Plato's Charges Against Poetry & Aristotle's Vindication
Plato's Charges Against Poetry & Aristotle's Vindication
Plato's Charges Against Poetry & Aristotle's Vindication
against Poetry
&
Aristotle’s
Vindication
Plato’s contribution to the study of Art:
His condemnation of art and the artists
• Aristotle does not agree with the Platonic function of poetry (to make people
weaker and emotional/too sentimental). For him, catharsis is ennobling and
enhances humility in human beings. The moral end of poetry is to please; but
also to instruct. Such pleasing is superior to the other pleasures because it
teaches civic morality. Therefore, all good literature gives pleasure that is not
divorced from moral lessons.
Plato vs. Aristotle
PLATO: ARISTOTLE:
• Poetry presents a copy • Poetry may imitate
of nature as it is. men as they are, or
Poetry is twice better or worse.
removed from reality Poetry gives us an
-- it is a ‘shadow of idealized version of
shadows’. reality.
• Poetry could be
• Philosophy as wisdom
superior when turned
is superior to poetry as
into a creative
mimicry or a servile
process.
copy of nature.
• Poetry is compared
• Poetry is compared to to music.
painting.
Conclusion
• Plato judges poetry from the educational, philosophical and
ethical standpoints, not in terms of its own objectives, or its own
criteria of merit.
• Aristotle stands in defence of the theory of art which Plato condemns
on epistemological and ethical grounds. We cannot fairly maintain
that music is bad because it does not paint, or that painting is bad
because it does not sing. Similarly, we cannot say that poetry is
bad because it does not teach philosophy or ethics. If poetry,
philosophy and ethics had identical functions, how could they be
different subjects?