The metaphor of the painter in Plato, republic 10
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Abstract
The elaborate construction of the Republic progresses, step by step, to a final conclusion, irrefutable for Socrates’ interlocutors, in the construction of the ideal city: mimesis and, in particular, the tragic theatre have no place in that city, for its ontological emptiness and for the illusion and consequent deviation of reason. However, the Platonic Socrates argues with frequent recourse to metaphors, to allegories. The very structuring of book 1 suggests, by poetic anticipation, the course of the dialogical ‘action’. In other words: the reader or listener will appreciate how the Philosopher resorts to what he rejects, surrendering to its charm and aware of its persuasive charge. I propose, then, in the matter of understanding how theatre (tragedy) is excluded from the perfect city, to follow the thread of argument and the steps of argumentation that seem to contain deliberate vice and contradiction to arrive at the elimination of mimetic art (versus theatre) from the perfect polis, supported by a decisive argument of analogy: that of the ontological devaluation of painting, as mimesis of appearances. In the whole dialogical journey, however, if the power of persuasion derives from the appeal to intelligence (noesis) and understanding (dianoia), through argumentative logic, it also derives from the force of the suggestion of poetic resources. It is, after all, this same process of persuasion that leads Socrates to admit in the city the epidictic rhetoric of poetry of praise to illustrious men and heroes. Now this constitutes the space paradoxically open to what Socrates warns about as a danger: the charm of the imprecise, which escapes judicious evaluation. This is the case and the function of the recourse to the developed metaphor of painting, prepared to devalue this art by resorting to the comparative argument of the mirror. After all, artistic imagery delights and reinforces the reader’s adherence to the Platonic proposal, in a dynamic that is easily condensed into delectare, mouere, docere.
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