The ancient quarrel unsettled: Plato and the erotics of tragic poetry

This study examines Plato's critique of tragedy and his account of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. I argue that for Plato, tragic drama is poetry par excellence, a limit case in which the analysis of the nature of poetry can be exhibited most clearly. Central to Plato's critique of tragedy is what Socrates in Book X of the Republic refers to as the "quarrel between philosophy and poetry." Since antiquity this quarrel has commanded the attention of Plato's interpreters, and in recent decades it has become a recurrent motif in Platonic studies and in the expanding field of philosophical engagement with literature. In contrast to much that has been written on this subject, I argue that the opposition is not, at root, a generic distinction based on formal criteria such as meter or diction, nor is it simply the difference between myth-making and account-giving, between muthos and logos. Most significantly, against the predominant view among scholars, I maintain that the arguments developed by Socrates and his interlocutors against poetry are not intended by Plato to constitute philosophy's victory over poetry. Nor, for that matter, do these arguments manifest philosophy's failure to defeat its opponent. On my reading, the quarrel is deliberately unresolved. In the mode of a thought experiment, it contrasts two opposing conceptions of the nature and purpose of human discursive activity and the ethical implications of each, and it turns ultimately on the question of what Plato calls erôs. Philosophy and poetry manifest different understandings of the character and fate of erotic striving and constitute two different responses to the human condition.;The Introduction to the thesis surveys several studies of the "ancient quarrel" to establish the field of inquiry and then adumbrates my intervention. Chapter One recapitulates the conception of mimêsis formulated in Book X of the Republic and defends, against many critics, the cogency and explanatory power of Socrates' account of mimetic making. Chapter Two then identifies what I regard to be the decisive limitations of the account defended in Chapter One. It is in light of these limitations, I argue, that Plato's deeper concerns about poetry in general, and tragedy in particular, come into view. Chapter Three elaborates these concerns, arguing for the centrality of erôs to Plato's conception of the "ancient quarrel" and examining the problem of "tragic beauty," which Plato is the first author to isolate and analyze. The chapter concludes by noting Socrates' claim in Book VIII that tragedy fosters tyranny, and by identifying a fundamental puzzle: that erôs is portrayed in the Republic as the predominant psychological force in both the philosopher and the tyrant. Confronting this ambivalence in the portrayal of erôs is the main business of Chapter Four, in which I reject various attempts to solve the puzzle. I argue that the dialogue remains radically aporetic on the question of whether human thought has access to the objects of intellection (the forms), which access would be necessary to ground the distinction between philosophical and tyrannical erôs . On my reading, the same aporia informs the Republic's presentation of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. In the final chapter, I argue that what most interests and concerns Plato about tragedy is its power to rouse and sustain erotic desire in the face of this fundamental aporia. The philosophical conception of erôs sees desire as directed toward and determined by its proper cognitive object---the beautiful as the manifestation of the good. Such desire is, at least in principle, satiable, but also, and for that reason, subject to surcease. The love of tragedy reveals a conception of desire that, by contrast, has no proper object. Tragic beauty is conceived here not as a delimited object, but as the spectacle of the perpetual transgression of limits, and tragedy is seen as emblematic of a way of life that embodies a praxis for sustaining desire in the absence of any proper object. The quarrel between philosophy and poetry, on my reading, is a reflection on the nature and fate of desire: the possibilities of its fulfillment and the conditions under which it is or can be sustained.