“Mimesis and the Education of Desire in Plato’s Republic”

by Sherwood Belangia
Presented at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, Madrid, Spain
July 13, 2017

— I. Mimetic Theories of Plato and Girard Compared —

The educational program of Plato’s Republic evinces deep insight into the nature of mimetic
desire and its consequences — a claim that must contend with Rene Girard’s mostly negative
appraisal of Plato. Plato not only had a mimetic theory, but one fully-formed, with remarkable
affinities to Girard’s own. The convergences are striking:

— Both held that desire, especially mimetic desire, is the core constituent of human
psychology and sociology.
— Both thought of anthropology in interdividual terms.1
— Both understood the danger and promise of mimeticism, particularly the conflict-
generating potential of acquisitive mimesis.2
— Both showed why questioning the mythical structures of society often leads to a “crisis
of degree” and unleashes mob violence.
— Both saw that loss of the object is symptomatic of scandalized relations.

A full articulation of such similarities is beyond the scope of this paper, but the list reveals
a shared anthropological insight into the importance of mimetic phenomena. Even a cursory
reading of Plato’s Republic though a Girardian lens can make this kinship clear.

***

The problem of desire becomes thematic right away in the Republic. Early in Book I, when
Socrates asks Cephalus whether old age is hard, his elderly host introduces the problem of
desire. Speaking of his aged peer group, Cephalus says:

When they meet, most of the members of our group lament, longing for the pleasures of youth and
reminiscing about sex, about drunken bouts and feasts and all that goes with things of that sort; they
take it hard as though they were deprived of something very important and had then lived well but are

1
 E.g.  the  Republic’s  city/soul  analogy.  
2
 Contra  Girard’s  tenuous  interpretation  of  Plato  on  this  point.  See  Rene  Girard,  Things  Hidden  Since  the  
Foundation  of  the  World  (Stanford:  Stanford  University  Press,  1987),  pp.  8-­‐9.  
     2  

now not even alive. (329a3)

But Cephalus thinks that the loss of carnal appetite is a blessing, agreeing with Sophocles
that:

“[M]ost joyfully did I escape it, as though I had run away from a sort of frenzied and savage
master’…in every way, old age brings great peace and freedom from such things. When the desires cease
to strain and finally relax, then what Sophocles says comes to pass in every way; it is possible to be rid
of very many mad masters.” (329c)

There are a few things to notice here. First, mimetic desire lingers even without the
support of carnal urges, a vivid demonstration of how desire cannot be reduced to appetite.
Unsatisfied (and unsatisfiable) desires of the aged friends haunt them like phantom limbs.
Second, desires can be “mad masters,” acting against one’s best interest, implying that life is
better without them. Socrates shows respect to Cephalus, but Plato signals that
passionlessness cannot serve as a remedy for mimetic desire. The scene is laced with death
imagery, an allusive agreement with the friends’ opinion that loss of desire is as loss of life.
Cephalus (the “Head”) is quickly whisked off the stage, not to return; his son Polemarchus
(“War-ruler”) assumes his mantle. The man without passion has little to contribute to a
discussion of the good life.4

Polemarchus resumes the nascent examination of justice, defining it as, “doing good to friends
and harm to enemies.” (332d) By this account, justice becomes indistinguishable from mimetic
reciprocity. Polemarchus’ tit-for-tat conception of justice is a catalyst for mimetic doubling:
each side interprets the other’s defense against hostility to be an act of hostility, leading to a
self-perpetuating cycle of conflict. In response to Polemarchus’ definition, Socrates makes two
critical moves, both important when we think about how he would deal with mimetic desire.
First, Socrates leads Polemarchus to reflect on whether someone could mistake friend for foe
or enemy for friend. After all, imitation of desire must always begin with an interpretation of
the model’s intention. Such “interpretations” are usually just habitual reflexes. But since one
can be wrong, there is an implied need for critical reflection before one can enact justice.
Without a critical pause, the worst effects of reciprocity (e.g. increasing my enemy’s hostility)
become active. Second, Socrates shows Polemarchus that justice, as a virtue, can only be a
benefit and the application of justice should make its recipient more, not less, just. Therefore,
it must be distinguished from reciprocal violence against one’s enemies, which makes them

3
 Stephanus  page  citations  throughout  the  paper  are  from  Plato:  Republic,  transl.  Allan  Bloom  (New  York:  
Basic  Books,  1968).    
4
 The  Cephalus  episode  demonstrates  how  when  desire  is  lost,  fear  become  the  guiding  motive  for  living.  This  
has  important  personal  and  political  implications  that  I  will  leave  to  the  reader  to  think  through.  
     3  

more unjust and likely to respond in kind. On Socrates’s reckoning, justice is only selectively
reciprocal, since it reciprocates benefits but not harm. Socrates’s questioning has undermined
three aspects of conventional applications of justice — that it is reciprocal, violent and
unreflective. Not coincidentally, each is a prominent feature of mimetic rivalry.

The entry of Thrasymachus into the conversation is the climax of Book I. Without warning,
Socrates is verbally attacked by the scandalized sophist. Most of the commentaries on this
famous passage have focused on Thrasymachus’ notions of justice, but it is important to pay
close attention to the dramatic interaction between the two interlocutors. In particular, watch
Socrates. He enacts the very features of justice revealed in his dialogue with Polemarchus.
Socrates’ response is non-reciprocal: he does not mirror Thrasymachus’ aggression or
escalation to extremes; non-rivalrous: he does not try to “win” the debate at the expense of the
other; and benevolent: he responds to Thrasymachus’ enmity by seeking to help/heal him with
his dialectical art, an act of interpretive charity. Considerations of brevity prevent me from
exploring all the mimetic features of this fascinating exchange, but I want to highlight a few.
First, notice how differently Thrasymachus and Socrates account for what is at stake in their
dialogue/debate:

Thrasymachus: "You won't get away with doing harm unnoticed and, failing to get away unnoticed,
you won't be able to overpower me in the argument." (341 a-b)

Socrates: “Thrasymachus, you daimonic man, do you toss in such an argument, and have it in mind
to go away before teaching us adequately before finding out whether it is so or not? Or do you suppose
you were trying to determine a small matter and not a course of life on the basis of which each of us
would have the most profitable existence?" (344d-e)

Both seek “advantage” — a key term in Thrasymachus’ definition of justice, the “advantage of
the stronger”5 Thrasymachus understands advantage to mean overpowering or harming the
other to prevent being harmed, whereas Socrates seeks the mutual advantage of determining

5
 See  338c.  Socrates’  critical  examination  of  Thrasymachus’s  definition  —  that  justice  is  the  “advantage  of  the  
stronger”  —  reveals  Thrasymachan  justice  to  be  neither  advantageous  nor  stronger.  Thrasymachus’s  
understanding  of  "advantage"  (sumpheron)  is  different  from  Socrates’s.  Thrasymachus  uses  sumpheron  to  
mean  "profit"  or  "advantage",  with  a  strong  tilt  toward  the  idea  of  "advantage  over.”  This  necessitates  a  
winner  and  loser.  Socrates  agrees  that  justice  is  a  sumpheron,  but  hugs  closer  to  the  etymological  sense  of  
"bearing  with"  as  one  might  assist  another  in  battle.  Socrates  and  Thrasymachus  have  contradictory  
understandings  of  sumpheron.  Thrasymachus  is  imitating  what  he  takes  to  be  Socrates’s  desire  for  victory  
and  honor.  On  the  other  side,  Socrates  is  imitating  a  deep-­‐set  desire  in  all  human  beings  to  understand  and  
pursue  the  best  form  of  life.  He  imitates  what  he  takes  to  be  Thrasymachus’  desire  to  know  and  enact  the  
best  form  of  life.  Thrasymachus  asserts  a  sumpheron  as  desired  by  competitive  desire,  i.e.  thumos;  Socrates’  
sumpheron  is  that  desired  by  our  rational  (but  still  impassioned)  capacities  like  phronesis  and  dianoia.      
     4  

together the “most profitable existence.” Let me underline an extremely important point: there
is mimesis in both instances. Thrasymachus imitates what he interprets as Socrates’ desire to
defeat him in debate and claim the superiority that follows from victory; Socrates imitates
what he takes as Thrasymachus’ desire to articulate and live the best form of life. Mimesis can
be either vicious or virtuous depending on the interpretational habits one brings to the
encounter. This relates to the chief interest of the dialogue: the role of justice in the good life.
The dramatic subtext and thematic topic are perfectly coincident here. An unjust disposition
leads (Thrasymachus) mimesis into conflict and escalations, whereas a just disposition
(Socrates) brings about reciprocal effort toward achieving what’s good for both parties.

A second highlight in the Thrasymachus/Socrates conversation centers on the scandal of

advantage. Socrates asks a series of questions about who among the just and unjust would
desire to “out-do” or "get the better" of the other: would an unjust person desire to "get the
better" of a just person? How about over another unjust person? Will the just person desire to
"get the better" of another just person or simply an unjust one? (349b - 350b) The agreed
upon answer is that an unjust person would desire to "get the better" of both the just and the
unjust indiscriminately, whereas the just person would seek to "get the better" of only the
unjust. (350b) This is reciprocal or nonreciprocal depending on one’s point of view. The
Greek verb that Allan Bloom translates here as “to get the better of" is pleonektein. Other
variants in Liddell-Scott include to out-do; to claim more that one’s share; to be greedy, grasping,
arrogant.6 The substantive form is pleonexia, which means something like “over-reaching
acquisitiveness at the expense of others.” Translated into the language of mimetic theory,
pleonexia is “acquisitive desire,” the root of violence and disorder in both Plato and Girard.7 A
careful reading of the Republic will reveal pleonexia to be the opposite of justice and the disease
it seeks to cure. Socrates defines justice (dikaiosune) as “doing one’s own work” – one’s own
related to one’s knowledge, expertise or competence. (433b) To transgress against another’s
expertise is injustice, which Socrates defines as “meddlesomeness” (polupragmosune). (434b-c)
Injustice is then a form of inappropriate “out-doing” – in other words, pleonexia, the seed of

6
 See  entry  for  πλεονεκτέω  in  Liddell-­‐Scott.  An  Intermediate  Greek-­‐English  Lexicon,  7th  Edition  (Oxford:  
Clarendon  Press,  1997.  
7
 Girard  not  only  missed  the  prominent  place  of  acquisitive  desire  (i.e.  pleonexia)  in  Plato’s  thought,  he  
attacked  Plato  for  its  supposed  omission:  “Plato's  problematic  fails  to  mention  the  domain  of  application  
where  imitation  is  inevitably  conflictual:  appropriation.  No  one  has  ever  perceived  that  failure.  Everybody  
always  imitates  Plato's  concept  of  imitation.  As  a  result  of  this  curious  mutilation,  the  reality  of  the  threat  
imitation  poses  to  the  harmony  and  even  to  the  survival  of  human  communities  has  never  been  correctly  
assessed.  The  omission  by  Plato  of  acquisitive  mimesis  as  a  source  of  conflict  is  paradoxical  because  Plato  still  
shares  but  cannot  justify  the  universal  terror  of  primitive  communities  for  mimetic  phenomena."  Rene  Girard,  
To  Double  Business  Bound  (Baltimore:  The  Johns  Hopkins  University  Press,  1978),  page  20.  
     5  

violent escalation.8

***

This then become the problem at the heart of the dialogue: how can one overcome the
mimetic temptations to pleonexia? Where should we look for a cure? Girard has left hints
about the requirements of a cure, particularly in his scattered analyses of conversion
narratives.9 But Plato does more than hint; he dramatizes a prescriptive solution. Plato’s
interest in prescription differs from Girard. Girard devotes much attention to diagnosis and
etiology, but his pretensions to scientific objectivity made him coy about non-sacrificial
prescriptions. In Girard’s primordial origin story what cures a society of widespread mimetic
violence is unanimity resulting from scapegoating violence. But scapegoating works because it
creates unanimity — aligned, non-acquisitive desire — and not because of violence as such.
The prescriptive challenge is to achieve such unanimity, what the Greeks called homonoia,
without resorting to scapegoating.10 Both Plato and Girard believe that a fundamental
transformation of our relationship to our mimetic others is necessary to escape from the worst
effects of it, including scapegoating. Plato’s situation with respect to Socrates was akin to the
disciples after the crucifixion. He had seen the best man murdered by the mob, aided by the
institutional “justice” system, not in spite of but because of his goodness.11 In so doing, he
vicariously participated in the victim’s transcendence from the mythically constituted crowd.
Plato was understandably skittish about his society’s usual remedy for social disorder —
casting about for a pharmakos or other object of blame — while neglecting the root problem:
mimetic desire attaching itself to competitive social objects of dubious social value.

8
 See  488a  –  489c  for  a  story  illustrating  the  political  danger  of  pleonexia  in  which  sailors  on  a  ship  mutiny  
against  the  true  captain  possessed  of  the  art  of  navigation,  thinking  themselves  (wrongly)  able  to  do  his  job.  
9
 For  the  importance  of  conversion,  see  Rene  Girard,  Deceit,  Desire  and  the  Novel  (Baltimore:  The  Johns  
Hopkins  University  Press,  1961),  pp.  290-­‐314;  and  Rene  Girard,  with  Pierpaolo  Antonello  and  Joao  Cezar  de  
Castro  Rocha,  Evolution  and  Conversion:  Dialogues  on  the  Origins  of  Culture  (London:  Bloomsbury  Publishing,  
2008)  p.  45  &  pp.222-­‐3.  
10
 For  a  discussion  of  homonoia  in  relationship  to  Rene  Girard,  see  Sherwood  Belangia,  “Homonoia,  Positive  
Mimesis  and  the  Sharability  of  Desire”  (2014),  posted  at  academia.edu.    
11
 Girard  credits  Plato  with  insight  into  scapegoating,  though  he  must  scramble  to  explain  it:  “Christ  flags  
himself  as  the  victim  to  his  persecutors.  This  pattern  works  also  in  the  case  of  Plato  -­‐  which  shows  how  aware  
Plato  was  of  this  mechanism.  There  is  an  astonishing  sentence  in  Plato,  which  still  remains  unexplained.  One  
of  the  characters  in  the  Republic  says  that  if  there  existed  a  perfect  man  in  whom  there  would  be  absolutely  
no  evil,  no  vengeance,  he  would  end  up  being  killed.  Socrates  is  close  to  being  such  a  man.  He  criticizes  
cultural  inequities;  therefore,  he  designates  himself  as  a  scapegoat.  This  could  perhaps  be  derived  from  the  
Bible,  which  Plato  may  have  known,  since  he  travelled  to  Egypt,  where  there  were  many  Jews  at  that  time.  
However,  there  isn't  a  real  history  of  the  Diaspora  and  the  early  period  is  still  mysterious.  Nietzsche  wrote  
about  the  fact  that  Plato  knew  the  Bible.  (Maybe  that  is  why  he  did  not  like  Plato  ...)”  -­‐-­‐  Evolution  and  
Conversion,  pp.  67-­‐8.  
     6  

What is astonishing in Plato is his recognition that desire and mimesis, despite their
pathologies, are inalienable ingredients in a well-lived life. Plato is a useful supplement to
mimetic theory due to his wide-ranging exploration of mimetic disorder and his tenacious
pursuit of non-sacrificial forms of mimetic order. Girard left enough hints in his early work to
prescribe what a “cure” for mimetic disease must look like, again with striking similarities to
Plato:

— Both understood the necessity of repentance, conversion and vertical transcendence for
overcoming mimetic disorder.
— Both knew that humans cannot leave behind their essential mimeticism, that the cure
for mimesis is always mimetic.

Once we notice that the diagnosis and therapy of disordered desire is at the core of Plato’s
Republic, the logic behind its educational program becomes clearer. This paper is an attempt to
make that logic evident. Socrates narrates an education of desire that seeks to unveil (1) the
mimetic origin of desire, (2) the frustrations of the double-bind, and (3) the inherent nonbeing
and undesirability of mimetically generated social objects. This ascetical ground-clearing
prepares the student/patient to choose a different type of mediation and to discover different
types of objects as a means to a transformed type of relationship. This “transformed
relationship” has a name. He calls it dikaiosune, aka “justice.”

— II. Social Stratification and Mimetic Desire —

The Republic’s educational program is part of a larger quest to understand the nature of
justice. Socrates proposes that he and his interlocutors “build a city in speech” in order to
make justice easier to discover by being “writ large.” (368c-d) The first version, “the primitive
city,” is devoted only to the satisfaction of limited survival needs. (368c - 369a) But Glaucon
objects to this austere minimalism and calls the result a “city of pigs.” He demands “relishes”
— a metonym, I would argue, for any desire that exceeds bare need. Superfluous, mimetic
desires are given free reign. Socrates characterizes the resultant city as “feverish” and, like a
skilled doctor, begins taking the patient’s history. The features of this second iteration of the
city-in-speech, aka the “luxurious city,” ( 372e-375c) 12 should be familiar to students of
Girard: mimeticism, acquisitive desire, manufactured scarcities and conflicting desires that
lead to violence. Inordinate desires butt up against the desires of others similarly disposed.
Each actor tries to acquire more than the other, leading to social energy diverted from

12
 Here  I  follow  Eric  Voegelin’s  articulation  of  the  four  poleis  (primitive,  luxurious,  purified  and  philosopher’s)  
given  in  Order  and  History,  Volume  Three:  Plato  and  Aristotle  (Baton  Rouge:  Louisiana  State  University  Press,  
1977),  pp.  97-­‐98.  
     7  

production to predation and defense. The perverse alchemy of mimetic desire turns
sufficiency into lack: each wants to seize their neighbor’s other’s land, finding that their own
“will now be smaller although it was once enough.” (373d) Socrates makes clear how “unlimited
acquisition…overstepping the boundary of the necessary” leads to “war as a consequence.” (373d-e)
Socrates then says that “we have now found the origins of war. It comes from those same desires that are
most of all responsible for the bad things that happened to cities and the individuals in them." (373d-e) By
“these same desires,” Socrates clearly means “desires prone to mimetic escalation.”

The threat of violence unleashed by inordinate desire (epithumia) leads the city to appoint
people of competitive spirit (thumos) to serve as guardians, as loyal defenders of tribal values.
These two words — thumos and epithumia — are so important to the mimetic interpretation of
Plato that I need to discuss them in more detail.13 Liddell-Scott gives the following English
equivalents for thumos: soul, spirit, the principle of life, feeling and thought, esp. of strong feeling and
passion; desire or inclination; the seat of anger; temper, will; the heart, as the seat of the emotions.14
Thumos is competitive desire for social goods like honor, victory, prestige, fame, status,
supremacy over others. It delights in competitive contexts, is sensitive to honor and shame
and is quick to pick a fight. Whereas thumos desires social goods, epithumia is inordinate
craving for appetitive goods like food, drink, sex, creature-comforts and, in service of these
ends, money. While epithumia can denote “desire” simply, it connotes “craving” or “lust,”
because mimesis tends to drive it to the extremes of pleonexia.15 Thus Plato bifurcates mimetic
desire into two species, epithumia and thumos, distinguished by their objects: appetitive goods
and social goods, respectively. This dichotomy is the basis of social stratification: the city sets
the thumos of the guardians over the epithumia of the masses.

Thumos provides the basis for a status-obsessed culture that keeps scornful watch over
epithumia. Similarly, in the soul equipped with rightly disposed thumos, concern for social
standing makes one ashamed of pursuing a profligate life. Thumos disparages excessive
devotion to appetitive goods. It considers mastery over such base pleasures to be a badge of
honor. There is clearly a self-transcending potential to thumos. But thumos has a dark side,
which students of mimetic theory will recognize: its honor is easily offended and prone to
escalate rivalry to the point of violence. Tokens and seats of preeminence, always mimetic in

13
 Both  words  share  a  common  root  with  the  Greek  word  for  sacrifice,  thusia.  The  thu-­‐  stem  comes  from  an  
Indo-­‐European  word  for  “smoke”  or  “vapor.”  The  smoke  rising  in  a  sacrificial  pyre  would  be  interpreted  as  
the  life-­‐force  (thumos)  rising  from  the  body.  The  English  word  “fume,”  which  can  mean  either  “vapor”  or  “to  
be  angry,”  has  the  same  lineage  
14
See  entry  for θυµός in  Liddell  &  Scott,  An  Intermediate  Greek-­‐English  Lexicon,  7th  Edition  (Oxford:  
Clarendon  Press,  1997).
15
 Epithumeo  is  the  Greek  verb  used  in  the  Septuagint  for  “covet,”  as  in  the  10th  Commandment  “Thou  shalt  
not  covet  thy  neighbor’s  wife...”  For  Rene  Girard’s  interpretation  of  the  commandment  against  coveting,  see  I  
See  Satan  Fall  Like  Lightning  (Maryknoll,  NY:  Orbis  Books,  2001),  pp.  7-­‐18  
     8  

origin, are scarce and likely to attract multiple claimants, again inciting violence. Even the
goods desired by epithumia — food, sex, creature comforts, money — can turn into objects of
rivalry for thumos when they become markers of status or honor, i.e. when they become
trophies in a competitive struggle. So thumos can also fall into the pleonexia it was assigned to
overcome. And it can devolve into an even worse form of pleonexia since it amplifies and
escalates a desire for inherently scarce social goods that rely on antagonists to achieve value.

The educational program arises out of the need to keep the savagery of the guardian’s
thumos from becoming pleonexic in this way and erupting into factional conflict (stasis). As
Juvenal put the problem: “Quis cusdodiet ispsos custodes?” — “Who will guard the guardians
themselves?”16 Plato does not fantasize that the city must rid itself of those most prone to
mimetic conflict. On the contrary, the thumoeidetic17 guardians are to be educated not banished.
Unlike epithumia, which is devoted to selfish appetite, thumos has a capacity for selfless
obedience to the values of the society in which it finds itself. The mimetic impulses must be
purified through education, not eliminated. The natural desire of thumos to excel will be
leveraged to reach something even more socially beneficial. The problem is not thumos
broadly, but thumos that succumbs to pleonexia, i.e. “acquisitive desire,” the craving to possess
more than one’s share of material or social goods at the expense of the other. Education in the
Republic is an inoculation against the disease of pleonexia. The educational program has three
main stages that I will explore in turn:

(1) training in gymnastics and music,

(2) mathematical studies that serve as liturgies for transcendent objects, and
(3) dialectical exercise and philosophical apprenticeship.

— III. Gymnastic and Music —

A. Music

Primary education begins with “music,” a term meaning more than sounds produced by
instruments and voices. Mousike refers to any mimetic and metrical medium, including poetry,
theater, dance, literature and history. Music was the prime bearer of cultural memory in
service to the mother Muse, Mnemosyne. Greece had been a predominantly oral culture only
decades before Socrates. Indeed, Eric Havelock sees Plato as part of the vanguard of literacy’s
struggle to supplant orality – an orality saturated with mousike.18 Metrical forms are highly

16
 Satire  VI,  lines  347–348  
17
 Thumoeides  is  one  part  of  Socrates’  tripartite  psychology  -­‐-­‐  along  with  the  epithumetikon  (desiring  part)  
and  the  logistikon  (calculating  part)  in  440e-­‐442c.    
18
 See  Eric  A.  Havelock,  Preface  to  Plato  (Cambridge:  Harvard  University  Press,  1963).  
     9  

mimetic: a cultural heritage infuses music into the sinews and bones of its people. Socrates
claims that “never are the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved.” (424c)
The mimetic tenacity of music is both a strength and weakness. As a preserver of right
opinions and salutary norms it is a very good thing. But it also tends to preserve the
unreflective norms of archaic (i.e. sacrificial) societies.19 Music confers a semblance (doxa) of
truth and rightness that may be wrong upon reflection. But music is not reflective. Even
worse, it crowds out reflection. Music “educates through habits, transmitting by harmony a certain
harmoniousness, not knowledge, and by rhythm a certain rhythmicalness. And connected with it were
certain other habits, akin to these, conveyed by speeches, whether they were tales or speeches of a truer sort.”
(522a) Some modern theorists have even suggested that before there was literacy there was
nothing equivalent to what we would call a conscience.20

Mimeticism is present from the very beginning of human development, whereas a self-
aware critical consciousness is an achievement hard of attainment, the mature fruit of a
mature culture. This is true in both the phylogenesis of human society and the ontogenesis of a
developing individual. Culture must be absorbed by the young before they can critically
engage it. And yet they *must* be given the cultural inheritance before they can develop a
critical faculty. As Girard says in an interview: “the new can only emerge within a tradition. You
can't subvert tradition except from within.”21 Therefore, a cultivated ethos and the habits of
subjectivity that sustains it — “tradition taken as task” to quote Goethe — is preparatory to an
accomplished self-transcending objectivity. Plato thinks that it is easy for a society to botch
this stage — both the message and the medium of its delivery ought to be chosen with care:

"The young can't distinguish what is allegorical from what isn't, and the opinions they absorb at
that age are hard to erase and apt to become inalterable. For these reasons, then, we should
probably take the utmost care to ensure that the first stories they hear about virtue are the best ones
for them to hear." -- 378d-e

Notoriously, Socrates proposes the censorship of traditional stories as a naïve first response to
this danger, but we need to read such things in a dialectical context. The censorship of
mimetic art is not to be taken too literally. After all, the Republic itself violates nearly every law
laid down by Socrates in his mimetic proscriptions.22 The call for censorship merely serves as
an invitation to reflect on the danger of mimesis:

“[T]elling the greatest falsehood about the most important things doesn’t make a fine story – I
mean Hesiod telling us how Uranus behaved, how Cronus punished him for it, and how he was in
turn punished by his own son. But even if it were true, it should be passed over in silence, not told to
foolish young people. And if, for some reason, it has to be told, only a very few people – pledged to
secrecy and after sacrificing not just a pig but something great and scarce – should hear it, so that

19
 We  still  live  with  some  of  these.  
20
 See  Barry  Sanders,  A  is  for  Ox:  The  Collapse  of  Literacy  and  the  Rise  of  Violence  in  an  Electronic  Age  (New  
York:  Random  House,  1994).  
21
 When  These  Things  Begin,  p.  45.  
22
 Too  many  seem  to  read  the  Republic  without  noticing  the  irony.  
     10  

their number is kept as small as possible.” – 377e-378a23

When Socrates calls these depictions of the gods “falsehoods,” his concern is not the
lack of correspondence between the stories and their divine subjects. What worries him is that
such depictions function as unreflective norms, received and transmitted mimetically.24

"Indeed, if we want the guardians of our city to think that it's shameful to be easily provoked into
hating each other, we mustn't allow any stories about God's warring, fighting, or plotting against
one another, for they aren't true. The battles of gods and Giants, and all the various stories of the
gods eating their families or friends, shouldn't either be told nor even woven in embroideries." --
378b-c

Violence, as in this instance, has a scandalous attraction. Violent images create strong somatic
effects that remain rooted in memory. The body can’t distinguish between image and reality
— amygdala, heart and viscera all prepare to fight. The spirit becomes excited with fantasies
of aggressive supremacy. This lays down a habit in the soul that functions as a norm — i.e.
one must counter offense with aggression — just waiting for a provocation to initiate a
mimetic cycle of violence and counter-violence. Mimesis operates at a pre-conscious level, and
our lack of awareness of its psychological effect is reason enough to care about media ecology.
That the mimetic models are external mediators — gods and heroes — doesn’t mitigate the
dangers. Whether one person internally models for another the desire for a common object or
an external mediator excites desire for a common object among two people close enough to
fight, the result is the same. The purified musical education proposed by Socrates is intended
to moderate or sooth the thumos of the guardians — not to weaken but to channel it into
salutary directions. Music acts more like a rudder than an anchor.

B. Gymnastic

If music provides the rudder, then gymnastic fuels the motor. Struggling against
resistance in pursuit of recognized achievement motivates a person of high thumos. The
student will “undergo these exercises and labors looking less to strength than to the spirited part of his
nature and for the purpose of arousing it.” (410b) Competitive desire (thumos) is a potency that
needs discipline and amplification, despite its tendency to “savagery.” Socrates says that the
savagery “stems from the spirited part of their nature, which if rightly trained, would be courageous; but, if
raised to a higher pitch than it ought to have, would be likely to become cruel and harsh.” (410d)

Gymnastic here is a term for any discipline that trains the body in order to improve it. It

23
 See  Rene  Girard’s  interpretation  of  this  passage  in  When  These  Things  Begin:  Conversations  with  Michel  
Treguer  (East  Lansing,  Michigan  State  University  Press,  2014),  pp  27-­‐28.  
24
 In  379a  –  383c,  Socrates’  lays  down  two  theological  patterns  that  are  really  requirements  for  any  lasting  
norm:  (1)  a  god  (i.e.  transcendent  norm)  is  a  cause  of  good  effects  only,  never  harmful  ones;  and  (2)  a  god  
(i.e.  a  transcendent  norm)  does  not  dissemble  but  is  always  true  and  unchanging  in  appearance.  
     11  

may seem obvious then that gymnastic is for bodies whereas music is for the soul. In fact,
gymnastic trains the soul by disciplining the body. (410c) Gymnastic works to “arouse” the
competitive spirit (thumos) to overcome the negative effects of passionlessness such as laziness,
sleepiness, drunkenness, illness, over-medication, etc. (Plato has already signaled his rejection
of passionlessness in the Cephalus episode.) The rigors of the latter stages of the educational
project will require courage, resilience and zeal — potencies of thumos. Although later stages
of education will find the trophies of athletic contests to be valueless, the virtues required to
compete for them are extraordinarily valuable and we are right to applaud them.25 Every
classroom teacher is well aware of the problems associated with passionless students. Those
who lack the requisite zeal (the root of student in Latin is studium, i.e. zeal) are nearly
impossible to teach. They are not prepared for the rigors of real study.

— IV. Logistike as Liturgical Study —

In Book IV, Socrates enumerates three parts (or faculties) of the soul. 26 Two have been
hinted at already: the faculties dealing with epithumia and thumos. The third is logistikon,
sometimes translated as the “rational part” of the soul, but is more precisely concerned with
logistike, the art of comparisons, calculation and ratios.27 (Logos, the root of logistike, means
among other things, “ratio.”) Logistike abstracts from the relativity of conflicting appearance
and submits them to the discipline of ratio and measure. Music and gymnastic prepare thumos
to rule over epithumia, but the soul still needs a critical faculty in order to see through the

25
 Per  Sarah  Broadie,  “We  love,  value  or  admire  the  qualities  that  are  tested  by  the  competition  and  which  
provide  the  criteria  for  victory.  Making  these  qualities  the  focus  of  an  on-­‐going  competitive  habit  or  culture  is  
a  way  of  celebrating  the  qualities  for  their  own  sake;  and  at  the  same  time,  through  the  competitive  raising  of  
standards,  it  is  a  way  –  also  for  those  qualities’  own  sake  –  to  generate  in  the  world  more  perfect  instances  of  
them.  Thus  the  type  of  rivalry  that  generates  pure  winners  tends  to  be  part  of  a  larger  activity  which,  in  
addition  to  satisfying  the  human  desire  for  competition  and  victory,  is  dedicated  to  cultivating  for  their  own  
sake  the  qualities  in  which  winners  excel.”    Aristotle  and  Beyond:  Essays  on  Metaphysics  and  Ethics  
(Cambridge:  Cambridge  University  Press,  2007),  pp.  154-­‐5.  
26
 The  three  parts  are  the  epithumetikon  (the  “desiring  part”),  the  thumoeides  (the  “spirited  part”),  and  the  
logistikon  (the  “rational  part”),  as  given  in  439d-­‐e.  
27
 I  am  applying  logistike  in  a  broad  sense  as  a  concern  for  the  how  relations  relate  to  quantities.  In  this,  I  am  
extrapolating  from  the  more  precise  sense  of  Jacob  Klein:  “‘Logistic’  is  not  merely  the  art  of  calculation  in  the  
sense  of  ‘operating’  with  numbers,  i.e.  an  art  teaching  the  procedures  to  be  applied  in  multiplication,  division,  
taking  of  roots,  and  in  the  solution  of  verbal  problems.  All  meaningful  operations  on  numbers  presuppose  
knowledge  of  the  relations  that  connect  the  single  numbers.  This  knowledge,  which  we  acquire  in  childhood  
and  which  we  use  in  every  calculation,  although  it  is  never  present  to  us  as  a  whole,  is  logistike.”  Jacob  Klein,  
Greek  Mathematical  Thought  and  the  Origin  of  Algebra,  transl.  Eva  Brann  (New  York:  Dover  Publications,  
1968),  p.  19.  Emphasis  mine.    
     12  

deceptions of doxa, i.e. opinion. Under the sway of mimesis, things seem more valuable, more
important, more desirable than they really are. As Girard notes:

The value of an object grows in proportion to the resistance met with in acquiring it. And the value of the
model grows as the objects value grows. Even if the model has no particular prestige at the outset, even if
all that "prestige" implies – praestigia, spells and phantasmagoria – is quite unknown to the subject,
the very rivalry will be enough to bring prestige into being.28

The comparative and superlative properties that the objects seem to possess are products
of mimetic mediation. In the Republic’s famous cave analogy, the desired objects (shadows)
that the prisoners mistake for realities are projected by mediators (puppeteers) and their
signaled desires (puppets). The prisoners must be turned around to be taught to see through
the mimetic relativity of what seems true and noble to them. Logistike and the logistical science
— arithmetic, geometry, harmonics and theoretical astronomy — are the prescribed means to
encourage this turning from mimetic mediation toward measure. That we could overcome the
pernicious effects of mimetic distortion by working math problems probably sounds bizarre.
But let’s think through this appearance toward what Plato might have in mind.

The first point is that thumos must learn to submit to measure and proportion. Plato’s chief
political concern is that political passions are perverted by partisan thumos toward pleonexia,
i.e. an “I-win-you-lose” dynamic. The object of politics (the good it intends) becomes lost in
the heat of rivalry: a steady stream of “losers” must be sacrificed to prop up the conceit of the
“winners.” This dynamic tends toward immoderation — the escalation to extremes and
monstrous doubles. An excessive interest in partisan melodrama obscures the true end of
politics: the common good and participation in its benefits. Logistike studies ratio and measure.
A sense of proportion can help dampen exaggerated extremes of polemical opinion.
The logistical arts are touchstones immune from the vagaries of mimetic deception.
Socrates is particularly interested in the paradoxes due to the relativity of our sensible
comparisons, e.g. a finger that appears “long” when compared to a short finger and “short”
when compared to a long one. Thought (dianoia) is summoned to the aid of the perceiver —
Socrates calls these aporiai of perception parakletikai. Likewise, in the world of public opinion,
better and worse are subject to relativities of perspective and so in need of Paracletes to avoid
the scandals generated by them. Logistikon resolves the paradox of conflicting perspectives
through the invariant properties of ratios, as are found in measurement.

Second, logistical studies are hard; they test a student’s capacity for disciplined striving,
for tenacity in the face of resistance — in service to an object that emerges only after long

28
 Girard,  Things  Hidden,  page  295.  
     13  

struggle. In a sense, they are a kind of higher=level gymnastic. The student can pass the test
only by means of a desire that is energetic enough to endure rigor, but without the zeal of
partisan conflict to sustain it. The student must learn to be competitive without being
rivalrous. In his Seventh Letter, Plato describes how he identifies unpromising potential
students:

“One should show such men what philosophy is in all its extent; what their range of studies is by which
it is approached, and how much labor it involves. For the man who has heard this, if he has the true
philosophic spirit and that godlike temperament which makes him akin to philosophy and worthy of it,
thinks that he has been told of a marvelous road lying before him, that he must forthwith press on with
all his strength, and that life is not worth living if he does anything else…
"Those who have not the true philosophic temper…when they see how great the range of studies is,
how much labor is involved in it, and how necessary to the pursuit it is to have an orderly regulation of
the daily life, come to the conclusion that the thing is difficult and impossible for them, and are actually
incapable of carrying out the course of study; while some of them persuade themselves that they have
sufficiently studied the whole matter and have no need of any further effort. This is the sure test and is
the safest one to apply to those who live in luxury and are incapable of continuous effort…” 29

Likewise in the Republic, Socrates proposes that the guardians class be bifurcated by means of
testing to identify who is fit to rule and who not.

Third, logistical study fosters the right kind of mediation. The master models desire for an
object without being an obstacle to the imitator. The student then learns to trust the master’s
mediation of goods that are unknown to the student and difficult of attainment. The student
learns to see that her inspiring master is not an obstacle, but an ally in overcoming the
difficulties inherent in rigorous study. The master and student are com-petitors in the
etymological sense of “seekers in common.” Student and master become advantageous (i.e.
sumpheroi) to one other by sustaining desire and joint attention. The model/obstacle nexus is
severed because the resistance comes from the object’s difficulty, not the model’s opposition.
In fact, treating the master as an obstacle would mistake the nature of the object being
mediated. In order to reach her goal, the student must learn to not outdo (pleonektein) the
master when she is but a novice – such out-doing being the essence of Platonic injustice.
Validation for the master's expertise comes when the student achieves the requisite insight.
Noetic understanding now supplants belief as the basis of common endeavor. This
apprentice/master paradigm is propaedeutic to future dialectical study.

Fourth and finally, logistical study serves as a liturgical exercise, shaping desire to pursue

29
 Plato:  7th  Letter,  trans.  Jowett,  in  public  domain.  
     14  

ends that transcend every other desire. I am using the term “liturgical” borrowing an insight
of James K. A. Smith:

“Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are
shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and
practices…” that we engage in “…that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the
world. Embedded in them is a common set of assumptions about the shape of human flourishing, which
becomes an implicit telos, or goal, of our own desires and actions. That is, visions of the good life,
embedded in these practices become surreptitiously embedded in us through our participation in the
rituals and rhythms of these institutions. These quasi-liturgies effect an education of desire, a pedagogy
of the heart.”30

Smith’s point is that action and attention in concrete settings and practices shape our
notions about what is desirable. The student’s desire is molded in a variety of ways.
Abstracting from one’s natural interest in physical or social objects as objects of acquisition is
an ascetical act. The objects involved in logistike are transcendent, yet inform the world of
immanence. Logistike begins the process of liberation from the illusions of doxa, since
mathematical objects are indifferent to opinions concerning them. Alistair McIntyre writes
that “goods internal to practices” motivate virtue maintenance at higher stages of
development.31 Likewise, the thrill of insight — one of these “internal goods” — inspires love
of learning (philomathia). Desire to know transcendent objects is already a transfigured desire
and a safe harbor from mimetic impulse.

None of thus is to suggest that we cease to be mimetic in becoming mathematicians.

Rather, a relative autonomy from mimetic bondage can only occur when there is what Girard
calls “vertical transcendency.”32 The value of the logistical arts for Plato is not in their
recognizing true goods — that will require dialectic — but in turning away from the
contradictions of sham mimetic goods and subjecting what remains to the test, so that we
might be left with what is really desirable. Socrates says that the transcendent, hypothetical
objects studied by logistike act as “stepping stones” to excite our attention for, and increase our
trust in, objects that exceed our sensibilities. Such study prepares a search for a religious and
moral desideratum: what Plato calls “the idea of the Good.” Michael Polanyi has written about

30
 James  K.  A.  Smith,  Desiring  the  Kingdom:  Worship,  Worldview,  and  Cultural  Formation  (Grand  Rapids:  Baker  
Publishing,  2009),  p.  25.  
31
 “A  virtue  is  an  acquired  human  quality  the  possession  and  exercise  of  which  tends  to  enable  us  to  achieve  
those  goods  which  are  internal  to  practices  and  the  lack  of  which  effectively  prevents  us  from  achieving  such  
goods.”  Alisdair  McIntyre,  After  Virtue  (Notre  Dame:  Notre  Dame  University  Press,  1981),  p.  191.  See  also  pp.  
188-­‐9  for  an  example  of  the  concept  of  “internal  goods”  as  applied  to  the  game  of  chess.    
32
 Deceit,  Desire,  and  the  Novel,  p.  313.  
     15  

the “to-from” structure of consciousness, that we attend not to but through the instrument
when performing an act of skill.33 Liturgies have the same structure: they are not the end of
our seeking, but the means, the real focus being something transcendent. Logistike is but a
preparation for the final discipline: dialectic.

— V. Dialectic, Conversion and Philosophical Friendship —

Dialectic is the capstone of the curriculum, coming only after ten years of apprenticeship
in the mathematic disciplines. (534e) It aims at conversion (periogoge) from desires that are
inconsistent with human flourishing — both social and psychological – toward objects that are
consistent with them, what Plato calls “form.” (eidos)34 For Plato, as for Girard, the social and
the psychological interpenetrate. The virtues of soul and city are not different in kind: they are
the same virtues inscribed in different media. The same features of conversion that Girard
describes are present in Plato. Quoting Girard:

“Every level of [the convert’s] existence is inverted, all the effects of metaphysical desire are replaced by
contrary effects. Deception gives way to truth, anguish to remembrance, agitation to repose, hatred to
love, humiliation to humility, mediated desire to autonomy, deviated transcendency to vertical
transcendency.”35

Transcendent objects are not available to view, nor are they even of interest, without
mediation. Because mimetic desire is triangular, conversion affects all three poles of the
mimetic relationship — subject, object and mediator.
— Regarding the subject, the convert is made to face his/her personal implication in
mimetic desire. The resultant painful disillusionment (i.e. the state of aporia) opens a door for
a heightened critical consciousness regarding his/her relation to opinion and desire. As Girard
says, “[V]ictory over desire is extremely painful.”36 Socratic ignorance is a form of ‘felt absence.’
Feeling a negation like ignorance is an effect of desire and desiring what one does not know is
a mimetic effect. The awareness of ignorance is an effect of a desire for knowledge – and vice-
versa.
— Regarding the object, the dialectical mediator focuses attention on the student’s lack of

33
 “To  rely  on  a  theory  for  understanding  nature  is  to  interiorize  it.  For  we  are  attending  from  the  theory  to  
the  things  seen  in  its  light,  and  are  aware  of  the  theory,  while  thus  using  it,  in  terms  of  the  spectacle  it  serves  
to  explain.”  Michael  Polanyi,  The  Tacit  Dimension  (Gloucester:  Peter  Smith,  1983),  p.  17,  although  the  whole  
of  Chapter  1  is  germane  to  this  section.  
34
 See  518b  -­‐  519c,  where  Socrates  says  education  is  “an  art  of  turning  around”  the  soul.  
35
 Deceit,  Desire,  and  the  Novel,  p.  293.  
36
 Ibid.,  p.  300.  
     16  

clarity regarding the desired object. Remember that loss of the object is both cause and effect
of late stage mimetic disease: the object becomes increasingly lost as the conflict escalates. A
Socratic mediator continually reexamines the object of desire, making it (and not the
mediator) focal, pointing out how saturated with unreality is the seeming-state called “doxa.”
(534b-c) We could define doxa as “opinion” or “consensus reality.” It is a mimetic product37
and the source of what Socrates calls “involuntary falsehoods.” (535d-e) If critical scrutiny
reveals one’s doxa to be illusory, then the student’s critical faculties can be awakened to the
power of mimetic mediation in her life. The dialectical master helps the student measure the
desired object against reality to determine its true desirability. Again, Girard: “[W]e must forgo
the fervent dialogue endlessly carried on by each one of us at the superficial levels of our being. One must
‘give up one’s dearest illusions.’ ”38
— Regarding the mediator the dialectician also brings to critical consciousness the
existence of mediators around us that power the allure of deficient objects. Plato calls much
attention to the presence of such mediators: vulgar crowds, sophists, parents, rival lovers,
rhapsodes, politicians, mythographers, poets and playwrights. In the Republic, Plato never lets
the reader forget how such forces shape the desires of those in their thrall. In this he agrees
with Girard: “Conversion is the discovery that we have always, without being aware of it, been imitating
the wrong kind of models who lead us into the vicious circle of scandals and perpetual frustration.39
Socratic therapy deconstructs a mediator’s implicit or explicit claims regarding the actual
desirability of the object of desire. By reminding the apprentice of the contingent, mimetic
origin of desire, the dialectician effectively decouples the object from the mediator, freeing the
student to consider not only other objects of desire but more importantly, to consider what it
means to be truly desirable. Just as cave-dwellers40 are liberated from empty shadows because
they are turned by another (turning=periagoge=conversion), so Girard anticipated the
possibility of such freedom:

“Only mimetic desire can he free, can be genuine desire, human desire, because it must choose a model
more than the object itself. Mimetic desire is what makes us human, what makes possible for us the
breakout from routinely animalistic appetites, and constructs our own, albeit inevitably unstable,
identities. It is this very mobility of desire, its mimetic nature, and this very instability of our identities,
that makes us capable of adaptation, that gives the possibility to learn and to evolve.”41

37
 Doxa  derives  from  the  Greek  verb  dokeo,  which  in  the  middle-­‐passive  voice  means  “seem”  but  in  the  active  
voice  means  “opine.”  The  “seeming”  of  doxa  comes  from  “opining”  of  others.  Let’s  think  of  “opining”  in  the  
broadest  sense  as  “the  communication  of  any  evaluative  stance,  whether  though  speech,  acts  or  gestures,  
whether  intentional  or  not.”  To  appropriate  “seeming”  by  means  of  another’s  “opining”  is  mimesis.  
38
 Deceit,  Desire,  and  the  Novel,  p.  300.  
39
 Evolution  and  Conversion,  pp.  223.  
40
 See  Republic,  Book  VII.  
41
 Evolution  and  Conversion,  p.  58.  
     17  

The dialectical student must exchange bad models for good ones — those that mediate
desires for objects whose goodness stands up to critical examination. Such a relationship will
be decidedly different since the objects interesting to the virtuous are not rivalrous objects. As
Girard writes: “True conversion engenders a new relationship to others and to oneself."42

The dialectical relationship is not immune from mimetic effects. Indeed, it is highly
mimetic by design. Dialectic follows the mimetic pattern of two aspirants for a common
object. As such it is bound up with the dangers present in any close mimetic relationship.
Metaphysical desire seems to be present from the beginning.43 As in most formative
relationships, the apprentice must want to be like the mentor. Dialectic requires physical
proximity, common interests, desire for being and a feeling of lack — in other words, same as
the recipe for mimetic rivalry. As Girard notes:

"This structure of rivalry is not a static configuration of elements. Instead the elements of the system
react upon one another; the prestige of the model, the resistance he puts up, the value of the object, and
the strength of the desire it arouses all reinforce each other, setting up a process of positive feedback." 44

By ‘positive feedback,’ Girard clearly did not mean something good, but rather a self-
amplification leading to conflict. But it can be good. Dialectic is an escalation of positive
feedback. Both participants see to know more and more objects of real value like the true and
the good. “The value of an object grows in proportion to the resistance met with in acquiring it. And the
value of the model grows as the object’s value grows.”45 The good must be realized in the soul by
increasing levels of desire for it, and each partner imitates the other’s zeal.

What Girard calls “vertical transcendency” is analogous to Platonic eros towards

knowledge of the good — “knowledge” not just in the cognitive sense, but also in the moral
and experiential senses. The role of the dialectician (aka, the platonic guardian) is to help the
apprentice be motivated by philomathia (love of learning) rather than philonikia (love of
victory) or philotimia (love of honor).46 Just as in the great novels in which the hero must

42
 Deceit,  Desire,  and  the  Novel,  p.  295.  
43
 See  Sherwood  Belangia,  “Metaphysical  Desire  in  Plato  and  Girard,”  Journal  of  Comparative  and  Continental  
Philosophy,  Volume  2,  2010,  Issue  2,  pp.  197-­‐209.  
44
 Things  Hidden,  p.  295.  
45
 Things  Hidden,  page  295.  
46
 See  Republic  581c  for  this  distinction.  The  hierarchy  is  distinguished  by  the  type  of  desire:  the  lover  of  
learning  should  rule  over  the  lover  of  honor  who  should  rule  over  the  lover  of  pleasure.  These  are  
distinguished  by  their  characteristic  objects  of  devotion:  non-­‐rivalrous  transcendent  goods  over  rivalrous  
social  goods  over  rivalrous  physical  goods.    
     18  

undergo a conversion, so too must the student exchange rivalrous objects of desire for non-
rivalrous ones. This conversion probably does not happen all at once. The apprentice will
likely begin by a desire to demonstrate her superiority in verbal exchange, but this must
eventually give way to a desire to overcome one’s ignorance with the other’s help, to seek in
common an object that can be enjoyed in common. The mentor begins as an external
mediator and ends as an internal one – from an authority to a friend. The stage in which
external mediation gives way to internal is critical. One most go through rivalry in order to
overcome it.

What prevents the mimetic escalation from becoming conflictual is the transcendent
character of the object sought — the idea of the good. The victory of the philosopher is a victory
over a lust to possess at the expense of the other (pleonexia). Eros for knowledge is never
defined by possession of the truth, but rather by just submission to it, whether known or not.
One cannot possess what lays “beyond being” — one only “knows” the good by becoming
more and more conformed to a virtuous disposition, an antecedent willingness to act
correctly.47 Phenomenologically, the idea of the good appears as the insistent question “Is it
good?” that haunts all human action and is at the heart of virtuous conduct.48 Pursuit of the
good is the good enacted. An earnest questing after justice, for instance, makes those who seek
it more just. The dialectical student is tested twice: once on the knowledge of her own
inadequacy, and secondly on her participation in just relations, i.e. commitment to common
endeavor, admission of the other’s point, etc. Injustice is a form of pleonexia: trying to outdo
the other in situations that call for submission. Socrates warns that unless the mature indulge
in it, dialectic is liable to generate the wrong kind of mimesis:

"Socrates: Isn't it one great precaution not to let them taste of arguments while they are young? I
suppose you aren't unaware that when lads get their first taste of them, they misuse them as though it
were play, always using them to contradict; and imitating those men by whom they are refuted, they
themselves refute others, like puppies enjoying pulling and tearing with argument at those who
happened to be near...Then when they themselves refute many men and are refuted by many, they fall
quickly into a profound disbelief of what they formerly believed. And as a result of this, you see, they
themselves and the whole activity of philosophy become the objects of slander among the rest of men."
(539b-c)

Logistical training should have prepared the dialectical apprentice to seek such a
transcendent object in substitution for the rivalrous social goods sought by the thumos. A

47
 For  an  explanation  of  antecedent  willingness,  see  Bernard  Lonergan,  Insight:  A  Study  of  Human  
Understanding  (San  Francisco:  Harper  &  Row,  1978),  pp.  623.  Lonergan  there  defines  willingness  as  “the  state  
in  which  persuasion  is  not  needed  to  bring  one  to  a  decision.”  
48
 I  owe  the  notion  of  the  Good  as  an  insistent  question  to  Sarah  Broadie  and  a  lecture  she  gave  at  a  meeting  
of  the  International  Plato  Society  at  Emory  University  in  2015.    
     19  

mature person (spoudaios) will pursue the right kind of imitation:

"He will imitate the man who's willing to discuss and consider the truth rather than the one who plays
and contradicts for the sake of the game. And he himself will be more sensible and will make the practice
of discussion more honorable instead of more desirable." (539c-d)

Every desire is, at heart, a desire for the real and beneficial as opposed to the apparent but
harmful. We can desire the apparent good, only because we mistake it for the real. No one
really desires to be wrong in their desires. In dialectic, the student not only imitates the desires
of the master for the real good, the master also imitates the student’s desire for the real good,
however unrealized or misattributed.49 Because desire is the heart of human existence,
conversion involves the whole person, not just the intellect, but the spiritual and moral
components too. This is true in both Plato and Girard:

"In reality, no purely intellectual process and no experience of a purely philosophical nature can secure
the individual the slightest victory over mimetic desire and it's victimage delusions. Intellection can
achieve only displacement and substitution, though these may give individuals the sense of having
achieved such a victory. For there to be even the slightest degree of progress, the victimage delusion must
be vanquished on the most intimate level of experience; and this triumph, if it is not to remain a dead
letter, must succeed in collapsing, or at the very least shaking to their foundations, all the things that
are based upon interdividual oppositions – consequently, everything that we can call our 'ego', our
'personality', our 'temperament', and so on."50

Here, Girard seems to equate the “philosophical” with abstract intellectualism, but this is
to misunderstand Plato’s conception of philosophy. Philosophy is existential desire and
affective to the core. The true philosopher is a lover of, and seeker after, the real and the good.
If a philosopher is intellectual, that is because it is intellect that must distinguish between
apparent and actual goods. As Girard observes, “Conversion is a form of intelligence, of
understanding.”51 The desire to achieve the good must include the desire to recognize it too.
Philosophy requires the integration of heart and mind in pursuit of the good. It is personal
and communal, its provenance being conversation and friendship, not dry intellectualism.

— VI. Conclusion: Plato as Novelist —

49
 See  Phaedrus,  255d-­‐e,  for  a  depiction  of  the  reciprocity  of  transcendent  truth-­‐seeking  friends.  
50
 Things  Hidden,  page  399-­‐400.  
51
 Evolution  and  Conversion,  p.  45.  
     20  

The Republic is not a philosophical treatise; it is a work of dramatic fiction. As with many of
Plato’s dialogues, it displays consummate literary artistry. Only recently has Plato scholarship
begun to realize the importance of dramatic elements for interpreting a dialogue.52 Why would
Plato write dialogues instead of treatises? Perhaps the good that Plato sought could not be
defined because it resists abstraction. Plato was interested in the concrete embodiment of both
good and bad opinions concerning how best to live. Dialectical insight is a personal
achievement, so Plato’s medium was personality. Dialectic is always dialogical; it is always
dramatic. Likewise, Rene Girard emphasized the power of narrative fiction to reveal
existential truth and unmask delusions that cause us harm. Through the medium of either
dialogues or novels, the reader too is a mimetic participant. "In reading we relive the spiritual
experience whose form is that of the novel itself."53 The dialogue, like the novel, is liturgical in the
sense already discussed. Its meaning is not only in the text but in its appropriation, in its
application, in what it does to the reader. The reader is implicated — both in the disorder and
in the conversion.

Consider how these two quotes of Girard could apply as equally to Plato if adapted to his
context:

"'Society is the kingdom of nothingness.' We must take this affirmation literally. The novelist
constantly emphasizes the contrast between the objective nothingness of the Faubourg and the enormous
reality it requires in the eyes of the snob." 54

"The novelist is interested neither in the petty reality of the object nor in that same object transfigured
by desire; he is interested in the process of transfiguration. This has always been the fundamental
concern of the great novelists." 55

Plato was a great novelist in the normative sense used by Girard. The dialogues
consistently challenge the ‘Romantic Lie’ that desire is autonomous and self-authenticating.
Unfortunately, Girard himself missed the full scope of Plato’s artistic and theoretical
accomplishment. In an interview with Michel Treguer, Rene Girard seems to close to
admitting Plato’s novelistic insight, only to retreat from its implications:

"The Republic in particular, you notice that it's haunted by the true conflict born of imitated desires, the
conflict between people who are close to each other, who desire the same thing, and who all of a sudden

52
 E.g.  the  interpretive  work  of  Gadamer,  Howland,  Gonzales,  Hyland,  Gordon,  Sallis,  and  Brann  -­‐-­‐  among  
others.  
53
 Deceit,  Desire,  and  the  Novel,  pp.  222-­‐2.  
54
 Ibid.,  pp.  218-­‐9.  
55
 Ibid.,  pp.  219.  
     21  

become rivals – the sort of conflict I talk about, and that I found in the work of novelists and
playwrights – but he doesn't conceptualize it." 56

Girard speaks here as if these mimetic components are accidental and not part of Plato’s art. If
he doesn’t “conceptualize” mimetic desire, well, neither did Shakespeare. But to miss the art is
to miss the point. Girard’s failure to read Plato as one of the great novelists denied the world
the fruit of his usual interpretive genius. Would that Rene Girard had read the Republic with
the sensitivity and insight he brought to Shakespeare, Cervantes and Proust! Even so, he has
left us with hermeneutical tools to make an attempt. Forgive my feeble imitation of what a
Girardian reading might have looked like.

56
 Where  These  Things  Begin,  page  12.