Chapter 8a - Lecture I. Couches, song, and civic tradition

Summary

A wide-ranging study of Plato’s treatment in the Republic of the forms and institutions of a society’s culture (anthropologically understood), and the way culture shapes character through its operation, often gradual and imperceptible, upon the soul. Topics discussed in detail include Book X’s account of the structures within the human soul that Plato identifies in describing and explaining the way culture impacts upon it; Book II’s account of the first ‘economic’ city and its successor, the city of luxury, with special attention to the use of couches in the ancient Greek’s conception and practice of the key cultural practice of civilised feasting; the puppets and the puppeteers in the Cave analogy of Book VII, interpreted as symbolising the role of cultural products and their creators in shaping human susceptibility to cultural formation; and Book X’s discussion of the ontological status both of cultural products as indirect imitations of Forms, and of those Forms themselves, particularly considered as the paradigms upon which a more soundly based culture might be modelled.