This article examines the apian imagery that runs through Plato's Republic in order to show how Socrates exploits traditional bee-related metaphors to strengthen his case against poetry. Socrates transvalues the traditional association between poetry and honey by conflating the image of the productive bee-poet with that of the parasitic drone-citizen, thus using poetry's own value terms to critique it on political grounds. By reconfiguring sweetness in all forms as a toxin inimical to a healthy state and incommensurate with the philosophic values of purity and moderation, Socrates turns the poetic tradition against itself. Once sweetness and benefit are understood to be mutually exclusive, poetry's apian "virtues" become political liabilities.
This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions.
Plato's Ion develops a concept of fiction distinct from the mimetic accounts of poetry found in the Republic and Aristotle's Poetics . The dialogue dramatically exposes the fictionality of poetry by (1) revealing a disparity between propositional and poetic semantics, (2) identifying the paradox of belief in imaginary worlds, and (3) showing that fictional constructions emerge from novel arrangements of real-world facts. Ultimately, the Ion examines the fraught relationship between literature and the real world, and the peculiar nature of literary knowledge, which takes both fact and fiction as its objects.
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