Plato the Taboo-Breaker: Myths, Cultural Change, and Democratic Degeneration

• In Event: Ancient Greek Democracy, Aesthetics, and the Cultivation of the Political

Abstract

That Plato was invested in the politics of cultural change may not be an especially controversial insight to many of his modern readers, but it is something that recent scholars of Plato have increasingly found useful to acknowledge explicitly. And, as several of these scholars have argued, Plato’s interest in the topic was importantly informed by the background of Athenian democratic culture, with which he was often in conversation in his work. This paper suggests that one of the ways Plato envisioned constructively negotiating radical transformations in culture, especially in the context of Athenian democracy, was through the reconfiguration of what we might today call social taboos. Greek mythological tradition placed special stress on the idea that there existed certain acts, such as cannibalism or incest, that were absolutely forbidden and tested the boundaries of the human and nonhuman. Such extreme, unspeakable acts found most canonical expression in tragedies, and were recurring tropes in the Greek imaginary. The most well-known instances in which Plato invokes such taboos in his political work are especially charged moments in his portrayal of the degeneration of democracy into tyranny: democracy enables a “leader of the people” and proto-tyrant to commit wrongdoings that are compared to a mythological episode of cannibalism (Rep. VIII 565d-e); as his moral degeneration progresses, the tyrant’s erotic desires will extend to incest and bestiality (Rep. IX 571c-d) – motifs that are recapitulated in the Myth of Er and its description of the life of a tyrant who is fated to eat his own children (Rep. X 619b-c). On one reading, Plato’s aim in appealing to these tropes is to make a powerful point about the sheer extent to which democracy teeters on the edge of a kind of rule that any of his readers can recognize as truly horrific. However, when we read these well-known passages alongside the specific myths he appears to be referencing, as well as his efforts elsewhere to rework and reimagine the same taboos, we can also see that he is engaged in thinking through a much larger project of cultural transformation. This paper, as such, is an effort to give an alternative reading of Plato’s use of mythologically canonical taboos. On the one hand, Plato saw great social value in taboos, as exceptionally stable anchors of “natural law” that not only reinforce but cultivate a politically necessary sense of shame in citizens. On the other hand, as evinced in his radical restructuring of the nuclear family in the kallipolis, and the discussion of incest in Laws VIII, Plato also believed social taboos could be weaponized – for good and for bad – and that transforming them was often an indispensable part of real cultural change.

Author

• Tae-Yeoun Keum, University of California, Santa Barbara