At 435c-d and again at 504b ff., Socrates indicates that there is a “longer and fuller way” that one must take in order to get “the best possible view” of the soul and its virtues. But in neither passage does Socrates take this “longer way.” At 435c-d he accepts Glaucon's plea to continue with the “methods” they have used so far, giving arguments “at that level.” In the text that follows his reminder at 504b ff. he restricts himself to an indirect indication of its goals by his images of sun, line, and cave and to a programmatic outline of its first phase, the five mathematical studies. If we stay within the dramatic context of the dialogue, we can see why Socrates offers such a partial and incomplete characterization. As keen and receptive as they are on political and ethical matters, Glaucon and Adeimantus are limited interlocutors on metaphysical issues; they have not undergone the mathematical education Socrates prescribes, and they are not in a position to raise critical questions about the Forms or the structure the Forms imply for city and soul. Accordingly, in his initial willingness to forgo the “longer way” (435d) and in his later very introductory account of it, Socrates measures his words to what Glaucon and Adeimantus are prepared to understand.

Plato gives depth to character by writing in three dimensions. In the Republic's main speakers - Socrates and his two younger friends Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato's real-life brothers - Plato characterizes fully human beings. First to the reader's sight are arguers and arguments, so the logical dimension of character becomes most immediately visible. But these men are not mere talking heads or disembodied minds. They have about them the smell of mortality, with their individual histories, personalities, and commitments. It is not just a question of what arguments are made, but of what sort of man would make a particular argument, or accept it, or long for it. Indeed, Socrates virtually begins his conversation with the brothers by saying he would respond to their arguments differently if he had a different view of their character (368a-b). We catch something of this ethical and psychological dimension of Plato's writing when, for example, Socrates must playfully defend himself in a mock trial, reminding us that one day he will be tried in deadly earnest; when Glaucon lets slip an erotic streak he would prefer not to own; when Adeimantus' limitations are implicitly revealed by having Socrates go beyond them in conversation with his more brilliant brother.

The Republic repeatedly treats eros as if it were unruly or bad and ought to be remade to be more congenial to good government. The illegality of choosing a mate for oneself, compulsory coed exercising in the nude, the imposition of eugenically determined match making, and the enforced discipline of having many sexual partners but no single partner to call “one's own” are decidedly strange institutions. Such attempts to coerce and mold eros to fit abstract justice imply a negative judgment about the political effects of ordinary erotic desire that is not in harmony with the liberated views about love and sex prevalent in most liberal democracies today. Nor are the coercive and legalistic stances toward sexual unions taken in the Republic and other political dialogues (e.g., Pol. 310bff.) in harmony with certain other dialogues of Plato, namely, the “erotic” dialogues, which literally sing the praises of eros: in the Symposium and Phaedrus, eros is said to lead upward to pure beauty and goodness. In fact, the coercive parts of the Republic are not even in harmony with other parts of the Republic itself, for - just after the erotic regimen has been legally imposed - there follows a disquisition on eros that reads like a Symposium in miniature, with a profligate, promiscuous eros providing humanity's primary mode of access to the Forms.

At the antipodes of Plato's account of virtue stand the just and the tyrannical souls. The former, of course, is ruled by reason endowed with wisdom; and the latter is ruled by a kind of erōs, which we will call erotic passion. The point of the contrast is to have a better understanding of the just soul. First, however, we need an understanding of the tyrannical. The tyrannical soul is the last in a declining series, from the philosophical through the timocratic, oligarchic, and democratic souls. At last, the tyrannical soul is the culmination of pathology in the appetitive part of the soul, the epithumētikon. To explain the various maladies arising in the appetitive part, Socrates introduces a generous variety of new kinds of appetites. In Book 8, he says the appetitive part has both necessary and unnecessary appetites (558d-559b). Using these notions, he explains the oligarchic and the democratic souls. In Book 9, Socrates introduces two more refinements in order to explain the tyrannical soul. First are the outlaw appetites, a subdivision of the unnecessary appetites (571b-d). Second is the erotic passion, itself a particularly intense sort of erōs (572e-573a). As there is a degradation in the kinds of civic rule, from oligarchy through democracy to tyranny, so there is a degradation in the forms of psychic rule associated with these various types of appetites. To understand the rule of erotic passion, we need to begin with the distinction between necessary and unnecessary appetites.

“I understand that less than I understand the Good of Plato,” says a slave in comedy. The slave's understanding of the Good would not have been much helped by attending Plato's own public lecture on the subject: the majority of the audience “came in the expectation of acquiring some of those things that conventionally count as human goods, such as health, wealth, strength, and in general some wonderful happiness; but when the discussion turned out to be on the mathematical sciences - numbers, geometry, astronomy - and the conclusion to be that good is one, this struck them as utterly paradoxical; whereupon some came to despise the business, and others started to make complaints.” Nevertheless, in one respect at least, it is actually quite easy to grasp what Plato has to say about the Good.

If for the moment we confine our attention to Forms of artifacts, it is easy to understand and accept the Republic's claim that the Good has the privileged position of being what accounts for the existence and intelligibility of Forms, much as the Sun has the privileged position of being what accounts for the growth and visibility of plants (508b-e, 509b). For the claim will then be that everything about an ideal artifact is teleologically explicable. The ideal wheel is circular, and it has its axle in its center. These things are so because that is the best way for a wheel to be: a buckled wheel, or for that matter a circular wheel with its axle off-center, would give a bumpy ride. And the Good accounts in this way for every aspect of the ideal wheel: if, for example, we ask about the color of the ideal wheel, then the only answer is that it has no particular color; and that is because there is no one color that is the best one for a wheel to have.

WHY PHILOSOPHERS ARE EQUIPPED TO RULE

In his blueprint for an ideal society, the Socrates of Plato's Republic emphasizes three especially daring political proposals: first, inclusion of women in the guardian class, on fully equal terms with men; second, abolition of the family for this same elite class; and third, that philosophers should be kings. He speaks of these as three “waves” (5.457b-d, 472a, 473c-d), with the final proposal, that of philosopherkings, heralded as the third and biggest wave within the “triple wave” (trikumia, 5.472a).

Quite how destabilizing these proposals are meant to sound can be appreciated only when we realize that Socrates is referring here not just to stormy waves but to a veritable tsunami of change. Not only have tsunamis been a familiar feature of Mediterranean history in both ancient and modern times, but eyewitness accounts of tsunamis - including the massive one in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004 - again and again describe a sequence of three waves, an indication that it is this specific phenomenon that Plato is calling to mind. When Socrates speaks of a third and final wave as liable to “drown us in a deluge [katakluzein] of mockery and unbelievability” (5.473c), his reference is, if I am not mistaken, to a philosophical tsunami, a veritable cataclysm of incredulity that threatens to wash away his entire political agenda.

In the Republic Socrates and his interlocutors consider the question of how one should live (352d). As befits a work of philosophy, the question is answered by Socrates by means of arguments that are intended to be compelling because of their logical and rational qualities. The characters in the dialogue demonstrate a great interest in the question, and in the arguments brought to bear, because they perceive that what is said about it will matter for, and may well determine, how they live their own lives (621c). How is the student of the Republic to react to Socrates' arguments? Students of the Republic are free to examine Socrates' arguments without feeling that those arguments may have any impact on how they will live their lives. That is an option opened up by the autonomy of reading and bolstered by the disciplinary practice of academic philosophy, which requires indeed the examination of the arguments but not the implementation of the results of that examination in one's own life. By long practice, it has been found possible, and often intellectually advantageous, to keep life and the study of life separate.

In this chapter I argue that Plato's purpose as a philosophical writer was not merely to present compelling arguments about how one should live, but to present them in such a way that the reader would be most likely to be compelled by them to choose to live in a particular way. This is not an entirely original idea; the urgency of Plato's writing has been evident to many of his readers for a long time. But at a time when writing and reading have many multifarious purposes and disciplinary habits are entrenched, it is worth examining anew Plato's practice as a philosophical writer.

The project of this chapter is in outline simple. I first argue (section I) that somehow or other Socrates, and what I shall broadly call the “Socratic conception of philosophy,” are fundamental to Plato's political thinking in all periods of his writing (however these are to be defined), and I try to explain both why that should be so and what the consequences are for our understanding of Plato's political thought. I then (section II) go on to discuss the relationship of this Socrates - the one who, as I shall propose, stands constantly behind Plato as he reflects politically - to Callipolis, the second city of the Republic (second, that is, after Socrates' “city of pigs,” as Glaucon calls it). To put it in a more punchy way, in this second section of the chapter I ask about the precise relationship between Socrates, the main speaker throughout the Republic, and the philosopher-rulers of the second city he is made by the author to construct.

But first, a couple of preliminaries.

The old, simplistic, late twentieth-century account of Plato’s political philosophy is now, in my view, dead and buried: the sort of account that has him starting out (in the Republic) with the ideal of rule by philosophers, then (in Politicus and Laws) rethinking that ideal and becoming a constitutionalist, even if, as he rethinks, he still looks back wistfully to the earlier dream. Closer readings have in my view demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that this account radically misinterprets all three dialogues (i.e., Republic, Politicus, and Laws); it will no doubt persist among the wider public for a time, but it will and should be replaced eventually by a more nuanced story of Plato’s political thought and its evolution.

Plato's argument against poetry in Republic 10 is perplexing. He condemns not all poetry, but only “however much of it is imitative [hosē mimētikē]” (595a). A metaphysical charge against certain works of poetry - that they are forms of imitation, “at a third remove from the truth” - is thus used to justify an ethical charge: that these works cripple our thought and corrupt our souls. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear how to understand the connection between the two charges. We can see how they are related in a loose way: imitators are concerned with images far removed from the truth about what they represent (596a-598b); many people are too foolish to distinguish imitation from reality and thus accept ignorant imitators as experts and guides (598c-602b); imitation appeals to and thereby strengthens an inferior part of the soul unconcerned with truth (602c ff.); worst of all, the charms of imitation can seduce even those who generally know better (605c-607a). But when we try to make Book 10's argument more precise, trouble ensues. Plato certainly never spells out the connection between the metaphysics of imitation and the charge of ethical harm. Moreover, he seems in the end (603c ff.) to abandon metaphysical considerations and give a straightforward argument against tragedy and the works of Homer based on their content - they represent people behaving immoderately - and psychological effect: as audience we weep and wail and behave as immoderately as the characters, and this undermines the order of our souls. This argument makes no mention of imitation or ignorance or removes from truth; what, then, is the relevance of the metaphysical charge, to which Plato devotes so much discussion?

A full picture of the human soul emerges only gradually from the Republic. In Book 4 we come first upon a conventional enough distinction between calculation and desire, which under pressure from the correspondence between the microcosm of the just individual and the macrocosm of the just society, with its three different classes, is complicated by the addition of a third element, the element of “high spirit” (thumos). At this stage the three elements in the soul are distinguished principally by their functions: calculation calculates, desire desires, spirit gets spirited. If the text is pressed to assign them an object or goal as well as an activity, the indications would be that calculation is concerned with the good (i.e., with the best course of action); desire is concerned with pleasure; while spirit reacts to perceived slights or wrongs.

When we revisit these three elements in Books 8 and 9, however, they have taken on a different look. In Book 4 they seemed most like faculties; now they seem more like drives. The desiring element is specified as the drive toward material satisfaction; spirit as the drive to win and to amount to something; calculation as the drive to discover truth. They have not shed their characteristic functions, but these have found a new context; and the biggest change is to the calculative element. Previously, it had been unclear whether this element even had a goal of its own or was merely a supervisor that placed limits on the interests of the other elements in the interest of the individual as a whole. Now it is assigned an object of desire all its own, and that object is not the good, whether the good of the individual or the good tout court, but wisdom. Wisdom is a good, of course, arguably the highest good.

Many people have considered the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes to represent two antagonistic strands of Harlem Renaissance thinking about the role of the black artist, the nature of African American literature, and indeed whether something called “Negro Literature” existed. It is unquestionably true that the two poets themselves to some extent felt such an antagonism, as seen most famously in Hughes' 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” that began with a sort of racial syllogism attributed to an unnamed Negro poet in which the statement “I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet” becomes “I would like to be white.” While Hughes does not name the poet, the opening premise of this syllogism closely resembles a statement Cullen made during a 1924 interview in which he declared, “if I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.”

Hughes, too, is well known as the progenitor of a new black vernacular lyric poetry, particularly the genre of blues poetry, while the statement “White folks is white” in the first line of Cullen's “Uncle Jim” represents practically the entirety of his published verse directly utilizing some version of a distinctly African American idiom.

Dramatists of the Harlem Renaissance (c. 1916-35) sought to eradicate the legacy of minstrelsy. American minstrelsy began in the late 1820s and consisted in white actors applying burnt cork to their faces in degrading portrayals of African Americans. This created a cultural lexicon of stereotypes. Eliminating the century-long shroud of minstrel theater became one of the goals of Harlem Renaissance dramatists. Willis Richardson, author of the first African American non-musical drama on Broadway, said in 1919 that “When I say Negro plays, I do not mean merely plays with Negro characters,” but dramas portraying “the soul of a people.” Indeed, it was part of the “New Negro” agenda to lay bear the “people's soul.” Plays conveyed the principles of the “New Negro” by portraying characters having moral values, familial bonds, education, dignity, integrity, and work ethic. “Negro life,” Alain Locke noted in his “Introduction” to the era's influential The New Negro (1925), “is not only establishing new contacts and founding centers, it is finding a new soul.”

Creating the New Negro “soul” onstage, however, proved no simple undertaking. Several factors had to be considered, among them: how should blacks be portrayed - with idealization or bluntness; and what was drama's function - to protest racism or to convey the ordinary folk? James Weldon Johnson added in 1928 that the African American author “faces a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about - the problem of the double audience; it is a divided audience, an audience made up of two elements with differing and often opposite and antagonistic points of view.”

When an author's work is taught in colleges, and produced for television (by Oprah Winfrey), and her face graces postage stamps, coffee mugs, calendars, notecards, and refrigerator magnets, it is a safe bet that her status, in popular culture at least, is secure. Because so many of my friends and colleagues have bought them for me, I happen to own a great many Zora Neale Hurston finger puppet refrigerator magnets - complete with floppy hat, purple dress, pearl necklace, and “Magnetic Personalities” data card. Of the four dozen or so figures marketed in the magnet's celebrity series, Hurston is the only one identified by first name alone. This is not insignificant. Hurston has become a national celebrity and a folk heroine, as Sheffey's proclamation, quoted above, attests. Her intimacy with the shared heritage of folk traditions no doubt contributes to this sense that “Zora” is our familiar, someone we can approach on a first-name basis and imagine as our own. But, as I will suggest, there are myriad ironies involved in making Hurston into a folk heroine, not least of them being her own highly complex relation to the folk traditions she documented and referenced in almost everything that she wrote. This chapter, then, returns to some of Hurston's use of the folklore she collected to rethink the ways in which we have imagined her relationship to it.

The most notorious bad review of the Harlem Renaissance peaks with an upset stomach and an itch for soap. In an installment of his regular “Browsing Reader” column in The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois accused Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) of being nasty, brutish, too long, and largely unhygienic. “[F]or the most part,” Du Bois confessed, McKay's bestselling novel “nauseates me, and after the dirtiest parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Several features of Home to Harlem inspired this unusually embodied instance of reader response criticism. The novel fed the lechery of debased white bohemians, charged Du Bois, a smart set eager to project its own fantasies of “utter licentiousness” onto “black Harlem,” and powerful enough within the New York publishing industry to do so in wide public view. McKay satisfied this small but influential constituency for transracial pornography with rare skill, Du Bois allowed, summoning “every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.” Yet gilding the lily of decadence did not make for lean, harmoniously integrated fiction. Home to Harlem was “padded,” deprived of a logical plot or “any artistic unity.” It cried out for a well-wrought, well-scrubbed sequel free from a “dirty subject” and supplied with a “strong, well-knit as well as beautiful theme.” Before any such sequel was forthcoming, Du Bois' review inspired a blistering private letter from McKay. Questioning the elder statesman's basic credentials as a critic and author of mimetic fiction, McKay mockingly pitied Du Bois' removal from “real life” forced by his role as a racial advocate.

The Caribbean

Claude McKay and Eric Walrond have long been regarded as important figures of the Harlem Renaissance. They were not African Americans, however. McKay, born in Jamaica, and Walrond, born in present-day Guyana and raised in Barbados and Panama, were part of a large contingent of migrants from the Caribbean who came to the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their Caribbean origins had a profound influence on their attitude toward American race relations as well as on their literary development.

The impact of Caribbean immigrants on the Harlem Renaissance was widely noted at the time. As early as 1919, the editor Fenton Johnson wrote that “We of America owe much to the West Indian . . . In every field of American life we find the West Indian pushing ahead and doing all in his power to uphold the dignity of the Negro race.” Yet there has been a tendency to subsume writers like McKay and Walrond into the American canon without taking full account of their Caribbean origins. There is a need to reclaim them for Caribbean literary history and to see them as precursors of major contemporary writers such as Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat, who were born in the Caribbean but have lived in the USA for much of their writing lives.

In his last novel, Banana Bottom (1933), Claude McKay described the beginning of the twentieth century in Jamaica as a period of “inquietude” (45). That was somewhat of an understatement. Jamaica and other British colonies in the Caribbean were undergoing profound social, economic, and political upheavals that would contribute to the massive migration that took place from the 1890s to the 1920s.

Elaborately costumed crossdressers at Harlem drag balls, public wedding ceremonies for black lesbian couples, speakeasies entertaining racially and sexually mixed crowds with illicit drinks and sexually explicit performances - transgressive sexuality clearly represented a visible facet of life during the Harlem Renaissance. This glossy and racy image of Harlem fits the sexualized cliché of the “roaring twenties” as a decade of abandon and sexual revolution. Dramatic changes in the urban sexual and racial landscapes indeed occurred in the early twentieth century: thousands of African Americans migrated to the northern urban centers, the “New Woman” emerged, and same-sex desire was reconceptualized. Until then explained by the phenomenon of gender inversion - effeminate men desire other men and “mannish” women desire other women - and represented by easily identifiable “inverts,” types such as “fairies”/“pansies” or “mannish-acting” women, same-sex desire was now increasingly linked to a discrete and less visible category: homosexuality. Older theories of same-sex interest as inextricably linked to gender inversion, however, persisted. While the police and urban anti-vice societies attempted to suppress “immoral” sexual activities, New York's freshly emerged metropolis Harlem was largely exempt from policing efforts and consequently developed into a popular vice district. Striving for racial uplift, the black bourgeoisie tried to counteract this development by exerting pressure on the black community, but they lacked the power to successfully police Harlem.

Critics of the Harlem Renaissance often pair Nella Larsen with Jessie Fauset, but Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher make a better literary pair than do Fauset and Larsen. Like Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman, both Larsen and Fisher believed that sexual desire is a primary force in human nature but one shaped by the ubiquitous presence of modernity. One manifestation of modernity, of course, is popular culture - cabarets, film, and pulp fiction. And as modernists, Larsen and Fisher saw that popular culture was a source of modernism, especially American modernism. For instance, as murder mysteries, Larsen's Passing (1929) and Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies (1932) are indebted to a modernist conception that a lowbrow literary genre like a detective novel might reveal, in Raymond Chandler's famous phrase, a “hidden truth.” In Quicksand (1928), Larsen makes use of another aspect of popular culture (both cinematic and literary), the sensational story of the “tragic mulatta,” but her allusion to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) reinterprets that story as an examination of love in a post World War I universe. Finally, in Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies, the clue to the murderer's identity lies not in rational analysis (which presupposes Newtonian order) but in a comic blues song about sexual desire heard daily on Harlem's streets. Echoing Plato's Symposium, all three novels treat sexual desire as the engine in the human machine that can either destroy the self or create the possibility for transcendence, either personal or communal.