Education and the Arts in Plato's Republic

Abstract

The education in ‘music’ described in Books II-III of the Republic combines the content and the manner of presentation of stories so that moral substance and formal beauty work together to inculcate the opinions and virtues required in the children who are to become guardians of the ideal city. The principles which underlie this section constitute a theory of the role of the arts in moral education that can be applied in others contexts. Plato's view of how such education works depends upon his view of the way in which imitation affects the soul, and can be understood thoroughly only after the parts of the soul have been distinguished and the epistemological and ontological groundwork has been laid for a full discussion of imitation. These requirements having been met in the course of Books IV through IX, Plato returns to imitation in Book X, using painting as a foil to mount ontological, epistemological, and psychological criticisms of imitative poetry, now focussing upon its effect on adults, not children. His attack tacitly exempts the kind of imitations exemplified by Socrates' own frequent image making and by the philosophical poetry of the Republic itself. Socrates imagines, but rejects, a certain defense of popular poetry, the very one which Aristotle developed in his doctrine of ‘catharsis.’ But that defense rests upon views of practical knowledge and of the psychological resources of the average person that Plato would be unlikely to have accepted.