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

[david]

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.