Plato condemns imitative art

I came across with this educational blog where a teacher asks the students to read an excerpt of Plato's Republic and answer one of the five questions.

The answers are very good and I did chose this one to share with you because it is a issue that is still discussed: art and representation of reality.

Kaaren // May 24, 2007 at 3:18 pm

1. Plato criticizes art that is “imitative.” What exactly does Plato mean by “imitative” art? And why is he so critical of it?
Plato believes that art is imitative because it is a representation of an object’s true form. The question and answer between Socrates and Glaucon in Plato’s Republic explains this concept with the example of a bed. God designed the ideal of a bed; He is “the author of this and of all other things” (Section I). A craftsperson will make a functional representation of this bed, the bed that humans will actually sleep on. While this crafstperson is a secondary maker of God’s original plan, the artist is accordingly a tertiary maker. The artist is removed from the forms, or “perfect ideals” (Plato’s Aesthitcs) that constitute all earlthy things. For examply, as is outlined in Plato’s Aesthitcs, the mathematical idea of a circle varies greatly from the human representation of one.

Humans cannot recreate a mathematically proportional circle, because the measurements will always be slightly off. Therefore a true circle only exists in an ideal or Godly universe, not on Earth. Accordingly, Plato’s philosophies argue that the same concept would ring true with the artist’s representation of a bed. Since even the crafsperson’s recreation of a bed is not totally accurate or Godly, an artist’s drawing, painting, or other creative expression of a bed will be even farther removed from the original divine design.

Plato was critical of imitative art because he believed that it led humans away from the real or true forms in the universe, in other words, from the ideal of God. Plato describes artists and poets in Republic; “they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach” (Section II). Creative expression could be dangerous because it would lead humans away from focusing their attentions on the otherworldy, leading them into temptation instead of towards God.

"Mimesis", μίμησις (mīmēsis), is the Greek concept for imitation and we will see it in another post.