Ron said to Ant:
The Stanford Essay on Plato - aesthetics ...clearly states after a more careful
reading, that Plato was banning imitation in poetry and art. The mimicking of
women and musical instruments and such in artistic performance. It recalled the
painting "this is not a pipe". It sounds to me that what Plato really wants to
ban is reification. He wants to ban stereotypes, characitures. He thinks art
and poetry (and the performance) is best when it deals with the empirical.
Imitation, like worshiping graven images, encapsulates, and renders
static the now of experience.
dmb says:
I think Plato's attitude toward poetry and art has to be understood as a
feature of his overall view, which is extremely anti-empirical. He is the
godfather of rationalism. What's really real, for Plato, lies beyond mere
appearance. The Forms, ideals that somehow exist outside of empirical reality,
are the real thing and everything down in this dirty old phenomenal world (not
just art and poetry and unoriginal copying) is a pale imitation of these Forms.
The empirical world, Plato thought, is not to be trusted. In the famous
allegory, the empirical world is the world of mere appearance, nothing but
empty shadows on a cave wall.
So art was denigrated as an imitation of a copy of the Form. It was considered
to be mighty low indeed, especially when compared to the rational understanding
of philosophers. The radical empiricism of James, Dewey, and Pirsig reverses
this so that empirical reality is primary and ideas are always secondary. There
are no Forms and there is no reality beyond appearance - or if there were we
could never know anything about it because appearance is the only reality we
can ever have access to.
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