Polytropy

Index to this series

In the tenth and final book of Plato’s Republic (Stephanus 595–621), with the help of Glaucon, Socrates does three things:

1. Confirm and strengthen the ban on imitative poetry carried out in Book III.
2. Prove the immortality of the soul.
3. Tell the Myth of Er about how best to make use of that immortality.

Here is a finer analysis, as part of a general table of contents for this post.

• Prologue
  • A Translation Issue. How you translate Book X depends on whether you believe Socrates has a theory that all art is imitation. I have gathered sixteen translations of a diagnostic passage that Collingwood highlights in The Principles of Art (1938).
  • Imitation Elsewhere – that is, in Books II, III, V, and VI, as well as in the Phaedrus.
• Book X
  • Imitation
    • What It Is. It is at a third remove from reality.
    • Homer and the Tragic Poets – did you ever hear that they had
      • given a city its constitution,
      • led a successsful military campaign,
      • invented something useful,
      • been revered as private teachers, as Pythagoras was and sophists want to be?
    • The Three Arts involving a thing:
      1. Using it.
      2. Making it.
      3. Imitating it.
    • Parts of the Soul – the best part is the calculating part, which can avoid the confusions that imitations subject the worse parts to.
    • Imitation Is of the Worse – our worse aspects, not the good and decent ones.
    • Imitation Makes Us Worse by bringing out shameful feelings for others that we suppress for ourselves.
    • Philosophy and Poetry – they have an old quarrel, but philosophy is willing to listen to an argument on behalf of poetry.
  • Immortality – the soul must have this, because only its specific evils could kill it, and these are the opposites – injustice, license, cowardice, and ignorance – of the virtues identified in Book IV. They do not in fact kill the soul, at least not directly.
  • Myth of Er – a Pamphylian, son of Armenius, he died in battle, but rose again on the twelfth day, having learned that, unless condemned to hell, we are going to choose our next life, after a spell in heaven or purgatory, depending on how we have lived our current life; thus we had better be ready to choose wisely.

Continue reading →