[MD] Dr McWatt's advice to his unknown student from a remote spot of the world.

[Ron Kulp]

> On Aug 21, 2014, at 4:41 PM, Ron Kulp <xacto at rocketmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Correction 
> Ant had said:
> 
>>> The only things not included within the realm of the four static patterns (and this is the important, critical point that Plato got wrong) are the (essentially) formless Beauty, Love, and the Good.  They can only be understood by metaphor in the form of poetry, fiction and music.
>>> 
>>> (In fact as a young women, you might be interested to know that not only would Plato have banned all poets from his ideal Republic but also all women,
>>> all musical instruments, most modern technology and, for some weird reason,
>>> sounds of water too.)
>>> 
>>> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/
> 
> Ron:
> I have been reading and digesting 
> The Stanford Essay on Plato -aesthetics.
> Interesting enough, to be sure, it
> More 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".
> "Socrates returns to his analogy between poetry and painting. If you are partly taken in by a painting's tricked-up table apparition but you partly spot the falseness of it, which part of you does which? The soul's rational impulse must be the part that knows the painting is not a real table. But Book 4 established one fundamental principle: When the soul inclines in more than one direction, this conflict represents the work of more than one faculty or part of the soul (436b). So being taken in by an optical or artistic illusion must be the activity of some part of the soul distinct from reason."
> 
> 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.
> 
> "Notice especially the terminology in Book 9. The tyrant is “at the third remove” from the oligarch, his pleasure “a third-place idol [tritôi eidôlôi]” compared to the truth,alêtheia, of the oligarchic soul's pleasure (587c). The oligarch's soul in turn stands third below the “kingly man [tou basilikou]” (587d). Only ten pages later Book 10 will call the imitator “third from the king [basileôs] and from the truth [alêtheias]” (597e; cf. 602c). The language in Book 10 brings Book 9's equation of base pleasures with illusory ones into its attack on art. If Book 10 can show that an art form fosters interest in illusions it will have gone a long way toward showing that the art form keeps company with irrational desires.
> But Plato does not confine himself to reasoning by analogy from painting to verse. He recognizes that analogies encourage lazy reasoning. So Socrates proposes looking at imitative poetry on its own terms, not just as a painting made of words (603b–c). He exerts himself to show that poetry presents false representations of virtue, often drawn from popular opinion about morality (Moss 2007, 437), and that because of their falseness those images nourish irrational motives until all but the finest souls in the audience lose control over themselves."
> 
> The kind of art Plato wants to ban In his republic  seem to be arts like Commercials, tv shows (reality tv Especially) advertising, propaganda
> 
> And the unrealistic imitative images
> 
> Of female beauty that objectify 
> 
> Women as sex symbols.
> 
> Also, it seems, that religion would
> 
> Also be banned:
> 
> "Imitation works an effect worse than ignorance, not merely teaching nothing but engendering a positive perverted preference for ignorance over knowledge. Plato often observes that the ignorant prefer to remain as they are."
> 
> What seems to be the most 
> 
> Interesting topic where poetry 
> 
> And art is concerned is divine
> 
> Inspiration (dynamic quality)  
> 
> Concerning the art of persuasion.
> 
> The topic of the Phaedrus.
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