Plato On Poetry, Art And Philosophy Writing Assignment

Name
Instructor
Date
Date
Plato on poetry, art and philosophy
In the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, Plato argued that philosophers sought truth, but poets held that there was no truth. Philosophers felt that they were more important than poets that they rejected poetry, yet some were inspired by poetry. There has existed a troubled relationship between poetry and philosophy because there were attempts to expel poetry from the Greek city states. Since philosophy was seen to deal with knowledge, the poets were excluded from the ideal state, where poetry includes the popular arts like theaters and storytelling. According to Hooks (7), enhancing curiosity and passion should be prioritized, to improve critical thinking skills, as they do not get much attention in formal learning. Plato viewed poetry as imitative and this was less valuable than the field of philosophy where there is focus on seeking knowledge.
In this paragraph, I will highlight how Plato saw poetry as a falsehood that was based on imitation. Plato objected to poetry and art as he saw them as immoral because they were based on falsehood. This contrasts with philosophers who seek the truth and saw reality as it was, compared to the poets who only focused on ideas and ignored what happened in the world around them. Additionally, artists merely copied, yet only the real objects could not be replicated and going beyond limitations of what people did not know would open up possibilities of obtaining true knowledge as is the case of philosophers. For instance, poets imitate rather than seek the truth, and their knowledge is inferior to that of the creators. Dick (309) assessed the influence reality has on memories, highlighting that the difference between truth and fantasy sometimes depends on false-memory patters and the extent to which memory is reliable.
In the paragraph, there is emphasis on the idea of philosophy being associated with knowledge seeking, unlike poetry. Philosophers focused on ideas and truth, but he focuses on illusions. Socrates suggested banning pottery was for the greater good as he distrusted poets who were not the sources of knowledge (Jowett and Plato Book x 4). To Plato poets saw ideas and this limited their abilities to possess knowledge. Plato also explored the idea that art is imitative in the cave allegory where there are uneducated prisoners chained and do not know about the world outside the prison (Jowett and Plato, Book VII 1-2).
Having pointed out that poets and artists are imitators, phil...