?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Go back to the criticism of poetry and imitation when you've already done that in book three.
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  SPEAKER_00: So book 10 seems like another digression, really.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if you remember the digression of books five, six,
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  SPEAKER_00: seven, this is when some of the most significant content of Plato's work is done.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of the most significant work in the entire history of philosophy.
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  SPEAKER_00: So when Plato's making a digression, he's doing it for a reason.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not just an accident.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it's worth paying attention, particularly in this book.
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  SPEAKER_00: Book 10 is returning again to the difference between being and appearance.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's the basis of truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: Comes up in the beginning,
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  SPEAKER_00: obviously, raised by Glaucon and identifying what seems just and what actually is.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's the difference between being and appearance.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is why he's coming back to art.
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  SPEAKER_00: Art again, imitation, creating images.
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  SPEAKER_00: What is the relationship between the creation of images and their reality?
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  SPEAKER_00: At the start of Book 10,
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  SPEAKER_00: Socrates claims they were right to exclude imitative poetry from the city
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  SPEAKER_00: because all imitation harms the soul.
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  SPEAKER_00: What is at issue here is the justification for derivative realities in relation
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  SPEAKER_00: to what is truly real.
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  SPEAKER_00: What is the connection between art and reality?
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  SPEAKER_00: We'd say Plato's critiques here are ontological and not moral,
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  SPEAKER_00: unlike in book three when he's talking about the censorship.
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  SPEAKER_00: In this sense,
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  SPEAKER_00: he's trying to sort out what is the relationship between images and their reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he critiques the production of images that has three parts,
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  SPEAKER_00: the nature of the thing itself,
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  SPEAKER_00: The sort of knowledge the artist possesses and the effect of artistic imitation on
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  SPEAKER_00: the soul.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's go through.
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  SPEAKER_00: So his critique of art is that it stands a third removed from truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: Images are the lowest part of the divided line.
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  SPEAKER_00: He gives the example of a bed maker.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's one bed is made, the ideal bed, the form of the bed, which is produced by God or gods.
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  SPEAKER_00: Obviously nobody exists.
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  SPEAKER_00: You don't make the form of the bed.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then a craftsperson produces a copy of that form of the bed when they make a bed physically.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then if a painter comes along and paints that bed,
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  SPEAKER_00: they are copying the copy and are therefore three times removed from the truth
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  SPEAKER_00: in this Platonic conception.
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  SPEAKER_00: So there's a strange issue here in some sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: The original...
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  SPEAKER_00: Is the unity, is the form.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then as we move away from the original, there's this multiplicity.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's copying.
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  SPEAKER_00: The painter captures not the whole of the bed,
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  SPEAKER_00: but an aspect of it, a heart of it, a perspective.
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  SPEAKER_00: And basically Plato's like,
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  SPEAKER_00: if we fall in love with these imitations, we actually lose the thing itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: We lose the reality beyond it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's quite a dangerous place to be.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: A bit of an aside,
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  SPEAKER_00: but this epistemology,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: there's a great article in Palladium Magazine, The Platonic Case Against AI Slop.
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  SPEAKER_00: That basically has kind of proved where you're training AI models
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  SPEAKER_00: on their own synthetic data that they lead to what's called model collapse.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because obviously within the AI model,
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  SPEAKER_00: they're encoding statistical representations or images really of...
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  SPEAKER_00: Of objects and then remixing them in order to create new objects.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it turns out when you do that and you try and feed that back into it,
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  SPEAKER_00: you end up with just gibberish.
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  SPEAKER_00: It just falls apart, which seems to indicate that the reality is important.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can't just train them on anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: They need the real patterns that exist in the world in order to be comprehensible,
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  SPEAKER_00: to be intelligible.
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  SPEAKER_00: They need the logos in some sense or their own kind of approximation of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, they just break down.
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  SPEAKER_00: The author,
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  SPEAKER_00: Megan Agathon,
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  SPEAKER_00: great second name,
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  SPEAKER_00: by the way, argues that it's experimental evidence for the Platonic epistemology.
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  SPEAKER_00: So these questions aren't just like ancient history, pardon the pun.
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  SPEAKER_00: They are totally relevant to a lot of the technological stuff we're doing today,
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  SPEAKER_00: even social media,
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  SPEAKER_00: where we live in a world of images, which seems to be driving us crazy.
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  SPEAKER_00: The plurality of images does seem to have a psychological impact So again,
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  SPEAKER_00: Plato's Revenge, he just keeps coming back.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that's why he critiques images, essentially, that they're three times removed from the truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: But he's also critiquing poetry, in a sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: That the people who create the poems,
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  SPEAKER_00: really he's critiquing Homer here in some sense,
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  SPEAKER_00: will imitate things in their artistic work that they don't really understand.
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  SPEAKER_00: So for Plato,
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  SPEAKER_00: the person who has the best knowledge of the bed is the craftsperson who makes
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  SPEAKER_00: the bed.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the imitator who paints the bed or writes about the bed
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  SPEAKER_00: but doesn't really understand how to make the bed has superficial knowledge in
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  SPEAKER_00: that sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: But actually can be very persuasive.
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  SPEAKER_00: But very persuasive without really knowing anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
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  SPEAKER_00: he's criticizing Homer here,
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  SPEAKER_00: who's the educator of Greece, who writes a lot about warriors.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But he says, you know, what armies did Homer lead or what great battles did he fight?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's like he didn't really know anything about that at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: He just kind of pretended to be these characters.
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  SPEAKER_00: He gives the example of the reins and bit for a horse.
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  SPEAKER_00: The person who knows the most about the reins in a bit would be the person who uses them.
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  SPEAKER_00: The horse rider understands their function.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the craftsman would make new reins in a bit according to the specifications
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  SPEAKER_00: of the rider that has them that understands their function.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the painter that painted the horse's reins in a bit would have
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  SPEAKER_00: the least amount of knowledge about them,
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  SPEAKER_00: would understand their functionality the least.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe if the painter was also a horse rider and understood their function,
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  SPEAKER_00: Plato would feel differently about this, but That's the argument.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So again,
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  SPEAKER_00: what effect does this artistic imitation have on the soul of those
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  SPEAKER_00: who are consuming them or who are participating in the images?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this isn't a moral critique, it's ontological.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because you remember, wholeness is key for Plato.
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  SPEAKER_00: He wants unity in the soul.
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  SPEAKER_00: But sensory experience is always of parts.
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  SPEAKER_00: Connecting,
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  SPEAKER_00: feeling an affective relationship with these images creates factions in the soul,
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  SPEAKER_00: Plato argues.
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  SPEAKER_00: The images appeal to the appetite rather than reason that can have knowledge of the forms.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so it damages the interior unity of the tripartite psyche.
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  SPEAKER_00: He sees the danger of art creating a world of appearances that leads to
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  SPEAKER_00: the domination of the appetite and spirit over reason.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now,
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  SPEAKER_00: does this kind of leave the door open for images that work to point towards wisdom,
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  SPEAKER_00: towards logos, towards reality?
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  SPEAKER_00: Possibly it's something we'll talk about.
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  SPEAKER_00: But basically,
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  SPEAKER_00: these imitations can allow people to indulge the worst parts of their souls
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  SPEAKER_00: and feel like it's not a bad thing to be doing.
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  SPEAKER_00: The elephant in this whole argument,
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  SPEAKER_00: how Iris Murdoch described the paradox, is the problem that Plato is a great artist.
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  SPEAKER_00: Plato is a poetic philosopher.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of the contradictions that go on,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, he outlaws images But the whole of the Republic is a kind of poetry.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's literally imitating Socrates.
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  SPEAKER_00: He frequently uses images like the sun, the divided line, the cave.
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  SPEAKER_00: The divided line is an image that communicates why we ought not to use images.
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  SPEAKER_00: Socrates refers to himself as a painter in the Republic like four or five times.
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  SPEAKER_00: He criticizes Homer for not doing in reality, but then Plato founds a city in speech.
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  SPEAKER_00: You could go on.
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  SPEAKER_00: Socrates confesses his greediness for images, his love of poetry, and especially Homer.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, what's going on here?
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  SPEAKER_00: Like, why is Plato condemning images and then making such use of them?
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  SPEAKER_00: There's a couple of hypotheses on this, really.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first, usually, is just that Plato's a hypocrite.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, He doesn't care about his own rules.
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  SPEAKER_00: He'd banish all the artists except his own.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a bit too simplistic for Plato, to be honest.
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  SPEAKER_00: Like Plato's, Plato's no fool.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then, so other people would make a distinction like Hildebrandt.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not all art is imitative.
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  SPEAKER_00: Socrates criticizes imitative art,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is properly distinguished from creative or original art.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe philosophical imitators are not the same as poetic imitators.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tate makes the argument philosophers imitate the forms rather than the appearances.
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  SPEAKER_00: Socrates isn't an ordinary painter, but a philosopher-artist.
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  SPEAKER_00: As such,
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  SPEAKER_00: he detects the intelligible rather than the visible world,
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  SPEAKER_00: reality than appearances, forms rather than particulars.
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  SPEAKER_00: So he makes a kind of normative distinction between certain artists,
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  SPEAKER_00: artists that are genuinely philosophical, and artists that will be sophistical.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in that sense,
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  SPEAKER_00: a philosopher-artist can make a better use of images over a sophistical artist,
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  SPEAKER_00: possibly.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: My favorite comes from DC Schindler, which is that, because book 10...
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  SPEAKER_00: It takes place after the journey to the good, to the cave.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in a sense, if you remember, we argued book one of the Republic takes place in the cave.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so we can think of book 10 as an actual return to the cave from
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: the higher perspective that's been cultivated throughout the Republic.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in that sense, Plato can use images in order to try and lead people out of the cave.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: But still critique those that would use images in order to keep people in the cave,
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  SPEAKER_00: if that makes sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: The philosopher both transcends images, but then also returns to them.
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  SPEAKER_00: But with the higher purpose, again, of trying to lead people into transcendence.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, Plato puts images in the service of reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's when images take the place of reality that we get.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: In this sense,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: the Republic offers a kind of redemption of images,
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  SPEAKER_00: recognizing both their dangers and also their important role in transcendence.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: After the critique of images, Plato makes three arguments for the immortality of the soul.
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  SPEAKER_00: He asserts that the soul is the principle of life and is distinct from the body.
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  SPEAKER_00: While the body is perishable and subject to decay,
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  SPEAKER_00: the soul has a different nature that aligns with permanence and rationality.
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  SPEAKER_00: In a sense,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: because the soul's connection to what's outside of time and space,
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  SPEAKER_00: the forms,
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  SPEAKER_00: indicates that some part of the soul must also be outside of time and space.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you're going to apprehend things that are eternal and unchanging,
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  SPEAKER_00: something of you better be eternal and unchanging.
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  SPEAKER_00: Makes sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Plato contends that things are destroyed by their specific evils.
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  SPEAKER_00: For instance, disease destroys the body.
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  SPEAKER_00: However,
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  SPEAKER_00: vice and moral corruption,
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  SPEAKER_00: the supposed evils of the soul do not annihilate it, but only harm its moral state.
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  SPEAKER_00: Since the stone is not destroyed by its own evils, then it must be indestructible.
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  SPEAKER_00: So we see what he's already doing.
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  SPEAKER_00: In some sense,
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  SPEAKER_00: he's put,
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  SPEAKER_00: if you remember back to the very first lecture,
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: we talked about the natural philosophers and the threat to justice and morality,
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  SPEAKER_00: those being posed in ancient Athens.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so Plato, when he's now put Why justice is better than injustice on rational grounds.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's argued it philosophically and kind of scientifically.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now he's moving to the theological level of like why it's actually rational
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  SPEAKER_00: to believe that The soul goes on after death and why it would be evaluated morally.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why he gives the myth of Ur, essentially.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes this happens in Platonic dialogues where at the end of the dialogue,
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  SPEAKER_00: Plato will give a story that kind of brings together the competing parts of
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  SPEAKER_00: the philosophy that he's got.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the myth of Ur,
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  SPEAKER_00: I think it's often referred to as the myth of Ur,
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  SPEAKER_00: but it's not actually a myth, really.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a firsthand account, which is different.
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  SPEAKER_00: So again, Plato...
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  SPEAKER_00: Has been very critical of the Homeric theories of justice and injustice
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  SPEAKER_00: or cosmic grounding of injustice of his depiction of the gods.
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  SPEAKER_00: And now he's giving this firsthand account really of this soldier who has died
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  SPEAKER_00: in battle for 10 days,
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  SPEAKER_00: undergone this journey into the afterlife and then returned with an account,
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  SPEAKER_00: basically.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: So again, he's he's He's kind of re-mythologizing.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's putting justice and injustice back into the cosmic story,
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  SPEAKER_00: but in a totally different way than the Homeric version of it that kind of,
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: you know, he thinks has caused a lot of problems, basically.
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  SPEAKER_00: When Errol dies, he's Taken to a place where souls are judged after death.
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  SPEAKER_00: The just are sent upwards to heavenly reward.
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  SPEAKER_00: They go to a kind of festival for a thousand years.
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  SPEAKER_00: And whereas the unjust are sent downward into the earth to suffer for their wrongdoings.
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  SPEAKER_00: It seems like a kind of work purgatory type thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then after a period of thousand years,
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  SPEAKER_00: the souls return to a place where they're going to choose their next life.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's the spindle of necessity.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's at the center of the cosmos is this kind of cosmic mechanism that covers fate
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  SPEAKER_00: and order in the universe.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And at the bottom would sit the fates, Lachis, Clotho,
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  SPEAKER_00: Atropos, who oversee the process as souls are kind of sent into their new lives.
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  SPEAKER_00: The souls are each presented with a variety of possible lives,
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  SPEAKER_00: human, animals, rich, poor, weak, just or unjust.
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  SPEAKER_00: And their choices aren't predetermined.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is important.
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  SPEAKER_00: Souls are going to choose based on what they have learned from their previous life
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  SPEAKER_00: and from their kind of atonement, which life to live.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: So again, Plato's arguing like the wisdom that you develop in your life.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't just going to die with you.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's actually going to be instrumental in what happens to you in the afterlife.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: So again, he's grounding wisdom, virtue, justice, cosmically.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's giving it that universal significance.
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  SPEAKER_00: So even many souls,
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  SPEAKER_00: those who are rewarded in heaven,
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  SPEAKER_00: make foolish choices and pick unjust and miserable lives.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: He gives the example of one guy who chooses a life that ends up being the life of
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: a tyrant and In which he actually has to eat his own children.
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  SPEAKER_00: So not a good move.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the lesson is basically that the soul that learns true wisdom
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: and virtue will choose well in these most important of choices.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And once they've chosen their lives,
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: he actually depicts many of the Homeric heroes as well,
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  SPEAKER_00: like Odysseus and Agamemnon making choices and choosing,
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know, varying degrees of success.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Again, he's kind of restructuring the Homeric ideal in this myth.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Before they return to the world,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: the souls then drink from the River Laeth,
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  SPEAKER_00: the River of Forgetfulness, which causes them to forget their previous lives.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then they're reborn into the world, kind of beginning this cycle again.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Ur is sent back to the world of living to how it is seen.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: So people understand the importance of living justly and philosophically.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the myth of error tells us basically that our choices matter.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Justice is ultimately rewarded.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Wisdom is essential for choosing a good life.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's Plato's way of urging us to care for ourselves and seek the good
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: because our consequences of our actions echo far beyond this life.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: What we do in this life echoes in eternity.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: I have to quote Gladiator.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that is Plato's Republic.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you've enjoyed this series,
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: definitely check out my Substack,
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Raising the Cross Substack, where we'll do a lot more on books.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to have some reading clubs coming up.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, love to have you there.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: So check it out.