The idea that the Republic is an extended comedy seems foreign to those who’ve cut their teeth on the ponderous nineteenth-century scholarship which treats Plato, and the entire Greco-Roman classical canon, with great reverence. Such scholarship attributes great gravitas to Plato, and considers it unlikely that he’d play such a prank.
The text leaves the reader with a choice: either Plato was joking or he was serious.
This choice, however, points to a less comfortable option: if Plato were serious, then he advanced a blueprint for a society that would be both cruel and bizarre. Couched in Plato’s friendly prose are details which would violate any level-headed concepts of justice or human rights.
Plutarch’s account of Lycurgus and the Spartan constitution seem mild compared, e.g., to Plato’s prescription that a child should never be allowed to know who her or his parents are, and that the parent should never be allowed to know who their child is.
There are details about Plato’s plan for an ideal civilization that are so strange and brutal that the plausibility of the Republic as a scheme for social engineering is stretched to the breaking point.
Among these oddities are some self-destructive recommendations by Plato that the activities of writers be severely restricted. Such limits would presumably apply to Plato himself, and, as author Hans Magnus Enzensberger explains, would be the basis for government oppression of written creativity. Enzensberger shows what the literal effects of Plato’s text would be:
The state decides what poets may or may not write — that is a nightmare as old as the Occident. Decency and good behavior must be observed. The gods are always good. Statesmen and officials may not be disparaged in public. Praise be to heroes, no matter what. The crimes of our rulers are not fit subjects for poetry but for committee meetings behind closed doors. Protect our youth! Therefore, there must be no portrayal of unbridled passion unless it is authorized by the state. Irony is forbidden. There must be no effeminacy. Poets, being born liars, are to be assigned to the public-relations detail. The control commission not only assigns topics; it also decrees what forms are admissible and what tone of voice is desired. The demand is for harmony at all costs; this means “good language and good harmony and grace and good rhythm” — in a word, affirmation. Nuisances will be exiled or eliminated, their works banned, censored, and mutilated.
Indeed, Enzensberger makes Plato guilty for a number of problems in Western Civilization’s treatment of creative writing:
These familiar maxims, formulated in a small Balkan state more than two thousand years ago, can be found at the root of all European discussion of poetry and politics. They have since spread across the entire world. Dully, monotonously, brutally, they clang through history with the terrible regularity of a steam hammer. They do not question what poetry is, but treat it simply as an instrument to influence those held in subjugation, as something to be used at will in the interests of authority. Hence the tenacious life of these maxims, for they are tools of power — the selfsame thing into which they are trying to turn poetry. For this reason they are passed from hand to hand through history, like bludgeons, fungible, easily detachable from the philosophy from which they were hewn. Not only do they serve Platonism as cudgels against Aeschylus and Homer, but they serve every political administration.
But Enzensberger’s indictment of Plato is valid only if Plato was sincere in his instructions. Is there a chance that Plato was joking?
The likelihood that Plato did not intend for his directions to be taken literally increases with the consideration that Plato, as an author, would have suffered greatly under his own rules. Consider the constraints mentioned in the text of the Republic, as worded in Jowett’s translation:
The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mold the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.
Plato goes on to suggest that even the texts of Hesiod and Homer be redacted:
The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence.
Through the mouthpiece character of Socrates, who is clearly in no way related to the actual Socrates, Plato asserts that such stories are “not to be repeated in our” republic:
We shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives.
Whether the stories are taken as literal or figurative does not matter to Plato: in either case, they must be eliminated: “These tales must not be admitted into our” Polis, “whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not.”
This censorship is in no way a self-censorship, or one informally imposed by social custom, but rather a statist enactment:
The founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them.
A translation by Paul Shorey confirm’s Jowett’s rendering: “We must not accept from Homer or any other poet the folly of such error.” The state will determine what is true, and will eliminate any text which asserts an untruth. Plato writes that the state “will not approve” or “permit our youth to hear” certain passages from Aeschylus. Plato has named at least three major poets as earning censorship. This amounts, if taken literally, to a frontal assault on the Greek canon.
Which is a good reason not to take it literally.
In his other dialogues, Plato demonstrated affection and respect for Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus. Yet in the Republic he instructs the audience to redact, censor, and ban them from his polis. Either he is guilty of blatant self-contradiction, or his comments in the Republic are meant as satire.
The text of the Republic goes on to assert that the state will forbid an individual to “assert” certain things “in his own city if it is to be well governed.” This would be “one of the laws” and “speakers and poets will be required to conform” to it.
Plato goes so far as to assert “we” will not “allow teachers to use” Homer and Aeschylus “for the education of the young.” This proposition does such great violence against Greek sensibilities that it certainly urges the reader to suggest that Plato is joking.
Likewise, a translation by George Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve, shows the strict censorship which Plato proposes: “We must supervise such stories and those who tell them.” Plato writes: “We’ll expunge” and “delete” texts which are displeasing to the state. “Names for the underworld must be struck out.” Not only will the state forbid poets to write certain things; the state will also require them to write other things: “We’ll compel the poets.”
Francis Macdonald Cornford also confirms what is in Plato’s text: “We shall have to prohibit such poems and tales and tell them to compose others in the contrary sense.” In these words, Plato goes beyond censorship and conscripts the writers into the service of propaganda:
Then we must not only compel our poets, on pain of expulsion, to make their poetry the express image of noble character; we must also supervise craftsmen of every kind and forbid them to leave the stamp of baseness, license, meanness, unseemliness, on painting and sculpture, or building, or any other work of their hands; and anyone who cannot obey shall not practice his art in our commonwealth.
After deciding that most of the other arts — sculpture, painting, music — should also be subject to strict censorship, Plato concludes that “we could not but banish such an influence from our commonwealth.”
The reader, then, is left with a choice: Either Plato is making a joke — an absurd joke, a provocative joke — or Plato is proposing the most ruthless type of censorship.
On the one hand, history teaches us that such extreme and inhumane censorship is indeed possible: one need only to consider activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who sought to forbid the reading of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Thomas More, Mark Twain, and others.
Censorship is merely one of the brutal measures prescribed in the Republic. Taken together, the sum of the ordinances in the text would constitute a fascist totalitarian program which would locate Plato among the bloodthirsty likes of Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and Daniel Ortega.
On the other hand, Plato has already demonstrated his ability to write comedy in the Ion, one of his most humorous dialogues.
Surely, a poet who calls for the banishment of poetry and a creative author who calls for the rigid regulation of creativity must be writing ironically. If Plato’s program were enacted as written, most of his dialogues would be condemned and he would be exiled.
If Enzensberger is correct in seeing Plato as a serious totalitarian, and if Plato was therefore not joking, then the implications for civilization are indeed as grim as Enzensberger paints them.
But if Enzensberger is wrong, and Plato is merely joking — it will be a separate question as to whether his joke is funny — then generations of scholars have misdirected their students into a literal reading of the Republic.
