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Republic X and Euripides' Dionysius

其他書名	Freedom,Form and Formlessness
出版	SSRN, 2020
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=QxH_zgEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Plato's Republic defends the “forms” or eidê. They are the defined shape of a thing - bed, couch, couch-maker - and they enable us to know what is a bed, couch, couch-maker. They enable us to distinguish one from another, the couch from the bed, and, in Socrates' story, they are grounded in a nature that the artist cannot capture. In Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae, Dionysius the god of theater, wine and illusion is constantly shifting forms while his antagonist struggles to impose a form on the threatening god. The violent ending to Euripides' tragedy does not vindicate the efforts to impose forms and the completeness such forms entail, but it does raise questions about the impact of an inability to establish the sort of boundaries - between gods and men, between men and women, between humans and animals - that the Socratic forms offer, suggesting a conflict between form and formlessness or the place of freedom on the polity. Book X in the Republic revises in important respects the earlier discussion of the imitative arts in the Republic. That revision may offer a resolution of the tension between total freedom from forms of the BAcchae and the enslaving power of forms in Callipolis.