Plato's book X
...n the perfect society – the Republic. Plato argues that the arts are a result of emotion and are imitations of things found in life, and, therefore, he dismisses them as, by definition, irrational. Because Plato believes that all art is made to represent objects, which, in turn are interpretations of forms, it is the result of an imitation – the lowest form of creation. Plato also blames the arts for inflaming the worst, basest, most appetitive parts of the soul; he sees the empathy one experiences for characters experiencing greed, lust, jealousy, irrationality, and spontaneity as a sort of excuse to indulge in these emotions and actions in one’s actual life. This banishment of the arts from the ideal society, although logical if one follows the platonic organization of things, fails to take all art into account. Although much of art imitates the things around it, art, especially in the 20th century, has become much less representational and much more consistent with forms and ideas as a whole. Musical techniques such as serialism rely utterly on logic and reason; one could even make the argument that that they would be platonically classified as objects or even or even essences, not imitations. Also, post-modern poetry, with its use of free verse and stream of consciousness writing, no longer attempts so much to stylize and imitate real things as to capture pure forms, making them at least objects. Just as Plato does not see art in reason, he ignores the reason in art. A more general, underlying flaw of Plato’s classifications lies in his complete disregard for intuition and instinct. There is no room for the poets in his Republic because he leaves no room for anything that can never be explained and analyzed with the tools of logic and reason; there is no allowance to feel one’s way through experiential existence. He makes the assertion that, because poets do not excite logical reasoning and philosophical contemplation, they know nothing, and this fallacy succeeds only in banishing and belittling abstraction. This distaste for abstract thinkers is a bit of a mistake for Plato, seeing as he is the creator of some of the most abstract concepts in the history of Philosophy – the forms. Plato’s muddled and unclear feelings about abstract thoughts is made even more ridiculous by his telling of the myth of Er, which involves a multitude of abstract concepts: a hell-like and heaven-like place for the dead after judgment, a common ground where the dead wait to choose their next life, and the entire illogical promotion of reincarnation. The basis of purity and virtue and purity in the forms is, undoubtedly, true; the more well thought-out and conceived our actions, the more effective they become. However, intuition and feeling can never be underestimated in ...