Plato Vs. Art

Plato Vs. Art

Plato Vs. The Arts


The philosopher Plato can be faulted as disliking the arts. When thinking of this well known philosopher one might consider his views on art to be intriguing. Plato as a philosopher takes things much further then the average person when viewing artwork. This could be that Plato questions the arts in many different aspects. He likes to go beyond and see the true meaning of where the end result might have formed from, as in the way someone might act on stage or a painting someone had created. He strongly believes the final finished product isn’t really formed from ones own findings, but is merely just an imitation.

When it comes to the arts Plato strongly believes that it can alter ones personality. In Plato’s account of the Ion he finds faults in the performing arts. He questions Ion about his performance on stage and when he responds that he went into a total state of madness. The question one might ask is how can someone go on stage and act crazy? The real question to ask is how can one go on stage and act crazy if they aren’t really crazy? Sometimes when actors get a role, they need to portray a scene that might be emotional. This being said, they might go back to a time when something emotionally really did happen to them. When a person relives this moment in their lives, it could cause a state of emotional madness. By doing this, it portrays a more realistic scenario. Another situation that furthers this point would be modern day video games. Violent video games tend to impact the minds of children. If a child plays a violent video game, they tend to pick up negative habits, such as bad language, or imitating the acts into real life. For example in my junior high school there was a group of boys who rein acted the popular video game known as Grand Theft Auto in which they went around vandalizing and hijacking cars of innocent town citizens. This left the town truly devastated and in total shock of what had happened and how video...

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