In a way, Book 10 is an odd addendum to the Republic. The main problem of the dialog appears to have been thoroughly solved. We know that justice (in a city or a soul) is each part doing only the thing that it is naturally suited to, with the rational part ruling and harmonizing all the others, as befits its essential nature. And we know that the just man is happy, and the unjust man miserable simply because of the way they are constituted, irrespective of what their worldly reputations might be. So why, for his finale, does Socrates return to the denunciation of "imitative" poetry that he already covered in Book 3? And why does he follow this with a discussion of the logic of models and copies he touched on in Book 6? Finally, what does all this have to do with the immortality of the soul, a topic which hasn't been discussed and seems irrelevant, and the elaborate metempsychosis of the myth of Er?
I think the key question that holds the conclusion together is: what is justice good for? How does it benefit us? While it's tempting to say that Socrates has already answered this question -- it makes us happy -- this isn't how it was presented. It's not happiness, but the Good, that is the ultimate criterion of judgement. We weren't counseled to be just because it would make us happy. That was merely a byproduct of a justice that was valued in itself, even if all its consequences were invisible (359e9). We might also be tempted to say that Socrates has provided another answer to this question by constantly showing us how the unjust soul is at war against itself. Only the just man quells the civil war within his own soul. But this too is merely a consequence of justice, and anyhow begs the question of why peace is good. So if the ultimate purpose of justice is not to provide peace and happiness, then what are we supposed to use it for?
We use justice to select. The purpose of justice is to enable us to choose the Good. If Beauty is first among Forms because it inspires an increasingly abstract love within us, Justice is like the last Form because it enables us to distinguish the essential natures of things. In other words, by enabling us to know what each thing is naturally suited to and how things fit together, Justice gives us a vision of the realm of Forms. Justice is knowledge of order. It's the knowledge of what Forms structure reality, what abstract parts it breaks down into. This knowledge is useful, practical, and directly moral, not merely theoretical. The world is a confusing place, filled with a multicolored clamor. If we are to choose a life that's good for us, we need justice to act as a guide that uncovers the true Forms that organize all the appearances of experience. Starting in Book 2, the construction of the 'luxurious city' emphasized that experience comes to us as a mixture, and that Justice purifies this mixture by showing us what metals compose the alloy. Once we know the components of any mixture, we can separate better mixtures from worse ones. In short, Justice gives us the tools to make a practical moral choice about how to live better amidst the confusion of this world.
This is precisely the logic of a model and its degraded or mixed copies. We can't select a better copy without knowing what the model looked like. Justice, then, is the knowledge of models. The benefit of knowing the models, the Forms, is that you can see what each copy or thing is composed of. This statue is 98% pure gold, it just got a little scuffed up. Knowing the compositions of things allows you to choose the best one. My reading of this naturally owes a lot to Deleuze. He pointed out that the seemingly central distinction between Form and thing, model and copy, in Plato is actually a secondary matter. That metaphysical distinction is important only because it serves a moral purpose -- it enables us to distinguish the better and worse copies. The core distinction between better and worse copies explains why the Republic concludes with the curious myth of Er. The point of the myth is to show the true benefit of Justice. It can't help you rest in the pure realm of Forms, but it can help you choose a new life for your next spin of the wheel.
The first half of this chapter revisits the dispute between poets and philosophers we saw in Book 3 only as a way of again illustrating the distinction between the model versus the copy we first saw in Books 6 and 7. Poets are condemned as mere imitators, mere producers of images. Socrates illustrates this by hypothesizing the famous Form of a table (or bed) (506b). He doesn't seriously believe that there is a Table; this is just a pedagogic device. But, presuming there is a form of a table, then a particular real table will be an imitation of that form, and a painting of table will be an imitation of that imitation. Poets and other artists then deal only with reflections of reality (596e), with images of images that come in third place relative to the 'things that are'.
Why does Plato harp on poetry though, as the representative of art? I think he chooses poetry specifically because of the central role of Homer in Greek culture. As we saw in our discussion of Meno, Plato is right on the cusp between an oral and a written society. Most of the knowledge of an oral society is stored in the form of tales and stories that are told and retold, preserved but also modified by accretion. So, fundamentally the question is whether we should look to philosopher's or poets, Homer or Plato as an authority.
Then, we must consider tragedy and its leader, Homer. The reason is this: We hear some people say that poets know all crafts, all human affairs concerned with virtue and vice, and all about the gods as well. They say e that if a good poet produces fine poetry, he must have knowledge of the things he writes about, or else he wouldn't be able to produce it at all. Hence, we have to look to see whether those who tell us this have encountered these imitators and have been so deceived by them that they don't realize that their works are at the third remove from that which is and are easily produced without knowledge of the truth (since they are only images, not things that are), or whether there is something in what these people say, and good poets really do have knowledge of the things most people think they write so well about. (598e)
This echoes the discussion in Ion about what a poet or a rhapsode really knows. In the end, these artists just incite people with words, without any knowledge of what they're talking about at all. They're just 'painting pictures', as it were, of different subjects. And like someone painting a bed, they needn't concern themselves with how to actually build one.
And in the same way, I suppose we'll say that a poetic imitator uses words and phrases to paint colored pictures of each of the crafts. He himself knows nothing about them, but he imitates them in such a way that others, as ignorant as he, who judge by words, will think he speaks extremely well about cobblery or generalship or anything else whatever (601a)
This observation is pretty obvious to the modern mind, but I suspect it was much less so when the idea of a book was just getting off the ground.
So poets are just imitators. They are makers of images of real things, which are themselves just images of the Forms. Their craft (or knack as Socrates puts it in Gorgias) has nothing to do with true knowledge, but merely with appearances and opinions about appearances (602a). It's for this that they got kicked out of the Republic in the first place. Instead of knowing about the Form of a bed, or at least having a right opinion about how to make a working copy of a bed, they just paint something which others think appears like a bed. Makers of images of images are locked in a kind of hall of mirrors. Like the contestants in Keynes beauty contest, they only have opinions about the opinions of others (602b).
Socrates goes on to give several more reasons why the poets have to go, but in the end all these amount to the same complaint -- poets don't know, or even try to approach, the Forms of Courage, Temperance, etc ... which serve as models of behavior. They therefore don't appeal to the rational and knowing part of the soul, but to the appetitive and emotional part (603). What's worse, poetry doesn't even confine itself to producing images of good, moderate, rational lives, but actually delights in depicting all kinds of extreme and variable characters (604e). In fact, this is exactly what gives poetry such dangerous influence over even the good and rational souls. Since all souls have an appetitive part, the imagination makes anyone susceptible to empathizing with the images the poets depict. As a result, after watching all this violence on TV, it's easy to lose sight of the philosophic life we know is good for us. In short, the problem with people who make images is that they can mix together any stories they want to make compelling images of anything. So if we're trying to train people to separate the good life from the bad, people who don't concern themselves with the true Forms at all will have to go.
Socrates knows this condemnation of poetry sounds harsh (607b), but then again, it's the health of our immortal soul that's at stake. The next section of the chapter gives a brief (and pretty unconvincing) proof of the immortality of the soul along different lines than those we saw in Phaedo. The basic argument is that things can only be destroyed by whatever 'natural evil' corresponds to their essence. So if we find that the natural evil proper to the soul nevertheless does not destroy it, then we'll have to conclude that it is immortal and indestructible. Injustice is the natural evil that undoes the harmony of the soul. However, being unjust does not literally kill us. Therefore, the soul is immortal. QED. I don't know who this is supposed to convince. But it certainly reinforces the notion that the world is divided into certain forms, and that the key moral question is finding what is naturally healthy or unhealthy for that form.
Anyhow, the discussion of the immortality of the soul is really just a prelude to the discussion of how the soul benefits from justice. Throughout the dialog, Socrates has insisted on judging justice itself, even if its appearance were invisible (612b). Now, however, having defended justice in itself, he wants us to see that in fact it has lots of benefits and rewards, both in this life and, since the soul is immortal, after we die (614). The biggest of these benefits, what ultimately makes justice good for us, is the way it gives us the knowledge to choose a good life the next time we are reincarnated. Justice is really a knowledge of types of lives, types of constitutions in their pure form, that is invaluable when it comes time to select a new life. This is the punchline of the Myth of Er that concludes the dialog.
The basic outline of Er's return from the land of the dead is the same as the other myths of metempsychosis we've seen in Phaedo, Gorgias, and Phaedrus. They all have some element of moral judgement that describes punishment for bad people and rewards for good people (615b). But these aren't Christian myths and I don't think this eschatalogical aspect is the most important part. Indeed, the notion of a 'final judgement day' is foreign to Plato since he doesn't conceive of any of these judgements as final. The point of the myths seem to be that the endless turning of the universe prevents any judgement from being final. Plato's idea of time seems to be entirely cyclical. All the imagery is of elaborate circles within circles that produce a constant motion that never goes anywhere at all, much less to the final judgement at the end of time. So while Er speaks of heaven and earth and even a sort of hell made especially for tyrants, mostly souls just seem to rotate through the apparatus, doing time on earth, then a stint in heaven, and perhaps landing in Tartarus (permanently?) if they're particularly nasty. There's no real principle of ascension to the mechanism. There's no final goal, no permanent resting place. The wheel of samsara just keeps turning indefinitely, and there's no way off the merry-go-round, regardless of how much karma you build up.
But then, what is Plato's moral point with this myth? Unlike the other versions, the myth of Er explicitly adds an element of chance and choice to the metempsychosis. The souls waiting to be reborn draw lots in a lottery that determines the order in which they choose their next life from the set of all possible lives. Yet chance never makes the final determination, as even the last to choose can select a satisfactory new soul -- if, that is, they are capable of recognizing a good life when they see it (619b). If we know the Form of Justice, we can recognize which sorts of lives correspond to which sorts of constitutions. Then we can avoid choosing the life of a tyrant or some other soul that will fare miserably on earth. So, actually, our problem in the lottery of the afterlife is not so different than our problem here on earth. All the various lives are mixed up in front of us. We want to try and select a good life, and the first step in this selection is knowing how different types of souls will fare. Justice knows what properly belongs to each soul, which makes it a perfect tool for this selection. The elaborate circular mechanism of the afterlife seems to do nothing more than stir the pot, mixing all the lives and Forms together. As always, our moral imperative is to purify our thinking so that we can make a choice between the various imperfect, mixed, options in front of us. Perhaps in this sense we might read Plato as a sort of existentialist -- Forms are a hypothesis, while the need to make a choice is apodictic, a certainty beyond hypothesis. More plausibly, the certainty in Plato is simply the existence of the Good, the commonsensical idea that there is a true good and a bad beyond the confused opinions of men. That at least, seems to me to be the conclusion of the Republic, even if Parmenides perhaps undermines it.
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