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Preface to Plato
Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.
The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.
The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.
The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.
The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.
342 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
May 18, 2010
For those billions of you loosing sleep each night trying to figure out why Plato was so hostile to poetry in the Republic, this book will give you sweet dreamless sleep, whiter teeth, and shrink your waistline while you feast on chocolate and pork rinds. And it might even be half true!
September 13, 2026
A spectre is haunting Plato’s Republic – the spectre of poetry. Plato does not—as we might expect from the foremost sage of the Attic world, himself once an aspiring poet and still regarded as one of the finest stylists in his history of philosophy—embrace poetry into his vision of the state by infusing it with the new spirit of reason, recognising its rightful place of supreme artistic value in the aesthetic education of the utopian citizen. Neither does he merely treat it with ambivalence. Quite the contrary; Plato’s attitude towards what he calls poetry (both here and notably in Ion) betrays a dogged animosity, an unflinching and at times even vituperative intolerance for not only its particular manifestations but the very mimetic logic upon which it relies.
How are we to make sense of this? The history of engagement with the Republic bears witness to the perennial difficulties even the most steadfast Platonists have found themselves in when confronted with this question. Havelock puts it thus:
Classically, we are offered two equally unsatisfying conclusions: either Plato, dogmatically attempting to wedge artistic expression into his rigid rationalist criterion, simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees, or, there is some hidden, esoteric truth lying in wait beneath Plato’s apparent error. The former takes Plato seriously but fails to explain his “mistake”, whereas the latter refuses to take Plato at his word in order salvage his “meaning”. What if, however, we both take Plato at his word and attempt to understand how his aesthetic antipathy might not be a deviation from but indeed a feature of his thinking? This, dear reader, is where Havelock’s intervention makes its entrance.
Once we have accepted the perhaps uncomfortable fact that, yes, Plato does target both the poetic per-se and the poetic experience in the Republic, we can ask, with Havelock, a more strictly historical question: what was the “poetic” for Plato? This is, to me, the essential question. If we simply presuppose that poetry meant the same thing to Plato (and the Athenians) as it does for us, then the problem cannot but remain insoluble.
Much of Preface to Plato is dedicated to presenting Havelock’s evidence that, when one pays the appropriate attention to the role and status of those like Hesiod and Homer in Athenian society, one is ineluctably compelled to accept the conclusion that poetry as Plato knew it was in fact vastly different—dare I say almost unrecognisable—from poetry as we know it today. Not, of course, in terms of its content, but rather in its function relative to the prevailing culture, education, and even consciousness as-such. If Plato so “insists on discussing the poets as though their job was to supply metrical encyclopaedias”, then why shouldn’t we ask whether he does so because their job really was to supply metrical encyclopaedias?
Simply put, by taking Plato seriously, we are forced to explore the possibility that the Attic poet was not an inspired genius purging their innermost truth into verse, but rather “society’s scribe and scholar and jurist”, the medium through which traditional, often instrumental knowledge was preserved through the generations. Havelock is not shy about using “indoctrination” when describing the purpose of the poem in Attic Greece; I doubt that he, for whom poetry was “an unconscious conspiracy”, would take much issue with going so far as categorising the Greek poetic institution—in Althusserian terms—as an ideological state apparatus par excellence.
This is where Preface to Plato begins to reveal itself as a staggering tour de force of rare ambition. To pursue this problematic to its end, Havelock is required to interweave not only philology and psychology with philosophical hermeneutics but also to make discrete historical (if necessarily speculative) claims about the shifting social role of poetry and literacy in ancient Athens. Whilst I’m not even remotely qualified to comment on the validity of the latter (historians and classicists were notoriously rather critical, so take that as you will), the former approaches are where things get really interesting.
When we read the Republic, we scoff at Plato’s imperious demand that poetry be banned, not simply because it seems to subject the art form to utterly arbitrary standards completely external to its spirit, but because it strikes us as an unforgivable step in the direction of authoritarian thought policing. Given the exceedingly contentious reputation the Republic has acquired in the modern era as a sort of blueprint for the archetypical totalitarian state, the contemporary reader is predisposed to be somewhat sensitive to “reactionary” proposals - and what could be more reactionary than censoring artistic expression?
And this is precisely why Havelock’s argument is so revolutionary: it completely overturns this image of Plato. Suddenly, in a flash of insight, that which had been received as one of Plato’s most archaic and authoritarian positions reveals itself to be, in truth, his most radical and iconoclastic, challenging the very foundations of Athenian society. If the poetic mode embodied the means through which the greeks not only spoke but thought, then Plato’s intervention, far from a means to control thought, is actually an attempt to free the citizenry from thought control. How about that...
This concession transforms the very character of the Republic itself, especially when viewed in light of the dialogues which are likely to have been written at a similar time. Whereas the latter more often than not end in aporia or an ironic, negative suspension of the doxa, the Republic is often dismissed by critics (Kierkegaard included!) as a shift in the direction of a more positive dialectic. And yet, if we accept that poetry assumed such a central, institutional position in Greek society, then this alone earns the Republic a place amongst the other Platonic dialogues which take aim at the presuppositions of Greek ethicality.
If the primary task of verse was to transmit techniques and mores, then Plato’s objections to the poet’s slapdash approach to verisimilitude sure make a lot more sense, don’t they? Why, then, does Plato seek poetry’s demise instead of its reform? The answer can be found in the idea that poetry was so ideally suited for its purpose—retaining group identity, preserving tradition and technique—precisely because it moulded itself to memorability and repeatability. Given this, it is obvious that there are limits to the lengths to which poetry can go in retaining the “objectivity” of its subject matter.
To my mind, what made poetry an art form in the first place, in and through its social role, is that the poet was forced to find creative solutions (Havelock counts polytheism itself, as the personification of abstract forces, among them) in order to retain as much of the objective as possible without thereby obliterating the capacity for reliable recollection. In other words, there’s a very good reason why we don’t encode sensitive legal documentation in poetic forms…
Whilst the incommensurability between the so-called objective and subjective is what today gives poetry its artistic appeal, Plato—for whom poetry was educational apparatus first and artistic expression second—could hardly afford to take this diremption so lightly. He wanted the objective-as-such, and the poetic was not only an ill-suited tool for the job but outright obstructive. This was because of its reliance on the mimetic, which to Plato’s mind relies upon a relation of “pathologically and certainly sympathetically" direct identification between poem and audience.
Indeed, Havelock goes on to make the even more radical claim that the rigid and mesmerising identificatory function of poetry forestalled the very formation of self-consciousness as we know it. Even if you don’t buy into it, such fearless ideas like these are a not insignificant reason why this scholarly reinterpretation of a specific argument in a specific Platonic dialogue was one of the most thrilling reading experiences I’ve had in recent memory. Not to mention the fact that it serves as further historical/psychological evidence for Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the ancient Athenians marked the sunset of consciousness before the disruptive powers of negative self-reflection ran amok.
What elevates it even further is just how relevant all of this is to our own paradigm of media consumption; have we not all met people who cannot seem to detach themselves from the “content” with which they uncritically identify? There does, therefore, seem to be a troubling parallelism between pre and post literate societies…
I digress. Havelock argues that this stunting of self-consciousness became the obstacle for Plato to overcome, that the condition of possibility for “a body of knowledge which is thought about and known” was the destruction of this “self-identification” embodied by the poetic; indeed, he finds in the dialectical method itself the very means through which Plato/Socrates lead the interlocutor into the realm of prosaic reflection, carving out a space for critique and abstraction by cutting through poetic complacency.
In harmony with this negative dialectic is the positive construction of a new syntax, a new way of thinking classification, typologies, and ultimately concepts. For Plato, the poem is doomed to a logic of multiplicity in a fixed temporality – it can never rise beyond “becoming” to the “being” required of a knowledge which transcends particulars and comes to rest in the universal, where, strictly speaking, thinking can truly begin.
To break from the torrent of multiplicity in time and instead grasp a being through which discursive abstraction becomes possible (see the Theaetetus, where it is clear that the thinkers of the multiple/becoming are almost forced to forgo the discursive altogether, not to mention the “scientific”) Plato was required to found a language of universality – of that which is decisively not temporal and not ephemeral, that which was one as opposed to the many of everyday experience and poetic education. His solution was, famously, the forms.
The birth of essence—as the “invisible” ground abstracted from all “accidental” properties of the object—is, at last, upon us. What Havelock has done here—deriving the defining parameters of Plato’s epistemology from its opposition to the poetic mode—is nothing short of remarkable. Far from being a frivolous exercise in scholastic motility, this method also sheds some revealing light on how and why the forms took the “form” they did: Plato denotes his abstractions “forms”/”shapes” as opposed to thoughts/concepts because he required that they are understood in their “objective” permanence apart from the multiplicity and becoming of experience.
Ironically, however, in his determination to sever the idea from the materiality of experience, Plato only served to immortalise it as a ‘look’, in language which cannot but conjure up visual connotations. Havelock explains this by reminding us that, given the environment in which this revolutionary effort was made, it is not all that surprising that Plato would have set aside just enough visual flavour to appeal to the pre-conceptual dispositions of his interlocutors and readers.
So, in the final analysis, Havelock offers a fascinating and compelling exposition not merely upon Plato’s antipathy to the poets but indeed his entire philosophical project. Even if some of the historical data doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, one thing is for sure: I will never read Plato the same way again.
How are we to make sense of this? The history of engagement with the Republic bears witness to the perennial difficulties even the most steadfast Platonists have found themselves in when confronted with this question. Havelock puts it thus:
“Why on earth, we wish to ask, should [Plato] attempt to judge poetry as though it were science or philosophy or mathematics or technology? Why demand that the poet ‘know’, in the sense that the carpenter knows about a bed? Surely this is to degrade the standards of poetic creation by submitting them to criteria which are unworthy or at least improper and irrelevant. Need the poet be an expert in the matter that he sings of? Such a presupposition does not make sense”
Classically, we are offered two equally unsatisfying conclusions: either Plato, dogmatically attempting to wedge artistic expression into his rigid rationalist criterion, simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees, or, there is some hidden, esoteric truth lying in wait beneath Plato’s apparent error. The former takes Plato seriously but fails to explain his “mistake”, whereas the latter refuses to take Plato at his word in order salvage his “meaning”. What if, however, we both take Plato at his word and attempt to understand how his aesthetic antipathy might not be a deviation from but indeed a feature of his thinking? This, dear reader, is where Havelock’s intervention makes its entrance.
Once we have accepted the perhaps uncomfortable fact that, yes, Plato does target both the poetic per-se and the poetic experience in the Republic, we can ask, with Havelock, a more strictly historical question: what was the “poetic” for Plato? This is, to me, the essential question. If we simply presuppose that poetry meant the same thing to Plato (and the Athenians) as it does for us, then the problem cannot but remain insoluble.
Much of Preface to Plato is dedicated to presenting Havelock’s evidence that, when one pays the appropriate attention to the role and status of those like Hesiod and Homer in Athenian society, one is ineluctably compelled to accept the conclusion that poetry as Plato knew it was in fact vastly different—dare I say almost unrecognisable—from poetry as we know it today. Not, of course, in terms of its content, but rather in its function relative to the prevailing culture, education, and even consciousness as-such. If Plato so “insists on discussing the poets as though their job was to supply metrical encyclopaedias”, then why shouldn’t we ask whether he does so because their job really was to supply metrical encyclopaedias?
Simply put, by taking Plato seriously, we are forced to explore the possibility that the Attic poet was not an inspired genius purging their innermost truth into verse, but rather “society’s scribe and scholar and jurist”, the medium through which traditional, often instrumental knowledge was preserved through the generations. Havelock is not shy about using “indoctrination” when describing the purpose of the poem in Attic Greece; I doubt that he, for whom poetry was “an unconscious conspiracy”, would take much issue with going so far as categorising the Greek poetic institution—in Althusserian terms—as an ideological state apparatus par excellence.
This is where Preface to Plato begins to reveal itself as a staggering tour de force of rare ambition. To pursue this problematic to its end, Havelock is required to interweave not only philology and psychology with philosophical hermeneutics but also to make discrete historical (if necessarily speculative) claims about the shifting social role of poetry and literacy in ancient Athens. Whilst I’m not even remotely qualified to comment on the validity of the latter (historians and classicists were notoriously rather critical, so take that as you will), the former approaches are where things get really interesting.
When we read the Republic, we scoff at Plato’s imperious demand that poetry be banned, not simply because it seems to subject the art form to utterly arbitrary standards completely external to its spirit, but because it strikes us as an unforgivable step in the direction of authoritarian thought policing. Given the exceedingly contentious reputation the Republic has acquired in the modern era as a sort of blueprint for the archetypical totalitarian state, the contemporary reader is predisposed to be somewhat sensitive to “reactionary” proposals - and what could be more reactionary than censoring artistic expression?
And this is precisely why Havelock’s argument is so revolutionary: it completely overturns this image of Plato. Suddenly, in a flash of insight, that which had been received as one of Plato’s most archaic and authoritarian positions reveals itself to be, in truth, his most radical and iconoclastic, challenging the very foundations of Athenian society. If the poetic mode embodied the means through which the greeks not only spoke but thought, then Plato’s intervention, far from a means to control thought, is actually an attempt to free the citizenry from thought control. How about that...
“There are a million things you cannot say at all in metrical speech and it will follow that you will not think them either”
This concession transforms the very character of the Republic itself, especially when viewed in light of the dialogues which are likely to have been written at a similar time. Whereas the latter more often than not end in aporia or an ironic, negative suspension of the doxa, the Republic is often dismissed by critics (Kierkegaard included!) as a shift in the direction of a more positive dialectic. And yet, if we accept that poetry assumed such a central, institutional position in Greek society, then this alone earns the Republic a place amongst the other Platonic dialogues which take aim at the presuppositions of Greek ethicality.
If the primary task of verse was to transmit techniques and mores, then Plato’s objections to the poet’s slapdash approach to verisimilitude sure make a lot more sense, don’t they? Why, then, does Plato seek poetry’s demise instead of its reform? The answer can be found in the idea that poetry was so ideally suited for its purpose—retaining group identity, preserving tradition and technique—precisely because it moulded itself to memorability and repeatability. Given this, it is obvious that there are limits to the lengths to which poetry can go in retaining the “objectivity” of its subject matter.
To my mind, what made poetry an art form in the first place, in and through its social role, is that the poet was forced to find creative solutions (Havelock counts polytheism itself, as the personification of abstract forces, among them) in order to retain as much of the objective as possible without thereby obliterating the capacity for reliable recollection. In other words, there’s a very good reason why we don’t encode sensitive legal documentation in poetic forms…
Whilst the incommensurability between the so-called objective and subjective is what today gives poetry its artistic appeal, Plato—for whom poetry was educational apparatus first and artistic expression second—could hardly afford to take this diremption so lightly. He wanted the objective-as-such, and the poetic was not only an ill-suited tool for the job but outright obstructive. This was because of its reliance on the mimetic, which to Plato’s mind relies upon a relation of “pathologically and certainly sympathetically" direct identification between poem and audience.
“this way of reliving experience in memory instead of analysing and understanding it, is for [Plato] ‘the enemy’”
Indeed, Havelock goes on to make the even more radical claim that the rigid and mesmerising identificatory function of poetry forestalled the very formation of self-consciousness as we know it. Even if you don’t buy into it, such fearless ideas like these are a not insignificant reason why this scholarly reinterpretation of a specific argument in a specific Platonic dialogue was one of the most thrilling reading experiences I’ve had in recent memory. Not to mention the fact that it serves as further historical/psychological evidence for Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the ancient Athenians marked the sunset of consciousness before the disruptive powers of negative self-reflection ran amok.
What elevates it even further is just how relevant all of this is to our own paradigm of media consumption; have we not all met people who cannot seem to detach themselves from the “content” with which they uncritically identify? There does, therefore, seem to be a troubling parallelism between pre and post literate societies…
I digress. Havelock argues that this stunting of self-consciousness became the obstacle for Plato to overcome, that the condition of possibility for “a body of knowledge which is thought about and known” was the destruction of this “self-identification” embodied by the poetic; indeed, he finds in the dialectical method itself the very means through which Plato/Socrates lead the interlocutor into the realm of prosaic reflection, carving out a space for critique and abstraction by cutting through poetic complacency.
In harmony with this negative dialectic is the positive construction of a new syntax, a new way of thinking classification, typologies, and ultimately concepts. For Plato, the poem is doomed to a logic of multiplicity in a fixed temporality – it can never rise beyond “becoming” to the “being” required of a knowledge which transcends particulars and comes to rest in the universal, where, strictly speaking, thinking can truly begin.
To break from the torrent of multiplicity in time and instead grasp a being through which discursive abstraction becomes possible (see the Theaetetus, where it is clear that the thinkers of the multiple/becoming are almost forced to forgo the discursive altogether, not to mention the “scientific”) Plato was required to found a language of universality – of that which is decisively not temporal and not ephemeral, that which was one as opposed to the many of everyday experience and poetic education. His solution was, famously, the forms.
The birth of essence—as the “invisible” ground abstracted from all “accidental” properties of the object—is, at last, upon us. What Havelock has done here—deriving the defining parameters of Plato’s epistemology from its opposition to the poetic mode—is nothing short of remarkable. Far from being a frivolous exercise in scholastic motility, this method also sheds some revealing light on how and why the forms took the “form” they did: Plato denotes his abstractions “forms”/”shapes” as opposed to thoughts/concepts because he required that they are understood in their “objective” permanence apart from the multiplicity and becoming of experience.
Ironically, however, in his determination to sever the idea from the materiality of experience, Plato only served to immortalise it as a ‘look’, in language which cannot but conjure up visual connotations. Havelock explains this by reminding us that, given the environment in which this revolutionary effort was made, it is not all that surprising that Plato would have set aside just enough visual flavour to appeal to the pre-conceptual dispositions of his interlocutors and readers.
So, in the final analysis, Havelock offers a fascinating and compelling exposition not merely upon Plato’s antipathy to the poets but indeed his entire philosophical project. Even if some of the historical data doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, one thing is for sure: I will never read Plato the same way again.
May 24, 2015
My summer project of reading Ancient Greek Philosophy got off to a rough start when I stumbled through Plato’s Republic. Expecting an insightful, albeit idealistic political solution, I was sorely confused. Interspersed between polemics against Poetry and Homer, I found traces of a simplistic, totalitarian regime. Even the running of this regime was not elaborated upon, except in the branch of education.
After scouring the internet wildly for answers, I found two likely solutions to my quandary. The first, was the following review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The second was this book.
From what I understand, Havelock’s fundamental aim is to trace the transformation in the Greek Mind through Plato’s writing. The main premise is that Plato’s society was still largely illiterate, and thus Plato’s attack against Poetry is in fact an attack on a ‘pre-literate’ source of knowledge that is lacking in logical consistency and factual correctness, that we take for granted in our own encyclopaedias. Havelock is arguing that Ancient Greeks literally ‘believed’ in Poetry, and this is the rational for Plato’s attack. From this perspective, the state that is constructed in Plato’s Republic is simplistic because it is brought in only for the sake of the argument on Poetry. The details in education are given because of the role Poetry played in Ancient Greek education, and this is the aspect of Poetry that Plato is attacking.
Havelock makes a lot of other insightful points about vocabularly etc, half of which went over my head. Aside from the the Republic and Homer’s Odyssey, I haven’t read any of the other sources he quotes. Further I do not understand Greek. For these reasons, it’s possible that the evidence Havelock brings to support his claim is faulty. However, the construction of his hypotheses, whether they are validated by fact or not, is intriguing in itself. He really made me think, and question in a way I was not used to. For example this is how it starts:
Where have you been all my life? Not only is he answering my concern about the lack of political theory, he is making the seemingly obvious hypothesis that maybe it is not about political theory at all. The presentation of this hypothesis, however, disguises its sheer brilliance. Through all my confusion, I not once doubted that Plato aimed to write on political theory.
This comes at the end of the chapter in which he draws a link between the transformation from an oral to written culture, and how it results in a realization of self. Not sure if I buy it completely, however, it asks really interesting questions about the impact of our means of communication on our fundamental thinking. The way he describes the process of self-realization is equally fascinating.
While this is slight less original, in that he seems to be merely documenting the return of ‘rationalism’. However, while few people claim to be Platonic idealists, the way we continue to describe our world in abstractions definitely has deeper parallels to Plato then I initially thought. Once again, his description of this historical process is in itself, thought-provoking.
Ultimately, Preface to Plato not only helped me understand Plato’s Republic better, as an exposition of hypotheses, it is commendable.
After scouring the internet wildly for answers, I found two likely solutions to my quandary. The first, was the following review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The second was this book.
From what I understand, Havelock’s fundamental aim is to trace the transformation in the Greek Mind through Plato’s writing. The main premise is that Plato’s society was still largely illiterate, and thus Plato’s attack against Poetry is in fact an attack on a ‘pre-literate’ source of knowledge that is lacking in logical consistency and factual correctness, that we take for granted in our own encyclopaedias. Havelock is arguing that Ancient Greeks literally ‘believed’ in Poetry, and this is the rational for Plato’s attack. From this perspective, the state that is constructed in Plato’s Republic is simplistic because it is brought in only for the sake of the argument on Poetry. The details in education are given because of the role Poetry played in Ancient Greek education, and this is the aspect of Poetry that Plato is attacking.
Havelock makes a lot of other insightful points about vocabularly etc, half of which went over my head. Aside from the the Republic and Homer’s Odyssey, I haven’t read any of the other sources he quotes. Further I do not understand Greek. For these reasons, it’s possible that the evidence Havelock brings to support his claim is faulty. However, the construction of his hypotheses, whether they are validated by fact or not, is intriguing in itself. He really made me think, and question in a way I was not used to. For example this is how it starts:
“It sometimes happens in the history of the written word that an important work of literature carries a title which does not accurately reflect the contents. A part of the work has become identified with the whole, or the meaning of a label has shifted in translation. But if the label has a popular and recognisable ring, it can come to exercise a kind of thought control over those who take the book in their hands. They form an expectation which accords with the title but is belied by much of the substance of what the author has to say. They cling to a preconception of his intentions, insensibly allowing their minds to mould the content of what they read into the required shape.
These remarks apply with full force to that treatise of Plato's styled the Republic. Were it not for the title, it might be read for what it is, rather than as an essay in utopian political theory. It is a fact that only about a third of the work concerns itself with statecraft as such. The text deals at length and often with a great variety of matters which bear on the human condition, but these are matters which would certainly have no place in a modem treatise on politics.”
Where have you been all my life? Not only is he answering my concern about the lack of political theory, he is making the seemingly obvious hypothesis that maybe it is not about political theory at all. The presentation of this hypothesis, however, disguises its sheer brilliance. Through all my confusion, I not once doubted that Plato aimed to write on political theory.
“So it is that the long sleep of man is interrupted and his self-consciousness, separating itself from the lazy play of the endless saga-series of events, begins to think and to be thought of, 'itself of itself', and as it thinks and is thought, man in his new inner isolation confronts the phenomenon of his own autonomous personality and accepts it.”
This comes at the end of the chapter in which he draws a link between the transformation from an oral to written culture, and how it results in a realization of self. Not sure if I buy it completely, however, it asks really interesting questions about the impact of our means of communication on our fundamental thinking. The way he describes the process of self-realization is equally fascinating.
“Yet the day would come when the original drive of the Platonic method would revive, and the phenomenal flux would once more be examined and penetrated and subordinated to categories of explanation which possess a wholly abstract integrity. And when this day came, science would awaken again.”
While this is slight less original, in that he seems to be merely documenting the return of ‘rationalism’. However, while few people claim to be Platonic idealists, the way we continue to describe our world in abstractions definitely has deeper parallels to Plato then I initially thought. Once again, his description of this historical process is in itself, thought-provoking.
Ultimately, Preface to Plato not only helped me understand Plato’s Republic better, as an exposition of hypotheses, it is commendable.
January 2, 2022
Excellent book!!
February 4, 2026
Sooo yeah, poetry used to be the main mechanism for memory in Ancient Greece! Such an interesting take on poetry, mimesis, culture making, and individualism!
Now I need to read The Republic lol
Now I need to read The Republic lol
June 3, 2014
Simply excellent. Makes sense of the transition involved in thinking by memorized narratives versus writing -- that is, abstraction. I'd say "page turner" but that'd be way too strong. Still, many juicy bits like the singing Turkish soldiers of W W 1 who, still part of the narrative epic culture, spoke in near rhyme.
April 22, 2020
Es un estudio que trata de poner sobre relieve algunos asuntos del texto La República del filósofo griego: la confrontación entre mito y logos, entre el poeta (conciencia de oyente) y el filósofo (otra forma de conciencia, otra psyche).
December 31, 2023
LITERATURE in PUNK ROCK - Books #57-58
------------------------
SONG: The History of the Concept of the Soul
BAND: Mr. T Experience (MTX)
ALBUM: Night Shift at the Thrill Factory (1988)
BOOKS:
- Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock (1951)
- The Greeks and the Irrational by ER Dodd (1953)
https://youtu.be/a_BiQkZSXhQ?si=natrA...
------------------------
"The History of the Concept of the Soul" by MTX is frequently reported as the "punk rock song" version of the lead singer's thesis or doctoral dissertation. However, a 2021 blogpost by Frank Portman, lead singer of MTX, clarifies the song development as a "stunt" to "...condense an undergraduate essay into a three verse, one minute twenty second punk rock song, with notes."
While the lyrical (sung) footnotes cite "The Greeks and the Irrational" by ER Dodd, the majority of lyrical content (1st and 2nd verse) is comparatively focused on theories of orality and literacy espoused in Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato.
According to Havelock, Plato's Republic is argument against a Homeric (oral/pre-literate) State of Mind, a collective-memory enforced through Poetic Repetition/Mimesis. The dominant Homeric oral-poetry-as-a-cultural-medium is contrasted with an embattled shift towards a Platonic State of Mind, in which mathematics and paper-writing (via introduction of the alphabet) establishes an abstraction for self-reflection and critical analysis (i.e.: separation of the knower from the known).
Akin, the 1st and 2nd chorus progress from how "Early Greek thought played a role, in the complicated history of the soul" towards the development Platonic State of Mind in which "Modern thought was (now) possible, in the complicated history..."
Havelock's theory coincides alongside lyrical juxtaposition (3rd verse) with ER Dodd's view on the influence of nascent Pre-Socratic Naturalist thought (i.e. Pythagorean or Orphic doctrines) as contemporary views on the soul whom were eclipsed in the absence of comparative "mystic" Platonic metaphysics.
This is the incredible
Complicated history of the concept of the soul
Rock and roll!
https://drankf.medium.com/too-vague-t...
------------------------
SONG: The History of the Concept of the Soul
BAND: Mr. T Experience (MTX)
ALBUM: Night Shift at the Thrill Factory (1988)
BOOKS:
- Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock (1951)
- The Greeks and the Irrational by ER Dodd (1953)
https://youtu.be/a_BiQkZSXhQ?si=natrA...
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"The History of the Concept of the Soul" by MTX is frequently reported as the "punk rock song" version of the lead singer's thesis or doctoral dissertation. However, a 2021 blogpost by Frank Portman, lead singer of MTX, clarifies the song development as a "stunt" to "...condense an undergraduate essay into a three verse, one minute twenty second punk rock song, with notes."
While the lyrical (sung) footnotes cite "The Greeks and the Irrational" by ER Dodd, the majority of lyrical content (1st and 2nd verse) is comparatively focused on theories of orality and literacy espoused in Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato.
According to Havelock, Plato's Republic is argument against a Homeric (oral/pre-literate) State of Mind, a collective-memory enforced through Poetic Repetition/Mimesis. The dominant Homeric oral-poetry-as-a-cultural-medium is contrasted with an embattled shift towards a Platonic State of Mind, in which mathematics and paper-writing (via introduction of the alphabet) establishes an abstraction for self-reflection and critical analysis (i.e.: separation of the knower from the known).
Akin, the 1st and 2nd chorus progress from how "Early Greek thought played a role, in the complicated history of the soul" towards the development Platonic State of Mind in which "Modern thought was (now) possible, in the complicated history..."
Havelock's theory coincides alongside lyrical juxtaposition (3rd verse) with ER Dodd's view on the influence of nascent Pre-Socratic Naturalist thought (i.e. Pythagorean or Orphic doctrines) as contemporary views on the soul whom were eclipsed in the absence of comparative "mystic" Platonic metaphysics.
This is the incredible
Complicated history of the concept of the soul
Rock and roll!
https://drankf.medium.com/too-vague-t...
May 30, 2024
Saggio di una chiarezza strepitosa! Havelock di conferma un grande intellettuale e un fine conoscitore della civiltà greca. In questo viaggio dalla Grecia arcaica fino a Platone, l'autore ci svela come la è cambiata la comuicazione e quali sono le ragioni che hanno portato al tramonto del poema epico, soppiantato dal logos moderno. Un viaggio che segue passo passo la progressiva imposizione della comunicazione scritta che sostituisce quella orale degli aedi e dei rapsodi. Un viaggio lungo almeno tre secoli, che ha così imposto il dominio del "concetto" e dato vita alla figura moderna del Filosofo, classificatore del mondo, al posto del Poeta, interprete dello stesso. Un'invenzione, quella della scrittura alfabetica, che ha avuto risvolti etici capitali e rivoluzionato un mondo, gettando le basi della cultura occidentale.
August 23, 2024
Maybe Plato hated poets because the ancient epics were from a pre-literate era, and literacy leads to abstract thought, which Plato's forms were all about.
Probably not. This idea is very unpopular now, and is seen as elitist for relegating oral traditions to an inferior status. I've also heard that Havelock's claims about literacy and abstraction are not backed by the research.
Interesting that the book is rated very high on Goodreads despite its low reputation in academia. Maybe it's Havelock's depiction of stark differences in subjectivity or worldview. It's interesting to try thinking about what other supposed states of consciousness are like.
Probably not. This idea is very unpopular now, and is seen as elitist for relegating oral traditions to an inferior status. I've also heard that Havelock's claims about literacy and abstraction are not backed by the research.
Interesting that the book is rated very high on Goodreads despite its low reputation in academia. Maybe it's Havelock's depiction of stark differences in subjectivity or worldview. It's interesting to try thinking about what other supposed states of consciousness are like.
October 14, 2017
Compelling argument focused on the transition from a society dominated by the oral transmission of knowledge to one where the written word is the principle vehicle of knowledge. Got me to think in new ways about Homer and Hesiod, as well as about Plato and the world Plato imagined was possible. I would like to know a bit more why Classists were less than enthusiastic about it.
July 2, 2022
speculative but compelling attempt at charting the transition from oral to literate philosophical culture through a creative reading of plato's attack on 'poetry', sometimes veers close to bicameralism-style thinking but the substance of it is deeply interesting even if you have to think around that stuff.
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August 9, 2026Wildly important, even if—and I suspect this to be the case—much of it is speculative, and in some critical moments Havelock forces his argument badly. These misgivings mostly concern fine details, however—the why, the how, the where—rather than the grand, overarching portrait of a culture developing a sui generis level of self-awareness. Havelock's argument, an experiment in what might be called "information history," contrasts the Homeric model of cultural indoctrination with the Socratic/Platonic. In the former, information is memorized and fully identified with; when one "thinks" they reflect on how cultural ideas are embedded in the everyday. With the latter, however, the Greeks achieved full abstraction, which was unprecedented—ideas were reduced to their essential, "eternal" elements, and regarded skeptically. (As Ong would discover, there's much to be said about the movement from the oral to the literate here, too.)
This is an interesting read at the dawn of AI, where information dissemination is becoming less literary and more oracular. I do not think we are returning to the age of Homer adumbrated by Havelock, but we may be entering a new age where abstraction (and the cold, mathematical logic of critical thinking that Plato proselytized) is harder to achieve (or less desirable) because of how and where we receive information. LLMs encourage us to farm out everything: epistemic certainty, synthesis, etc. What will happen, then, when "thinking" consists mainly of manipulating machines with deft queries and accepting the responses without question? Neither Havelock nor Ong will be around to investigate, but someone will, and I hope they start with this book.
This is an interesting read at the dawn of AI, where information dissemination is becoming less literary and more oracular. I do not think we are returning to the age of Homer adumbrated by Havelock, but we may be entering a new age where abstraction (and the cold, mathematical logic of critical thinking that Plato proselytized) is harder to achieve (or less desirable) because of how and where we receive information. LLMs encourage us to farm out everything: epistemic certainty, synthesis, etc. What will happen, then, when "thinking" consists mainly of manipulating machines with deft queries and accepting the responses without question? Neither Havelock nor Ong will be around to investigate, but someone will, and I hope they start with this book.
Read
July 4, 2022MECLAP reading
October 6, 2024
Imprescindible para entender a Platón y el origen de ese “amor al estudio” y “resistencia a la presión social”, de esa “música suprema” llamada filosofía.
August 30, 2026
Po zrozumieniu tej książki człowiek ma mózga jak platon mięśnia
Read
September 10, 2026very important book for the history of literary theory, i never want to touch it again
August 25, 2024
al principio no me convencía nada, menos mal que no lo abandoné porque menudo espectáculo de libro
November 1, 2024
Havelock writes here an extremely ambitious book, and he writes it pretty well. Havelock cites copiously, both primary and secondary sources. But his main text stands alone, with almost no demand on the reader to know any of the cited work. His writing is thorough and systematic, and compared to his contemporaries like Harold Innis or Marshall McLuhan, who often struggle to make sense, it is a dream to read. He is at least as good a scholar as Walter Ong, and a better writer. He somehow manages to take a narrower and superficially more constrained topic than Ong's "Orality and Literacy" and transform it into a book that has, if anything, a more ambitious scope.
At the heart of the book is Havelock’s thesis that Plato’s major work, "Republic", was principally a passionate attack on poetry – conflated by Plato with almost all education and learning that took place in his culture. The attack was passionate because - as literacy was rapidly spreading among the male citizens of Athens, Plato felt it to be impossible to clear the ground for the rise of a rationalistic, scientific and literate culture without throwing out poetry first.
Key to his critique is the concept of ‘mimesis’. This was a kind of experience in which those listening to the revered bards of the day, playing their lyres and telling their stories, became at one with the characters and the situations. Mimesis is more than empathy – it is complete identification. Plato was arguing that this approach to learning his culture's content, and to handing it down from generation to generation, effectively ruled out science, rationality, and genuine learning.
Plato’s critique was not of poets in a general sense, but the whole institutional infrastructure surrounding poets and poetry in Athenian society. Plato makes this sound more like a religion than the art we today association with Homer. His critique parallels the demands from atheists that we rid the world of religion, often for very similar reasons.
But I'm also reminded of how Robin Wall Kimmerer, in "Braiding Sweetgrass", reacted to her formal studies of biology. How she deeply respected and diligently learned the content, but felt that something important was missing; something she found by celebrating nature – and experiencing a kind of mimesis in nature - through her indigenous traditions.
There is no question that dissociation from a topic can lead to deep insights that would otherwise be impossible. Exactly this sort of dissociation from nature by science has not only supported tremendous growth in human knowledge, but tremendous increases in the power of scientifically-minded societies. But at what cost? And is it possible, as Kimmerer appears to believe, to have both – to maintain both identification and dispassion in the same person?
Was Plato advancing a false dichotomy? Is the required separation really so sharp, so unambiguous? This is one reason the social and human sciences become so problematic – it is impossible for us as humans to be dispassionate about ourselves.
Is there not a better science, waiting for us to find it, that marries the best of orality and literacy?
Havelock argues that every piece of important information in an oral society must be phrased memorably, with poetic effect, in order for it to be retained. He implies that the advent of writing and print freed us from this imperative. Yet riding on the subway today I was reminded that this is not true.
“Help keep the TTC safe. If you see any suspicious activity, notify TTC staff, or a police officer. If you see something, say something.” This final line is the one people are expected to carry away with them, and it fully fits the parameters of poetic and memorable that apply to oral cultures. This line is violently anti-rationalistic and anti-scientific. People see things all the time, but the notice is not asking people to report everything they see. We accept as a matter of common knowledge that “if you see something” has a very specific meaning. That is precisely why the phrasing is so memorable.
Why, in an era of rationalism and science, do we still use this sort of phrasing?
Because it still has power, no matter how much science and rationality whittle away at this type of power.
At the heart of the book is Havelock’s thesis that Plato’s major work, "Republic", was principally a passionate attack on poetry – conflated by Plato with almost all education and learning that took place in his culture. The attack was passionate because - as literacy was rapidly spreading among the male citizens of Athens, Plato felt it to be impossible to clear the ground for the rise of a rationalistic, scientific and literate culture without throwing out poetry first.
Key to his critique is the concept of ‘mimesis’. This was a kind of experience in which those listening to the revered bards of the day, playing their lyres and telling their stories, became at one with the characters and the situations. Mimesis is more than empathy – it is complete identification. Plato was arguing that this approach to learning his culture's content, and to handing it down from generation to generation, effectively ruled out science, rationality, and genuine learning.
Plato’s critique was not of poets in a general sense, but the whole institutional infrastructure surrounding poets and poetry in Athenian society. Plato makes this sound more like a religion than the art we today association with Homer. His critique parallels the demands from atheists that we rid the world of religion, often for very similar reasons.
But I'm also reminded of how Robin Wall Kimmerer, in "Braiding Sweetgrass", reacted to her formal studies of biology. How she deeply respected and diligently learned the content, but felt that something important was missing; something she found by celebrating nature – and experiencing a kind of mimesis in nature - through her indigenous traditions.
There is no question that dissociation from a topic can lead to deep insights that would otherwise be impossible. Exactly this sort of dissociation from nature by science has not only supported tremendous growth in human knowledge, but tremendous increases in the power of scientifically-minded societies. But at what cost? And is it possible, as Kimmerer appears to believe, to have both – to maintain both identification and dispassion in the same person?
Was Plato advancing a false dichotomy? Is the required separation really so sharp, so unambiguous? This is one reason the social and human sciences become so problematic – it is impossible for us as humans to be dispassionate about ourselves.
Is there not a better science, waiting for us to find it, that marries the best of orality and literacy?
Havelock argues that every piece of important information in an oral society must be phrased memorably, with poetic effect, in order for it to be retained. He implies that the advent of writing and print freed us from this imperative. Yet riding on the subway today I was reminded that this is not true.
“Help keep the TTC safe. If you see any suspicious activity, notify TTC staff, or a police officer. If you see something, say something.” This final line is the one people are expected to carry away with them, and it fully fits the parameters of poetic and memorable that apply to oral cultures. This line is violently anti-rationalistic and anti-scientific. People see things all the time, but the notice is not asking people to report everything they see. We accept as a matter of common knowledge that “if you see something” has a very specific meaning. That is precisely why the phrasing is so memorable.
Why, in an era of rationalism and science, do we still use this sort of phrasing?
Because it still has power, no matter how much science and rationality whittle away at this type of power.
October 10, 2007
This book completely transformed my world view. It was originally recommended by an ancient languages scholar at U. Mich. after I asked how one could tell which parts of the Old Testament were transcribed later from an oral tradition vs. which ones were "only" written.
April 9, 2014
One of those books that I encountered too late. But when I did, it suddenly synthesized years of related reading. Coupled with Luc Brisson's "How Philosophers Saved Myth", and it's the perfect preparation for reading Plato and Aristotle.
September 16, 2012
If an enlightening enterprise in archaealogy of knowledge into the Platonic Revolution, then a bit tautological one.
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