TY - JOUR
AU1 - GRETHLEIN, JONAS
AB - ABSTRACT The Republic’s ban on poetry is a major reason for the prominent place that liberal critics assign to Plato among the enemies of the open society, Friedrich Nietzsche's description of Plato as “the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced” being often cited. In this article, I argue that, while Plato's ethical stance remains unacceptable for most readers today, his understanding of aesthetic experience in the Republic appears highly perceptive when seen in the light of cognitive studies and can be thought‐provoking for current debates. As I try to show in the first half of the article, Plato's assessment of responses to poetry and theater resonate with embodied and enactive views of cognition. To corroborate this thesis, I point out in the second half that while theory has been blind to the significance of Plato's aesthetics, its major ideas are substantiated in practice. Contemporary psychotherapy and its increasing deployment of virtual reality unknowingly and with the opposite intent realize Plato's approach to the cognitive dynamics and ethical potential of aesthetic experience. Plato is “the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced,” noted Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (1988, 402). While Nietzsche could not help being fascinated by Plato's passionate stance on art, his catchy verdict has become a formula for a general and profound disapproval of the condemnation of poetry and other arts in the Republic. Plato has been accused of a “disenfranchisement of art” (Danto 1986, 7), “an outrageous attack on poetry” (Nehamas 1999, 251), “attacking the substance of art” (Porter 2010, 92), “a systematic rape of art” (Apelt 1912, 68), “turning art into a puritanical adjunct to an authoritarian politics or an absolutist metaphysics” (Halliwell 1989, 328), and “a banausic blindness to the notion of form, which is central to art”(Adorno 1970, 129), to randomly cite a few voices that hail from very different backgrounds and nonetheless form part of a vociferous chorus. As Stephen Halliwell notes, there is “a dominant consensus found not only in specialist literature on Plato but in a much broader body of discourse on the history of philosophy, literary criticism/theory, art theory, and aesthetics, that Plato was consistently, uncompromisingly ‘hostile’ to poetry per se (and even to ‘art’ more generally)” (2011, 158). And in fact, the censorship that Socrates and his interlocuters install in their ideal city makes Stalin's cultural politics look liberal. Nearly, all Greek poetry fails to meet the strict criteria asserted by Socrates; besides Homer and Hesiod, the tragedians, comedians, and even most lyric poets are given the boot. Admission is given only to literature that is tailored to a totalitarian state which is predicated on a metaphysical notion of truth and leaves little, if any, freedom to the individual. The Republic’s ban on poetry is a major reason for the prominent place that liberal critics assign to Plato among the enemies of the open society. Whether directly influenced by Plato, the “founding father of Western literary censorship,” or not, the severe censoring of literature has become an essential element of modern dystopias, as the states in Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and Ninety‐Eighty‐Four illustrate (Naddaff 2002, xi). There have been attempts to defend Plato against the charge of being an obtuse enemy of the Muses. The Republic’s examination of poetry, as some have claimed, is an exploration rather than a doctrine.1 Plato puts forward his critique of mimesis in the form of a dialogue, which itself is mimetic and has Socrates confess that he used to be in love with poetry. In a much‐cited article, Nehamas (1999) pointed out that Plato's target is not so much art in our sense as it is public performances; our equivalent of ancient theater would be mass entertainment on television, which, in fact, faces similar criticism. While these defenses of Plato have nuanced our understanding of his critique of poetry, it is a challenge to find scholars who have used it as an inspiration. Plato's entanglement of art with politics has been identified as a lasting challenge with which important strands in the history of aesthetics have grappled: “he poses a constant challenge to the right of discourse about artistic practice and value to claim self‐sufficiency” (Halliwell 1989, 347).2 And yet, there are only few scholars who engage more deeply with Plato's position and almost none who subscribe to his views in the Republic.3 It is time for a fresh look and reassessment of the Republic’s condemnation of poetry. No doubt, Plato's ethical stance remains unacceptable for most readers today, who are unlikely to share his vision of a totalitarian state and reluctant to support his severe regulation of affects. If we prescind, however, from Plato's political position, his close entwinement of aesthetics with ethics should appeal to the recent interest in the aesthetics of power and in the politics of form.4 It is my argument that Plato's notion of mimesis and his understanding of aesthetic experience, vehemently rejected or ignored by scholars of a wide range of provenances, appear highly perceptive in the light of cognitive research and can be thought‐provoking for current debates in the field of aesthetics. In Section i of this article, I revisit the two discussions of poetry in the Republic and make a case for their cognitive insights. Plato's fear of the effects of poetry has been rejected as outlandish. How should theatrical performances be able to wreak lasting damage on the recipient's soul? Yet, Plato's account of aesthetic experience is more nuanced than assumed by his critics. Most importantly, it resonates with an embodied and enactive view of our response to representations. To corroborate this thesis, I show in Section ii that while theory has been blind to the significance of Plato's aesthetics, its major ideas are substantiated in practice. Plato's ideal state may be a theoretical construct far from actual politics, but contemporary psychotherapy unknowingly realizes his approach to the cognitive dynamics and ethical potential of aesthetic experience. The increasing deployment of virtual reality for therapeutic means proves that Plato identified an important dimension of aesthetic experience that critics, for various reasons, tend to ignore. Finally, Section iii I show that Plato's aesthetics, if treated with due caution, can shed new light on issues discussed in the field of aesthetics today. I. THE EFFECTS OF MIMESIS: A COGNITIVE VIEW The Republic’s first discussion of poetry takes up the final part of Book 2 and the initial section of Book 3, placed prominently at the very beginning of the attempt to sketch an ideal state. Socrates and his interlocutors start their state‐building with the education of the guardians and first turn to poetry as its most essential element. The examination of what kind of poetry the guardians‐to‐be should be exposed to broadens into a general censorship of poetry in Kallipolis. In a first step, Socrates and Adeimantus, a less than equal partner, concentrate on contents and exclude topics that—it cannot be denied—are omnipresent in Greek literature: gods ought to be portrayed as essentially just and as solely responsible for good things; they can neither be represented as fighting each other nor as changing their own appearance and deceiving humans. By no means is Hades to be painted in dark colors, for this would curtail the guardians’ willingness to sacrifice their lives. In order to strengthen the self‐control of the guardians, heroes as well as gods in poetry must not give in to affects such as grief, lust, and laughter. This discussion of the content of poetry is complemented by a reflection on its form. Socrates distinguishes three forms of narrative (diēgēsis): mimesis, that is, representation through direct speech; plain diēgēsis, that is, representation through authorial speech; and a mixed representation, which deploys both forms. Socrates is most concerned with mimesis, which, he argues, ought to be handled with care. If given to flawed characters, it threatens to corrupt the souls of performers and audiences through the vices of the characters. The second examination of poetry in the Republic is placed equally to, if not more prominently than, the first and opens Book 10—a coda to the construction of Kallipolis. Socrates envisages both poetry and visual art against the backdrop of the concept of forms developed in Books 6 and 7. Being twice removed from the forms, verbal and iconic representations are ontologically and epistemologically inferior. Socrates then goes on to draw on the dissection of the soul in Book 4 in order to expound on the pernicious psychological effect of poetry on audiences. He contends that poetry appeals to the lower part of the soul, strengthening its appetites and weakening the command of the soul's reasonable part. When recipients indulge in mourning, laughing, or sexual desire, they are also in danger of losing control over these impulses in real life. There are some undeniable tensions between the two discussions of poetry in the Republic.5 In Book 3's analysis of poetic form, Socrates uses mimesis as a term for the dramatic mode. When he returns to poetry in Book 10, mimesis signifies all kinds of poetic and even iconic representation. Whereas the first discussion permits some forms of poetry even in the dramatic mode, the second discussion commences with the claim that all mimetic art should be banned from Kallipolis.6 And yet, the differences should not be unduly emphasized. Just as mimesis is also used in a broader sense in Books 2 and 3, Socrates views hymns and encomia of good men as acceptable in Book 10 (607a2‐3). While the two examinations do not fully jibe with each other, they are premised on the same understanding of poetry and can be discussed together. Not only will scholars today be reluctant to accede to the ethical ideas that undergird Plato's affect politics, but also, and more pertinently, the intensity and long‐lasting effects that Socrates ascribes to aesthetic experiences seem grossly exaggerated. How can watching a play lastingly damage our souls? Nehamas's (1999) influential article on “Plato and the Mass Media” provides an apt starting point for my argument; it provides a framework that deprives Plato's approach of some of its embarrassment, but simultaneously ignores a part that is essential for its full appreciation. To counter the scholarly distress about Plato's censorship of poetry, Nehamas clarifies that Plato's critique does not target art in our sense, but rather mass entertainment. Tragedy and epic, which we consider part of the fine arts, were in antiquity presented to large audiences in public performances. If we wish to do justice to Plato's reasoning, then, Nehamas submits, we have to think about media such as television and, if we update the argument originally made in the 1980s, video games. And indeed, television entertainment and gaming face critique and censorship that differ from Plato's verdict in degree rather than in kind.7 Just as Socrates and Adeimantus start their discussion with the danger of poetry for children, our laws restrict the films and games that children are allowed to peruse. While Socrates bans pernicious poetry from Kallipolis entirely, we have at least a broad discussion about the effects of violent films and video games on the behavior of recipients. Nehamas makes an intriguing suggestion about why we condemn contents of mass entertainment that we are happy to accept and would not tolerate to be censored in art.8 Whereas art showcases its own artificiality, mass entertainment is realistic.9 Nehamas admits that there is of course also mediation and convention in television, but he asserts that the medium is perceived as transparent. Since its content is seen as reality, it also has a direct impact on the viewers. Now, there is certainly something to the observation that form plays an important role in our response to art. Looking at art pictures, for example, we contemplate their facture in a way we do not do in street signs or pornography. At the same time, the notions of realism and transparency are problematical. Realism is a notoriously elusive category and phenomenological accounts speak loudly against the idea of transparency. Whenever we attend to a representation, no matter how immersed we are in the represented world, we remain aware of the representation.10 That realism and transparency are problematic concepts is not entirely suppressed in Nehamas's argument. In the case of television, Nehamas concedes that he does “not yet have a general account of which of its features are projected directly onto the world” (1999, 292). Plato's assessment of tragedy, however, is, as Nehamas sees it, straightforward: “for Plato representation is transparent. It derives all its relevant features, the features that make it the particular representation it is, solely from the object it represents, and which we can see directly through its representation” (284). According to Nehamas, Plato assumes that recipients ignore the mediation and respond only to what is represented; put more drastically, they fail to distinguish between a representation and the represented object. Due to this immediacy, the staging of deviant behavior has very strong effects and needs to be avoided at all costs. Nehamas believes that Plato's view of theater reflects its general perception in antiquity: “the drama was considered a realistic representation of the world: we are told, for example, that a number of women were frightened into having miscarriages or into giving premature birth by the entrance of the Furies in Aeschylus's Eumenides” (288). This reasoning is highly dubious. To start with, no stock can be put in the anecdote that Nehamas adduces as evidence for his thesis—the note of miscarriages in Aeschylean theater is much later and we do not even know whether or not women were allowed to attend theater performances in the fifth century. The general claim about the realism of tragedy is equally questionable. Realism is a flexible concept, but it is absurd to apply it to Greek tragedy and its performances: actors wore masks, staging was rudimentary, speech was in meter and highly artificial language, just to mention the most obvious points. Less obviously, but more importantly for my argument, Nehamas is wrong about an important point of Plato's viewpoint. Plato is far from assuming a transparency of the representations he condemns. Admittedly, the point is made in a convoluted sentence and is therefore possible to miss, but, introduced as the “greatest accusation” against poetry, it carries considerable weight (606a7‐b7):11 “the part of ourselves that is best by nature, since it hasn't been adequately educated either by reason or habit, relaxes its guard over the lamenting part when it is watching the sufferings of somebody else. The reason it does so is another man who, in spite of his claim to goodness, grieves excessively. Indeed, it thinks that there is a definite gain involved in doing so, namely pleasure. And it wouldn't want to be deprived of that by despising the whole poem. I suppose that only a few are able to figure out that enjoyment of other people's sufferings is necessarily transferred to our own.” Socrates contends that the affects which the audience lets in are real affects, but he does not conflate aesthetic experience with real‐life experience. The damage that the soul suffers is not predicated on blocking out the representation; poetry does not spread its poison through a complete immersion of the recipient in the represented world. On the contrary, it is the recipient's awareness that he or she is attending to a representation of the sorrows of another that renders poetry so dangerous. The distance prompts even the best to let their guard down and to give free rein to their affects.12 Reckoning that the engagement with the sorrows of another, not least a hero, has no effect on one's own ability to control affects, recipients let go and permit the worse part of the soul to revel in a pleasure forbidden in real life.13 Plato is not only far from erasing the “as‐if” on which responses to representations are premised; his assessment of their intensity also merits a reevaluation. In the Republic’s discussions of poetry, the semantics of bewitchment and enchantment looms large—traditional vocabulary to express the power of poetry.14 When Socrates wraps up the discussion of poetry in Republic, Book 10, he signals his awareness of belonging to those “enchanted” by poetry (kēloumenois, 607c7) and has Glaucon confirm that he too adheres to this group (607c8‐d2). If we want to resist the “spell” of poetry, we are in need of another “charm” (epadontes … epōdēn, 608a3‐4). The strong and lasting impact of poetry on the recipient's soul is tangible in the metaphors of molding and stamping. At the beginning of the first discussion, for example, Socrates notes that the soul of the young listener in particular is “most malleable and takes on any pattern one wishes to impress on it” (377b1‐3). The depth of the interference is also evident in the call to “persuade nurses and mothers to tell their children the stories we have selected, since they will shape their children's souls with stories much more than they shape their bodies by handling them” (377c3‐5) (see Slings 1989, 394–395; compare Ford 2002, 217–218). This emphasis on the strong resonance of poetry is bound to strike scholars of a wide range of provenances as outlandish. Despite their crucial differences, traditional hermeneutics, semiotics, (post‐)structuralism, cultural poetics, and New Historicism are all chiefly concerned with meaning (see, for example, Felski 2015). Even reader‐response theory with its focus on reception views the process of reading chiefly as an intellectual engagement. To these approaches, the intensity and long‐lasting consequences that Plato attributes to our responses to poetry appear at best hyperbolic. As I will argue now, however, Plato's position appears just as plausible and insightful when it is seen in the light of recent cognitive research. The logic of Plato's approach is visible particularly in his condemnation of the dramatic mode in Book 3. Plato's distinction of three forms of narration is usually viewed, if with different verdicts, as a proto‐narratology. While, for example, Gérard Genette contends that the juxtaposition of mimesis with plain diēgēsis prefigures and even outshines the dichotomy of showing versus telling (1972, 184–191; also 1966, 152–163), Halliwell (2009) highlights its insufficiencies and argues that failing to accommodate even basic forms of Platonic dialogue, Socrates's model prompts the clever reader to think beyond it. But such readings ignore the distinct rationale that distinguishes Plato's reflections from narratological taxonomies. Genette and his disciples assume different ontological levels that are stacked into each other: direct speech is the narrator's reproduction of words uttered in the story‐world that the author purveys to the reader. Socrates, however, neither distinguishes between author and narrator nor does he envisage author and characters as parts of different ontological levels nested into each other. Instead, Socrates assumes that the author slides into the role of the character and speaks “as if he were” the character (393a6‐b2). Mimesis in this context is, therefore, best translated with “impersonation.”15 In his discussion of the effects of mimesis, Socrates shifts from authors to reciters and audiences. Not only the writers, but also speakers and listeners come to impersonate characters. Another Platonic dialogue, the Ion, explicitly conceptualizes this transferal. There, Socrates inquires whether the rhapsode Ion owes his brilliance to art or to divine inspiration. When contemplating the latter idea, Socrates adduces the image of a magnet to illustrate how the inspiration of the poet is carried over first to the reciter, and then to the listeners. Author, speaker, and audience alike are raptured and feel transported to the scene of the action, be it the camp of Troy or Odysseus's palace on Ithaca (533c9‐536d7). The Ion’s image of the magnets provides us with a model for the implicit blending together of instances that are carefully kept apart in modern scholarship but fuse in the aesthetic experience as analyzed by Plato. Both the Ion and the Republic highlight that Plato's idea of impersonation is embedded in the song culture of the polis. In the archaic and classical periods, poetry circulated primarily in oral performance.16 If somebody recites a poem, it is natural to assume that, in direct speech, he or she slides into the role of the character as he or she modulates his or her voice into that of the character.17 If the poem is not recited by the author himself or herself, the speaker adopts either the role of the author or of a character. Homeric bards not only rendered the epic past, but took up Homer's role and reenacted his performance (see Nagy 1996, 59–86). Even nonprofessional recitals were seen as a form of impersonation; a symposiast who recited a poem in a symposium became the “I” speaking, taking up the role of Sappho or Archilochus, and, in the case of direct speech, transformed himself into the character.18 Plato's idea of impersonation is thus firmly rooted in the performance culture of his time; simultaneously, it ties in well with recent approaches to cognition in general and to readers’ responses in particular. In fact, the Platonic concept of mimesis offers a cognitive rather than a formalist account of narrative. While earlier cognitive approaches found the mind comparable to a computer processing perceptual data, the so‐called second generation of cognitive studies assumes that cognition is embodied and closely entwined with action (for example, Noë 2004, 2009; Gallagher 2005). As experiments demonstrate, our perception resonates with our entire sensorimotor system and focuses on aspects pertinent to possible interaction with our environment. When we see a hammer, for example, our mind does not produce a complete image of the hammer internally, as a computational model of the mind has it, but the very brain areas on which we rely when we grab, hold, and use a hammer, are activated. This paradigm shift toward an embodied and enactive view of cognition has also changed the way that language is perceived. Speaking and listening are no longer viewed as a processing of information but as an embodied, albeit vicarious, experience. The cognitive psychologist Rolf Zwaan, for example, lays out an “Immersed Experiencer Framework” for linguistic understanding: “language is a set of cues to the comprehender to construct an experiential (perception plus action) simulation of the described situation. In this conceptualization, the comprehender is an immersed experiencer of the described situation, and comprehension is the vicarious experience of the described situation” (2004, 36). As Zwaan and other second‐generation cognitive scholars suggest, the reception of narrative puts us into the shoes of the characters; it triggers similar, albeit vicarious, sensorimotor and emotional responses in us just as direct perception or the actual experience itself would (for example, see Bolens 2012; Caracciolo 2014; Troscianko 2014; Cave 2016). The impersonation that Plato describes as our response to direct speech encapsulates a model for the reception of narrative at large. The stretch between Plato's claims and the cognitive models is not as large as it may first seem. In Book 3, Socrates concentrates on direct speech, but the condemnation of representation more broadly in Book 10 shows that he assumes a similar, perhaps slightly weaker, dynamic in responses to all kinds of narrative.19 As some of the passages quoted illustrate, Plato stresses the importance of affects in the performance and reception of poetry. Audiences, as well as reciters, are made to feel fear, pity, lust, and other powerful emotions. While clashing with well‐established interpretive approaches, this emphasis on the role of affects conforms to a growing awareness of the emotional appeal of literature in cognitive narratology. (See, for example, Felski 2008, Hogan 2011, 2018, and Keen 2007, on empathy.) As it has become clearer over the course of the last decade, reading is more than an intellectual process; it gains much of its power from involving us emotionally. It is debated to what extent the emotions described in the Republic and other ancient texts coincide with our emotions (see Kaster 2005; Konstan 2006), but the premium put on affects aligns Plato with cognitive approaches. For Plato, there is also a physiological dimension to our emotional response to poetry: his view anticipates, with due differences, an embodied view of the mind. Socrates defines mimesis as making oneself like another “through voice or body” (393c4‐5). The bodily dimension of the response is spelled out, for example, when Socrates meditates on the representation of the Underworld: “And the frightening and dreadful names for the underworld must be struck out, for example, ‘Cocytus’ and ‘Styx,’ and also the names for the dead, for example, ‘those below’ and ‘the sapless ones,’ and all those names of things in the underworld that make everyone who hears them shudder. And this may be good also in another regard, for we fear that through this shuddering the guardians become warmer and softer than is required” (387b8‐c3). Fear articulates itself in a shuddering that is the result of cold in the body.20 When the body readjusts its equilibrium, it becomes warm and soft. The contemporary humor theory, to which Socrates's description seems to be indebted, is of course remote from modern models of physiological reactions (see Flashar 1956, 19–20; 1958, 68–71). This difference notwithstanding, however, the idea that literature provokes physiological reactions harmonizes with an embodied view of cognition. The idea of impersonation and its parallels in current cognitive approaches explains why Plato deems narrative so dangerous. Speakers and listeners slide into the roles of characters who are viewed as exemplary but engage in questionable behavior. By no means are audiences oblivious to attending to a representation; it is the awareness of the mediation that prompts them to indulge freely in affects they would otherwise restrain. Cognitively, the fear that the indulgence in the sorrow, laughter, and lust triggered by poetry has an impact on the recipient's “soul” is not easy to reject. Representations activate partly the same brain areas as immediate perception and even the activity itself (see Iacoboni et al. 1999; Gazzola and Keysers 2009). Every neuronal activity has an impact on the brain and its structure. Strong responses in particular strengthen synaptic communication with enduring effects. Strong neural connections are ready to be relied on in other situations; neuroscientifically, learning is nothing but the establishment of such neural pathways. We may disagree with Plato's condemnation of sorrow, laughter, and lust, but cognitive studies suggest that such resonances of representations do influence our reactions to experiences in the everyday world. Whoever finds this hard to believe will find some striking proof for this in Section ii of this article. II. PLATONIC MIMESIS, MODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY Nehamas thought‐provokingly compared the detrimental impact that Plato ascribes to poetry with the dangers that we find in television. By now, there is extensive research literature in psychology that explores the consequences of exposure to violence in films and television especially, but not exclusively, for children and adolescents.21 In addition to television, which is still there and has done little to dissipate the concerns of educated elites with its quality, other types of media have emerged and become so popular as to play a prominent role in discussions about the moral repercussions of entertainment. The impact of violent video games in particular has become the object of debate.22 The parallels between the effects of different media, in this case of film and video games, is an intriguing point to which I return to later. First, however, we need to ask, without neglecting the differences between modern media and ancient poetry, whether psychological research supports or challenges Plato's ideas. One popular concept—the aggression catharsis hypothesis—goes in the opposite direction of Plato's view. Building chiefly on Freud's ideas about therapeutic catharsis and the ethological investigation of aggression by Lorenz (1966), the aggression catharsis hypothesis claims that watching media violence or playing violent video games helps to vent aggression and thereby reduces aggressive feelings and behavior (for example, see Campbell 1993; Durkin and Barber 2002). At least the thrust of this theory can be traced back to Aristotle. While the exact meaning of catharsis in the Poetics is notoriously controversial, the general idea that indulgence in emotions has a positive effect on the mental health of recipients underlies Aristotle's reflections, as well as the aggression catharsis hypothesis. The aggression catharsis hypothesis materializes in so‐called anger rooms. The first of these rooms was opened in Texas in 2006. The company webpage praised it as “an alternative to seeing a ‘head doctor’ or talking it out when you're having a bad day.” Choosing between a five‐minute “short break,” a fifteen‐minute “lash‐out,” or a full twenty‐five‐minute “demolition,” customers are invited to let off steam by destroying a wide range of items.23 By now, there are anger rooms all over the United States and Europe. However, despite this commercial success, the aggression catharsis hypothesis has been forcefully questioned by empirical research.24 Experiments show that the medial exposure to, or even engagement in, violence increases aggression. The reason for this is simple: our brain is plastic and shaped by what it does. Stimulation, especially repeated stimulation, changes neurons and increases the strength of synaptic communication. In our case, watching violence or being aggressive oneself stimulates the neural connections related to aggression and thereby lowers the threshold for physically lashing out against opponents. Does, then, empirical research on media violence corroborate Plato's anxiety about poetry and its effects? Tempting as it is, such a claim would be too facile and would ignore the complexity of the empirical results. The effect of attending to violence in media is “small to moderate” (Gentile 2013, 492). Exposure to films or video games that feature violence is only one of numerous factors that weigh in on the emergence of aggression in recipients. Whether or not they become more aggressive depends strongly on their general disposition and social environment. It has been shown, for example, that the likelihood of aggressive behavior in children after watching violent television programs increases with conflicts in the family and decreases through parental monitoring.25 Showing that representations of violence foster rather than pacify aggressive feelings and behavior in audiences, psychological research reveals that Plato's model is more plausible than the idea of a catharsis, but the significance of other factors does not support the strength of Plato's anxiety about the consequences of poetic and dramatic representations. This being said, the general link that Plato sees between vicarious experiences and behavior in everyday life is thought‐provokingly proven in psychotherapy. Psychologists have started to use virtual reality environments to assess, understand, and, most importantly, to treat mental disorders.26 Anxiety, schizophrenia, substance‐related disorders, and eating disorders are the main diseases that to date are treated with the help of virtual reality. Most of these therapies use virtual environments for the purposes of exposure. Patients suffering from social anxiety are immersed in situations that trigger their anxiety; drug addicts are presented cues that lead to their craving for drugs. Virtual reality creates situations that are helpful for therapy but difficult or impossible to find in reality. It also permits a tight control over stimuli and thereby a precise calibration in tune with therapeutic needs. Experiments and long‐term studies prove that the deployment of virtual environments does in fact have a beneficial effect; it has even been shown that treatments based on virtual reality are as efficacious as equivalent treatments that rely on face‐to‐face interaction (Morina et al. 2015; Freeman et al. 2017, 2396). The psychotherapeutic use of virtual reality is still in its infancy, but at least some psychologists seem to harbor great expectations. The authors of a recent review article in a high‐ranking journal, for example, conclude that “it may become the method of choice for psychological treatment: out with the couch, on with the headset” and “‘revolutionary’ is an overused word; for [virtual reality] and mental health care, it may actually be justified over the coming years” (Freeman et al. 2017, 2394, 2398). At first sight, a huge gap separates modern psychotherapy from the Republic’s anthropology. Plato would have had little understanding of and considerable contempt for the therapeutic attention that psychology lavishes on the disorders mentioned above. That said, the use of virtual reality in therapy draws on the same logic as Plato's assessment of the effects of poetry. Both are predicated on the assumption that responses to mere representations establish patterns of behavior, which also become active in everyday life; thereby, experiences that are bracketed by an “as‐if” have an impact on the “real” world. While Plato is worried about the negative consequences of this transferal, however, psychotherapy exploits it as a therapeutic means. Another difference needs to be pointed out. Plato's fears concern what psychologists today call the process of sensitization: the repeated indulgence in affects heightens the readiness to respond to external stimuli. Concretely, the spectator who repeatedly cries over the fate of the protagonists on stage lowers the threshold to giving in to tears outside the theater as well. The psychotherapeutic deployment of virtual reality, on the other hand, relies on the idea of habituation: the exposure to stimuli in a virtual environment reduces the general readiness to respond to this kind of stimulus. An alcoholic who enters a virtual pub and manages to reject invitations to have a beer is less tempted by the same kind of stimulus in real environments. While sensitization and habituation describe opposite processes, the salience of the former in Plato's condemnation of poetry and the reliance on the latter by psychotherapists are both premised on the real‐life effects of responses to mere representations.27 The parallel to Plato's assessment of the Athenians’ experiences in theater is particularly remarkable when the authors of the review article quoted above elaborate on the merits of the new therapies: “And the great advantage of [virtual reality] is that individuals know that a computer environment is not real but their minds and bodies behave as if it is real; hence, people will much more easily face difficult situations in [virtual reality] than in real life and be able to try out new therapeutic strategies. The learning can then transfer to the real world” (Freeman et al. 2017, 2394). What Plato considers “the greatest accusation” against poetry has become “the great advantage of [virtual reality],” namely that neither the theater nor head‐mounted display fully immerses the recipient. Plato and modern psychologists concur in that the residual awareness of attending to a mere representation is crucial to the impact of the vicarious experience. Knowing that his affects are triggered by a staged action, the spectator at the Great Dionysia gives them free rein. Likewise, the patient is able and willing to face challenging situations since he or she remains aware that they are only simulated. Plato may emphasize the immersive power of performance, and virtual reality environments may aspire to create “presence,” but both the pernicious effects of the former and the therapeutic success of the latter depend on the awareness of the “as‐if” of representation. The Republic’s criticism of poetry has had a bad press. At best, it has been viewed as posing a challenge about the self‐sufficiency of art and aesthetics. Cognitive approaches, however, strongly suggest that Plato's assessment of aesthetic experience deserves to be taken seriously. Read against the backdrop of cognitive studies, the putative enemy of the Muses turns out to be highly perceptive to the depth and long‐term repercussions of our responses to representations. The corruption of the soul feared by Plato is neuroscientifically explained through the capacity of stimuli to establish and deepen neural connections. While aesthetic theory has been more or less blind to the potential of Plato's reflections, its insights are at work in practice when psychotherapists deploy virtual reality to treat their patients. The habituating force of representation that leads Plato to condemn poetry is identified as a possibility to improve the condition of patients. It is thus in contemporary therapy that Plato comes into his own right. It is ironic that Plato owes this rehabilitation of his core assumptions to treatments that he would full‐heartedly deride. At the same time, in the light of Nehamas's argument that Plato does not direct his attack against art in our sense, it makes sense that we find his ideas realized in a nonartistic instrumentalization of representation. III. PLATO'S AESTHETICS TODAY Plato benefits not only from a cognitivist assessment; inversely, he can shed new light on current debates. Due to their experimental basis, cognitive studies tend to focus on the present. Cognitive scientists are chiefly concerned with cognition as it can be explored through questionnaires and physical reactions today. However, cognition has a history, and while ancient recipients are not available for magnet‐resonance imaging or other physiological measurements, Plato and ancient criticism afford rich material for approaches to aesthetic experiences in a culture long past.28 We have, for instance, seen that Plato's emphasis on emotions and the physiological dimension of poetic resonances in audiences, while being bewildering for most approaches in literary criticism, tie in well with cognitive models of reader response. Plato's concept of the soul is a far cry from the models of today's medicine, and yet his description of the effects of poetry is premised on an embodied understanding of cognition. A comparison of ancient reflections with the results of cognitive studies is a promising way of assessing the tricky relation between nature and culture, between a cognitive apparatus that seems to have been more or less stable in historical times and changing cultural concepts that weigh in on cognition itself. Another point where Plato and antiquity can be illuminating is our assessment of media. We are inclined to ascribe strong effects of media to the enhanced quality of their simulation. The immersion through computer games appears unprecedented in the history of narrative just as the head‐mounted display of virtual reality is praised for finally establishing “presence.” But similar judgments were made about film—the first viewers of the Lumière brothers’ recordings actually felt threatened by the coarse images of a train slowly driving toward the camera. And, as we learn in the Republic, Greek tragedy, with its simple staging, was perceived as highly immersive in antiquity. While new media may overwhelm us through higher degrees of simulation compared with older media, their effect is premised on a transmedial phenomenology. We delve into represented actions and worlds without losing an awareness of attending to a representation. The devices of the Greek theater are remote from today's virtual reality gear, and yet both elicit responses that balance immersion with reflection. The strong effects of virtual reality are owed not so much to a technological revolution as to the phenomenology of representation. The Republic’s examination of poetry can also illuminate the nature of aesthetic experience itself. Nehamas pointed out that art may not be the correct conceptual framework for Plato's critique of poetry. We would also be hesitant to claim that patients facing their anxieties in a virtual environment are undergoing an aesthetic experience.29 At the same time, their therapy capitalizes on the phenomenology of representation that also operates in many aesthetic experiences. Not all, but a wide array of aesthetic experiences are triggered by representations: literature, drama, opera, representational painting, film, and so on.30 It is, therefore, possible and promising to review our understanding of aesthetic experience in the light of the effects of representations on which Plato's criticism of poetry and the therapeutic use of virtual reality are predicated. To give an example, we tend to describe aesthetic experiences as momentary. In the analytical tradition, Monroe Beardsley, for example, stipulated “that a person is having an aesthetic experience during a particular stretch of time if and only if the greater part of his mental activity during that time is united and made pleasurable by being tied to the form and qualities of a sensuously presented or imaginatively intended object on which his primary attention is concentrated” (1982, 81). If we move to the rather different field of continental aesthetics, Bohrer (1994) envisaged suddenness as the signature of aesthetic experience, which violently invades us but evaporates with equal speed.31 In the case of nonaesthetic uses of representation, such as therapy and entertainment, we recognize the repercussions which continue to echo long after the act of reception. Why should aesthetic experiences that involve the same phenomenology of representation not have these echoes? Plato's focus on the long‐term consequences of recitals and theater performances is a powerful call to question the view of aesthetic experience as fleeting.32 Plato can also prompt us to reconsider the kind of effects that we ascribe to aesthetic experiences. The idea of sensitization that we found at the core of his anxiety about poetry is not alien to our assessment of aesthetic experience. If we think about the benefits of reading in particular, we commonly stress its stimulating, even liberating character. Fiction is widely agreed to give us the opportunity to explore new perspectives and broaden our horizons (for example, Zunshine 2006; Oatley 2011; Nünning 2014). This view is ultimately indebted to the Romanticist creed that our imagination is a central force that enables us to exploit our potential in ever new acts of self‐creation. Whenever the arts and humanities are under pressure (as they currently are), their advocates, consciously or unconsciously, tap into this tradition and claim that art makes us more reflexive and that seeing the world with new eyes ultimately helps us make it a better place. As strained as the rhetoric of such defenses can be, there is certainly something to them. As psychologists note (for example, Mar et al. 2006; Bal and Veltkamp 2013), reading fiction has the capacity to sensitize us; it offers us an opportunity to train cognitive skills, not least empathy and theory of mind. As Halliwell pointed out, Plato's concept of mimesis shares common ground with the Romanticist esteem for poetry as a medium of self‐renewal (2002, 94–97).33 Roughly speaking, both credit the imagination with an immense potency and with the power to profoundly transform our souls and lives through sensitization. Where, however, the Romanticists enthusiastically embrace this capacity of the imagination as key to self‐fulfillment, Plato identifies it as a tremendous danger for the stability of the soul. He alerts us to the fact that sensitization need not be positive and can also have negative effects. Plato's examples may fail to convince us, but this is due to different outlooks on emotions. Cases that offend our value system are easy to think of. In addition to refining our theory of mind, literature can also, for instance, sensitize sadistic desires that are then acted out at the cost of others. Together with psychotherapy, Plato's analysis of mimesis also raises the question of the habituating force of aesthetic experiences. The process of habituation is exploited in psychotherapeutic treatments through virtual reality, but when we think about aesthetic experiences, we privilege the idea of sensitization. However, not only does psychotherapy capitalize on the same phenomenology of representation as art, but Plato's comments on poetry also illustrate that literature can habituate behavior. In addition to his worries about sensitizing affects, Plato observes that the continuous confrontation with questionable behavior desensitizes. Recipients who repeatedly see gods as well as heroes cheat and fight each other are ultimately brought to tolerate such behavior in their own lives. Just as sensitization can have negative as well as positive effects, habituation is an ambiguous but powerful process that forms part of aesthetic experiences. Much more could be said, but it has, I hope, become clear that Plato's entanglement of aesthetics with ethics is thought‐provoking. We are likely to disagree with Plato's ethical creeds. For us, empathy, which Plato treats as a means of corrupting the soul, is mostly a virtue; sorrow, as most today will agree, is something that needs to be articulated and not suppressed; on the other hand, the slavish obedience that distinguishes the citizens of Kallipolis is rather suspicious in our eyes. The juxtaposition with modern psychotherapy also reveals that our responses to representations can be used in radically different ways from those envisaged in the Republic. Nonetheless, Plato's analysis of the profound impact of aesthetic experiences is piercing and full of cognitive insights. While Plato the ethical philosopher continues to repel us, Plato the aesthetician has again (or still?) much to say to us; his sensitivity to the intensity and long‐lasting consequences of aesthetic experience illuminates the wide range of ethical implications that aesthetics can have without being tied to Plato's politics.34 REFERENCES Adorno , Theodor W. 1970 . Ästhetische Theorie . 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However, Nietzsche's engagement with Plato is often veiled and inverses Plato's metaphysics as it claims that existence and world can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. See Halliwell (2018). Derrida's (1972) well‐known engagement with Plato focuses on the Phaedrus’s criticism of writing. 4. For a survey of the ethical turn in aesthetics and literary studies, see Hale (2009). More recently, see Levine (2015) and Serpell (2014). 5. See, however, the discussions of Belfiore (1984); Burnyeat (1999, 289–291), and Nehamas (1999, 251–278), which emphasize the basic compatibility of both discussions. 6. See especially 396c‐e with the nuanced discussion of Halliwell (2009, 33–34). 7. See also Burnyeat (1999, 249–255). See, however, also Halliwell (2002, 90–91), noting that ancient tragedy is not that easily classified as entertainment as opposed to art. 8. For this observation, see also Danto: “The concept of art interposes … the incapacity of the artist to inflict moral harm so long as it is recognized that what he is doing is art” (1987, 4). 9. Nehamas reprises the argument about the transparency of tragedy (1999, 352–354) and even asserts “an immediate reaction to ‘the material alone’” (353). 10. For our response to visual representation, this point has been made through the concept of “seeing‐in” by Wollheim (1980, 205–226; 1987). Walton's concept of “make‐believe” offers a slightly different model that also accounts for our reception of fiction (1990). For a juxtaposition of the “as‐if” in responses to paintings and narration, see Grethlein (2017). 11. On the difficulties of the grammar and meaning of the sentence, see Mastrangelo and Harris (1997). 12. Peponi argues that allotria, here translated as “sorrows of another,” has a twofold meaning in this sentence: it refers to the other person and the other medium, that is, poetry (2012, 59). It is decisive not only that another person is suffering, but also that this suffering is represented. 13. For this point, see, from different angles, Ferrari (1989, 136–138), Halliwell (2002, 80–81), and Liebert (2017, 168–169). 14. For example, Od. 1.337; 11.334; 13.1‐2; 17.518‐21. See Walsh (1984, 3–21), Heath (1987, 7–9), and Halliwell (2011). 15. Else (1972, 23), de Jong (1987, 3), and Bakker (2005, 61) emphasize that mimesis did not originally signify a relation between text and referent, but a performance. For a fuller exploration of this unnarratological view of narrative in Plato and other ancient critics, see Grethlein (forthcoming). 16. On ancient song culture, see, for example, Herington (1985) and Stehle (1997). 17. Trying to capture the distinct logic of poetry as performance, Bakker himself considers direct speech as “mimetic impersonation” (1997, 167). 18. See Neer on the salience of this kind of role‐playing in the symposium (2002, 17–19). 19. Halliwell tries to tease out nuances between the discussion of the identification of the speaker with characters in Book 3 and the examination of the intense, but nonidentificatory, engagement of the audience in Book 10 (2002, 78). However, the separation may be less neat as Socrates shifts continuously between author, speaker, and audience in Books 2 and 3. 20. On shuddering in ancient texts and its physiological basis, see Cairns (2013, 2017). 21. See Khurana et al. (2018) with further literature. 22. For example, Jabr et al. (2018) with further literature. 23. See the entry to the blog of the International Society for Research in Aggression: http://www.israsociety.com/blog/keep-out-why-the-anger-room-is-not-a-good-place-for-reducing-aggressive-behavior. 24. See Gentile (2013) with references to relevant studies. 25. See Khurana et al. (2018) with further literature. 26. Freeman et al. (2017) provide a helpful survey of the field and list previous studies. 27. Plato reckons not only with sensitization, but also with habituation, particularly when he considers the effects of negative models posed by gods and heroes. On this, see below. 28. See Grethlein (2015, 2017) for attempts to make ancient material fruitful for current debates in aesthetics. The contributions to Anderson, Cairns, and Sprevak (2018) offer a wide range of cognitivist perspectives on antiquity. 29. What constitutes an aesthetic experience is notoriously controversial. For a broad definition that encompasses everyday situations, see, for example, Gumbrecht (2006). 30. Music is mostly nonrepresentational. It can represent something, but in itself it is less referential than self‐referential: tunes and chords refer not so much to something else than to other tunes and chords. 31. See also Seel (2004). 32. On this point in the light of ancient material, see Peponi (2019). 33. On the influence of other strands of Plato's philosophy on Romanticism, see, for example, Newsome (1974) and Baldwin and Hutton (1994). 34. I wish to thank Katja Bertsch and Falk Kiefer for many illuminating conversations about neuroscience and psychotherapy as well as the journal's two anonymous readers for their comments and suggestions. © The Authors. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Society for Aesthetics This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com © The Authors. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Society for Aesthetics
TI - Plato in Therapy: A Cognitivist Reassessment of the Republic's Idea of MimesisGrethlein
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12716
DA - 2020-05-18
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EP - 170
VL - 78
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DP - DeepDyve
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