A significant strand of the ethical psychology, aesthetics and politics of Plato's Republic revolves around the concept of poikilia, ‘fascinating variety’. Plato uses the concept to caution against harmful appetitive pleasures purveyed by democracy and such artistic or cultural practices as mimetic poetry. His aim, this article shows, is to contest a prominent conceptual connection between poikilia and beauty (kallos, to kalon). Exploiting tensions in the archaic and classical Greek concept, Plato associates poikilia with dangerous pleasures to redirect admiration toward (...) a distinctly philosophical pursuit of the nature of beauty. This is to displace a prominent and problematic cultural sensibility—the aesthetics of poikilia—not to deny that fascinating variety, even in mimetic poetry, may be beautiful. Rather, Plato's cultural critique lays bare an epistemological problem in the ethical psychology of beauty: since they cannot be distinguished from what seems beautiful, how should one respond to fascinating yet dangerous attractions? (shrink)

The Republic’s noble lie is widely read as an endorsement of political difference that opposes the democratic ideals of its Athenian setting. Once the text’s exclusionary political realities and rhetorical structure are attended to, however, the passages no longer appear as the template for an essentialist politics or the act of political deception they are typically taken to be. What they do is lay bare the ‘artifice’ (mēchanē) by which regimes – including classical Athens – produce membership status as a (...) ‘natural’ category. Plato presents the regulatory fiction that one’s political ‘kind’ (genos) expresses a pre-given status as an open secret. Given the privileged awareness he affords the reader, the noble lie may be fruitfully read as revealing – not concealing – that the ‘natural’ distinctions of an exclusionary citizenship politics are the effects of willful political power. This narrative strategy takes on specific significance in the context of the blood-based membership politics of Athens, which had its own noble lie. Accordingly, Plato’s text is shown to provoke insights into questions of democratic difference usually assumed beyond its purview. The Republic is read as exposing the workings of an essentialist politics it is typically thought instead to originate and prescribe. (shrink)