Plato as an artist

Abstract

Considering Platos critical attitude in rela-tion to “mimetic” arts, it may astonish that nearly all his dialogues, notwithstanding the richness and variety of their doctrinal contents, also represent literary creations of an eminently artistic character, so that they seem to belong, as poetically organized products, exactly to the kind of “mimetic” art that is taken by Plato to be so harmful and dangerous that he even recommends its prohibition and exclusion from the township. But this is merely an apparent contradiction, for Plato is critic not of every form of mimetic creation, but only with regard to the dubious business of a sort of artists that, in default of an access to the sphere of truth, create simple phantoms and illusions and pretend, by practicing this type of “art”, to be reputed to be wise and competent people-educators. But whoever, in contrast to such “imitator of shadows”, left behind the world of illusion and could find, like the philosopher, the way to real truth, is allowed and legitimated to make use of mimetic art, because in this case it is not more a question of “false imitation” of objects, but of reproducing them as “correct” and as “true” as possible, in order to prepare the readers in this way for a specific mode of philosophical thinking, what means in Plato: to demonstrate that one of his most important motives consisted in showing that philosophy means not only the knowledge of philosophical doctrines, but, in the first place, learning to philosophize.