1 [This is the penultimate version of an article published in Review of Metaphysics, 60 (2007): 756–778. It may contain differences from the published version. Please do not quote this material without my written permission. Bracketed numbers indicate pagination in the published version.] JUSTICE AND THE BANNING OF THE POETS: THE WAY OF HERMENEUTICS IN PLATO’S REPUBLIC TODD S. MEI What is unthought in a thinker’s thought is not a lack inherent in his thought. . . . The more original a thinking is, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The unthought is the most precious gift that a thinking has to convey. 1 Socrates at one point in the Republic remarks that the matter of accusing the poets of lying is “a point that we will agree upon when we have discovered the nature of justice.” 2 This suggests that in order to understand what is at stake with poetry, one must come to understand in some way the nature of justice. But this seems to be an impossible suggestion within the context of the Republic since the question of the nature of poetry occurs before any thorough exploration of justice is completed. To be sure, Plato’s return to the critique of the poets in Book 10 is often interpreted to be his final conclusion on the matter; 3 nevertheless, the above passage which occurs in Book 3, [756] places the reader in a precarious, interpretive situation that asks that one think on poetry and justice together, that is, as being mutually disclosive of one another. While this irony can be 1 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 76. 2 3.392c. All excerpts from the Republic are from the Loeb Classical Library, trans. Paul Shorey; Vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) and Vol. 6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Unless otherwise noted, translations of Plato’s other dialogues are from Plato’s Dialogues, Vol. 1 & 2, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937). 3 For example, as said outright by Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 4–5 or implicitly by M. Pabst Battin, “Plato on True and False Poetry,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36, no. 2 (1977), 163–5, Elizabeth Belfiore, “Plato’s Greatest Accusation against Poetry,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 9 (1983), 39–62 and Alexander Nehamas, “Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10,” in Plato on Beauty, Wisdom and the Arts (hereafter PB), eds. Julius Moravcsik and Philip Temko (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 47–53. Martha Craven Nussbaum sees the Republic as an intermediate statement on poetry that is subsequently revised in Phaedrus; “‘This Story Isn’t True:’ Poetry, Goodness, and Understanding in Plato’s Phaedrus,” PB, 81. For a contrary view see James O. Urmson, “Plato and the Poets,” PB, 127–8.