Plato Banishes Poets and Poetry in His Republic (Essay Sample)

Plato Banishes Poets and Poetry in His Republic
Like all the other philosophers, Plato believes that philosophy is a never-ending process of questioning everything that needs to be applied in every life stage. In my opinion, Plato’s Republic in many aspects, is the exact definition of what Plato understands from philosophy and what he wants every one of us to understand. It’s a very long book consisting of ten sections; each is connected and based on long conversations. Republic is a kind of book that cannot be associated with a single subject or said to belong to a specific genre. It is a book about all the issues and topics you can think of. More importantly, it is a book about education, about how people should be educated and what kind of an education system should be valid according to Plato. Plato is well aware that if one wants to change the whole system, the culture, perception, and social structure, one should start by modifying the education. Undoubtedly, what Plato thought back then, is what is being done for centuries in all communities to build a culture and structure. Throughout the book, Socrates and Glaucon have long conversations about constructing a new and ideal city by touching every detail that needs to be thought of before creating their perfect polis. But even though this is a book where the characters use their imagination to build a city, their suggestion is to forbid every poetic and imaginative activity from this city since they consider such actions immoral This paper will ask why Plato is very critical about the concept of mimesis, which he attributes to poetry and literature and means "imitation" for him.
Plato and Mimesis as an imitation
Mimesis is a concept that artists or crafts cannot create without, for sure. But behind Plato’s ban of poets and poetry in his Republic, there lies a reason behind; he tries to establish a philosophical ground of mimetic activity as a reaction to illusion and deception. And in this respect, he is known for his expulsion and condemnation of the artist from his ideal state. Although throughout the book, especially in Republic, Book III, it is for sure that he makes harsh criticisms about arts, there is a massive misunderstanding in which plenty of critiques still believe that Plato’s restrictions were an attack on art and the artists as a whole. Going step by step, first, we need to know what mimesis means now and what it meant for Plato back when he wrote Republic. As Göran Sörbom states in his article named “The Classical Concept of Mimesis”:
The theory of mimesis is now generally regarded as the oldest theory of art. But the theory of mimesis as we find it in ancient texts is not a theory of art in a modern sense; it is rather a theory of pictorial apprehension and representation. The basic distinction for the ancient theory of mimesis was that between mimemata and real things. (…) The mimema as a thing is a sort of vehicle for ‘man-made dreams produced for those who are awake,’ as Plato suggestively formulates it (Sophist 266C). Neither the dream nor the mimema is a real thing.[Göran Sörbom, “The Classical Concept of Mimesis”, (Blackwell Publishers, 2002)]