Part III (b) The Effect of Dramatic Poetry on Character

A further objection to dramatic poetry, tragic or comic, is that it not only encourages the indulgence of emotions, but it undermines character because we are ashamed to give way to them in our own actual lives. When we listen to some hero in Homer or on the tragic stage moaning over his sorrows in a long tirade, or to a chorus beating their breasts as they chant a lament, as Plato said, the best of us enjoy giving ourselves up to follow the performance with eager sympathy. The more a poet can move our feeling in this way, the better we think him. And yet when the sorrow is our own, we pride ourselves on being able to bear it quietly like a man, condemning the behaviour we admired in the theatre as 'womanish' (Plato's word, not mine). Plato believed there were few capable of reflecting that to enter into another's feelings, this must have an effect on our own, so that the emotions of pity our sympathy has strengthened will not be easy to restrain when we are suffering ourselves. Similar effects are produced by poetic representation of love and anger, and desires and feelings of pleasure or pain. It waters the growth of passions which should be allowed to wither away and sets them up in control, although the goodness and happiness of our lives depend on their being held in subjection to reason.

"Homer may be acknowledged to be the first and greatest of the tragic poets; but you must be quite sure that we can admit into our commonwealth only the poetry which celebrates the praises of the gods and of good men. If you go further and admit the honeyed muse in epic or in lyric verse, then pleasure and pain will usurp the sovereignty of law and of the principles always recognized by common consent as the best."

Plato said that it stood to reason that dramatic poetry should be banished from the Republic, because it had no serious claim to be valued as an apprehension of truth. If dramatic poetry could, however, show good reason why it should exist in a well-governed society, it would be welcomed back, because even the philosophers were conscious of its charm.

In conclusion, Plato himself, after about 40 years realized that there was no way of carrying out his theoretical utopian solution (Republic). Within the Republic itself, the more completely Plato disclosed all that was meant by the pursuit of wisdom, the further away the prospect became that the evils of human life would ever be cured by reason being the ideal representative in any possible form of society.

There is value in thought, because it leads to questions. When we ask questions, we may begin to discover that our own philosophy about life begins to take shape. Some people, interestingly, have a philosophy of 'right conduct', but don't live it, and others live a 'right conduct' philosophy without even knowing this is what it would be called. Every reader will find something to disagree with in Plato's solution, but if seriously asking the "why", and what alternative he or she could propose, Plato's purpose will then be achieved. Plato never forgot the lesson of Socrates, "that wisdom begins when a man finds out that he does not know what he thinks he knows."