Please read from Key Lessons from Plato’s Republic — Book I, as this story is part of a broader series on Plato’s Republic.
Socrates has now completed the main argument of The Republic; he has defined justice and shown it to be worthwhile. Now, he banishes poets from the city. He has three reasons for regarding the poets as unwholesome and dangerous. First, they pretend to know all sorts of things, but they really know nothing at all. It is widely considered that they have knowledge of all that they write about, but, in fact, they do not. The things they deal with cannot be known: they are images, far removed from what is most real. By presenting scenes so far removed from the truth poets, pervert souls, turning them away from the most real toward the least.
Worse, the images the poets portray do not imitate the good part of the soul. The rational part of the soul is quiet, stable, and not easy to imitate or understand. Poets imitate the worst parts — the inclinations that make characters easily excitable and colorful. Poetry naturally appeals to the worst parts of souls and arouses, nourishes, and strengthens this base elements while diverting energy from the rational part.
The Distinction between Philosophical and Civic Virtues
Philosophical virtue is worthwhile because it not only imitates the Forms, but aims at and consorts with them, but civic virtue is worthwhile as well because it involves bringing the Forms into your life by instituting order and harmony in your soul.
But the civic virtues alone are not enough. Only the philosophers know how to choose the right new life, because only they understand the soul and understand what makes for a good life and a bad one. The others, who lack this understanding, sometimes choose right and sometimes wrong. They fluctuate back and forth between good lives and miserable ones. Since every soul is responsible for choosing his own life, every person must take full responsibility for being just or unjust. We willingly choose to be unjust because of our ignorance of what makes for a just or unjust soul. Ignorance, then, is the only true sin, and philosophy the only cure.
