Rebel Poets: The Importance of Writing in a Free Society

Plato believed in censoring passion. Do we see the same unfolding today?

This piece originally appeared in Alata Magazine in February 2024.

Plato’s Republic, written in the 4^th century BC, inaugurated political philosophy and paved the way for the creation of both the American government and Western democracy as a whole. However, while the Founding Fathers borrowed many of Plato’s ideas about democracy from the U.S. Constitution, American society stands at odds with the society depicted in the Republic because it promotes freedom of expression. In banning poets, Plato believed in restricting freedom of speech. But why did he propose this?

The Republic presents us with a strange account of writing that will help us understand the contemporary importance of the skill. Plato’s text is rife with epistemological musings and governmental prescriptions—from every Philosophy 101 professor’s favorite Allegory of the Cave in Book VII to the introduction of the Philosopher King in Book V. Plato’s stance on poets, outlined in Book X, is another one of his most memorable ideas. In Plato’s view, poets—and, by extension, writers who use their medium for anything other than record-keeping or governmental matters—have no place in an ideal society.

To make sense of Plato’s disdain for poets, we must first understand Plato’s principal contribution to the Western philosophical tradition: his theory of the Forms and his defense of objective truth.

Plato’s theory of the Forms appears most famously in the Republic’s Allegory of the Cave, when, after only ever having seen a procession of shadows across a wall, a prisoner who escapes the cave comes into contact with the physical world around him and experiences a more accurate representation of reality. Plato’s shadows represent an erroneous picture of objective truth. Plato posits that our own world—the world that the prisoner comes to understand after escaping the cave—is a mere collection of imperfect representations of objects that have ideal Forms. To attain a more comprehensive understanding of objective truth, we must strive to comprehend the ideal Forms behind the representations—the sole “correct” version of reality.

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If a philosopher’s prime aim is to attain an understanding of the world in terms of its most ideal iteration, writing, in attempting to represent reality, suffers from the same problems as the shadows on the cave wall, precluding us from attaining objective truth. Poets operate at several degrees even more removed from this truth. They also run the risk of inflaming the passions of those who listen to them. Passions, for Plato, obfuscate reason, the primary faculty to understand ideal Forms.

Indeed, in another Platonic dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates compares the experience of reading to looking at a painting. A painting, he claims, is a mere representation of reality that stands in “solemn silence” and, in failing to provide a fluid depiction of the world around us, is unable to communicate truth. It is unclear, Socrates declares toward the end of Phaedrus, whether writing is an accurate representation of the truth, because it reflects inner experience and is therefore fundamentally unverifiable and subjective.

Poets, he tells us, are especially inclined to lie and thus pose the highest threat to a stable, functioning society that believes in a single objective truth—the society that he proposes in the Republic. Poets thus risk becoming especially harmful, because subjective feeling cause us to question preordained truths and run the risk of destabilizing society by upending the status quo.

We can best understand Plato’s ordinance against poets, therefore, if we take writing, at its core, as an expression of the subjective world—a challenge to an already-proposed reality. Writing becomes a societal threat precisely because it disturbs an established order—because it allows for the introduction of dissenting viewpoints. And if we are to believe the English political philosopher H.B. Acton’s claim that the world of the Republic is an authoritarian one, where order rules and objective reality cannot be questioned, writing is, perhaps, the best sort of antidote to control: writing is a plea for freedom.

Two thousand years after Plato, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida takes up the defense of writing against Plato. In his Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida proclaims that the Western world has largely operated under the shadow of Plato and has unfairly devalued writing over spoken dialogue, establishing a restrictive “logocentric” order where the spoken word, which for Plato represented reason, reigns supreme over written language. Derrida cites Plato’s disdain for writing in the early chapters of Of Grammatology and ascribes the West’s general wariness of the capacity for writing to open the world up to interpretations that deviate from a single image of political and social order.

While I have my own criticism of Derrida—he sees writing more as an excuse to topple the “Western metaphysical tradition” than as a way to promote freedom—he touches on a key point that he borrows from Plato but presents in a different light: writing disturbs societal order. But, in contrast to Plato, Derrida celebrates writing as the primary method through which we can honor subjective experience and use our diverse understandings of the world to liberate society from a single, preestablished thought pattern.

Writing is the best tool we have to continue to uphold a free, democratic society that allows each individual member to attempt to make sense of the universe through creativity, and, in so doing, disseminate his or her viewpoint. Writing is the antithesis of a totalitarian order because it allows dissent—and anyone literate can write and read.

But why is writing so central to the upkeep of a free society? As Benjamin Franklin tells us, “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.”

Public liberty, in other words, is based on both freedom of thought and freedom of speech. The key elements of a free society are the freedom to hold opposing belief systems and the freedom to express them. In order to create a free society, then, we must a) understand what we believe in and b) have the power to communicate our beliefs to the greater world. Writing can represent a more valuable tool than spoken dialogue to do so, because it allows us to explore and express the depths of our minds.

In the era of American individualism, in a postmodern universe that has destabilized objective truth, in the time of biased fact-checkers and fake news, in an epoch that the German philosopher Oswald Spengler termed “Faustian” in its individualistic quest for knowledge—in a world, in short, in which multiple and contradictory ideas prevail, it is more important than ever to understand our own individual belief systems.

Freedom, after all, is a double-edged sword. In wielding the power to express ourselves, we are resisting others telling us what and whom to believe. As we continue to promote freedom, we must each understand what we believe in and develop the ability to convey our beliefs to those around us.

That is where writing comes in. Writing is a powerful vehicle through which we can, in the words of the psychologist Jordan Peterson, “discover what we believe to be true.” In the modern age, writing has become one of the few ways in which we can cohesively grapple with subjective experience and translate that experience into a set of values. And as we develop our values, we must attempt to communicate them to the greater world. After all, a society that promotes multifarious values only functions if those values are translated into some manifestation of reality. Writing is the tool. It is a tangible form of expression that remains etched into the material world. It is a bridge from our most secluded, intricate thoughts to those of others reading them. Writing brings our consciousness into reality.

Writing, in other words, is the best way we can hope to be understood. As collective spirit falls by the wayside, and as we navigate what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt terms the world after Babel—where we no longer understand one another, as if we all speak different languages—we must attempt, somehow, to convey our own subjective musings to the greater world around us, so that we can, ultimately, unite and coalesce in our disparate views.

While Plato might have been shocked to learn about our culture’s overall disregard for objective reality, he might observe that we use writing to get to truth nevertheless, however imperfectly from his perspective. In a world that starkly contrasts with Plato’s more homogenous Athens, in a universe where we are free to play with ideas, writing—the conveyance of the subjective spirit in order to make sense of reality—is the key to nourishing a free society.

Learning to write in the modern era is not about outsmarting ChatGPT—the ability to write is also one of the core prerequisites for advanced intellectual development, ushering in a world of contradictory opinions but where argument and truth can be reached through it. As strong, authentic communication skills become increasingly sparse, the free world needs more great writers, not to shy away from their talents but to embrace them.

If you learn to write, you will be the person Plato always feared: the rebel with the power to change society.

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