Preface to Plato / Edition 1

by Eric A. Havelock

Overview

Plato’s frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato’s hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.

The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction—Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.

The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674699069
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/15/1982
Series:	History of the Greek Mind Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	342
Sales rank:	697,391
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eric A. Havelock was Sterling Professor of Classics, Emeritus, at Yale University.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: The Image-Thinkers

1. Plato On Poetry

2. Mimesis

3. Poetry as Preserved Communication

4. The Homeric Encyclopedia

5. Eric as Recorded as Record Versus Epic as Narrative

6. Hesiod on Poetry

7. The Oral Sources of the Hellenic Intelligence

8. The Homeric State of Mind

9. The Psychology of the Poetic Performance

10. The Content and Quality of the Poetised Statement

PART TWO: The Necessity of Platonism

11. Psyche or the Separation of the Knower From The Know

12. The Recognition of the Known as Object

13. Poetry as Opinion

14. The Origin of the Theory of Forms

15. 'The Supreme Music is Philosophy'

What People are Saying About This

A book bursting with new ideas, all of them exciting. It
may well turn out to be a landmark in the study of Greek
thought and literature.

Walter J. Ong

The frontiers of several fields of research meet in this rich and germinal study. Professor Havelock is concerned with Greek epic poetry and Plato's attack on it, with the whole of the Greek paideia as it existed before and after Plato, with the technological problems of communication, and, finally, with the emergence of Plato's doctrine of "forms," in its total cultural setting...In brief, Havelock's point is that Plato's attack on poetry is integral to his philosophy as such if we see poetry as what it really was in his day...Havelock's thesis is a sweeping one, and, on the whole, utterly convincing, tying in with the findings of an increasing number of recent psychological, historical, philosophical, and cultural studies.

B. M. W. Knox

A book bursting with new ideas, all of them exciting. It may well turn out to be a landmark in the study of Greek thought and literature.

Editorial Reviews

This book makes a major contribution…will offer the reader many hours of stimulating thought and a powerful challenge to reexamine some basic assumptions about the early Greek mind.

The Classical Bulletin

A book bursting with new ideas, all of them exciting. It may well turn out to be a landmark in the study of Greek thought and literature.

B. M. W. Knox

The frontiers of several fields of research meet in this rich and germinal study. Professor Havelock is concerned with Greek epic poetry and Plato’s attack on it, with the whole of the Greek paideia as it existed before and after Plato, with the technological problems of communication, and, finally, with the emergence of Plato’s doctrine of ‘forms,’ in its total cultural setting… In brief, Havelock’s point is that Plato’s attack on poetry is integral to his philosophy as such if we see poetry as what it really was in his day… Havelock’s thesis is a sweeping one, and, on the whole, utterly convincing, tying in with the findings of an increasing number of recent psychological, historical, philosophical, and cultural studies.

Walter J. Ong

This book makes a major contribution...will offer the reader many hours of stimulating thought and a powerful challenge to reexamine some basic assumptions about the early Greek mind.

The Classical Bulletin