The Review of Metaphysics

Jill Frank's Poetic Justice makes an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about the contemporary relevance of Plato's political philosophy. Philosophers, political theorists, and classicists will find much to grapple with in Frank's reassessment of how the Republic aims at cultivating philosophically engaged and self-reflective citizens. Her reading of the Republic works against the prevalent view of Plato as a thinker who upholds a rigid hierarchical view of knowledge and a political theory aimed at philosophers serving as rulers. On her view, the Republic presents the very acts of reading and rereading text as a mode of political education and civic formation that values the ongoing questioning of authority. Her dramatically attuned reading of the dialogue points our attention to how Plato presents reading as a practice of self-authority. She also illustrates how Plato's Socrates consistently sign-posts his exchanges with Glaucon and Adeimantus to stimulate them to question the kinds of authority they are setting up in Kallipolis. Frank repeatedly makes clear that they do not pass Socrates' test for philosophical kinship. However, their failure does not mean that we as readers will fall prey to the same sorts of mistakes. Frank maintains that the Republic trains us to read it in such a way that we build up the capacity for critical reflection in ourselves and how we interact with others in the world.

The book has a prologue, six chapters, and an epilogue. The prologue explains how Frank came to be interested in this topic of reading and rereading by attending a performance of Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Symposium. She found herself disappointed in the Symposium, and that disappointment led her to reconsider the notion that the dialogues were [End Page 146] meant to be performed or heard. Frank begins to wonder "whether there might be something about Plato's dialogues that requires that they be neither performed nor heard in real time, but read" and "reread." She reminds us that Plato wrote in the mid 300s, when literacy was on its way to becoming well established as a cultural practice. However, Plato set the dialogues in the late fifth century, where various modes of oral performance were still the primary mode of textual transmission. She isolates two main presentations of reading practices. The first, which she locates primarily in the Statesman, Sophist, and Protagoras, is a mode of learning from an authority figure. The second presentation "focuses on students' experiences of letters." In this way reading moves into the domain of "ethics and philosophy." Though she engages several other dialogues, the Republic's presentation of education in ethical and political self-governance is the primary focus of her book.

In chapter 1, "Reading Plato," Frank acknowledges that there are good reasons why people generally associate Plato with a strongly hierarchical political rule. However, Frank urges us to recognize that the Republic also "conspicuously subjects to scrutiny and critique that very same authority, its associated universalism, rationalism, transcendentalism, its hostility to what appears, and the ideal city it governs." In chapter 2, "Poetry: The Measure of Truth," Frank argues that "the elaborate framework of interpretation offered in the Republic's treatment of mimetic poetry to bring to light the substantial ethical and political benefits of mimetic poetry as these are depicted in and by way of the text." Simply put, we must learn to question all modes of authority and interrogate them for ourselves.

In chapter 3, "A Life without Poetry," Frank maintains that Socrates' encounters with Glaucon and Adeimantus should be regarded as an ongoing attempt to "underscore the perils for ethics and politics of a life without mimetic poetry." In chapter 4, "The Power of Persuasion," Frank argues for the centrality of persuasion by "highlighting a particular practice of persuasion, persuasion in the middle voice, a mode of persuasion that is determined not by a philosophic expert but by speakers and listeners acting as agents of their own persuasion...