The Myth of Plato and Plato the Myth-maker

Rick Benitez: Look, I think that’s a really good question. Partly it does have to do with literature. Most people would know that Plato has a great antagonism to the poets of his day, the ones who went before him...
Alan Saunders: Yes, he wanted them garlanded and then dismissed from the city, didn’t he?
Rick Benitez: That’s right, but he didn’t want all of poetry dismissed. He wanted a particular kind of poetry, his philosophic poetry, to replace that, or anyone else who could write poetry in a philosophic way. So in the Phaedo he famously has Socrates say that philosophy is the greatest music, right, so he does think of philosophy as a kind of art form and he’s pioneering a new genre. He’s not the first to begin to write dialogues, but he’s one of the ones who takes it to its highest form as a genre. So in part he is doing something aesthetic, something like a novelist would do. In part he’s doing that, but I also think embedded in his purposes is the use of pictures, images. The Greek word is icons, representations, to lead people from one kind of perspective, one way of thinking about things, to another, and his myths have that kind of function which I think of as at least pedagogical and maybe more philosophical of shifting perspective to a new kind of perspective, a different one.
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Alan Saunders: How did Plato regard the power of myth to control lives?
Rick Benitez: It’s a double-edged sword, it has incredible power to control lives, and I think you want to say not just the lives of people who are the irrational lot. It has the power to control the lives of even the most rational of people, and one of the things you find described in The Republic is that even the guardians of the republic, those most rational of all people in the society, are people for whom the power of the image is so great that it slips in under the radar of rationality and has its effect on them. This is one reason why he’s so scared of some kinds of poetry and its ability to persuade. He’s scared of propaganda. Many people may think, well, he’s got his own propaganda to replace it, but he doesn’t like the power that image has to persuade even the most rational of people. So, the most important thing for him is if you’re going to have the use of myths and images in society, he wants them to be ones that reflect in more accurate ways the truth of the matter about things, and this is where his belief that there is a truth of the matter about even the most ordinary practical sorts of things, right and wrong in everyday life, may differ from more recent views about that, more relativistic views about that.

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