Plato
Assess the contribution and achievement of Plato as a critic.
Plato was the first philosopher-scholar who gave a formal and systematic shape to criticism. It is believed that he started his career as a poet but soon after his meeting with Socrates, he destroyed his poems and dramas and began to take active interest in philosophy and politics. But he was not a professed critic of literature and his critical observations are not embodied in any single work. His chief ideas are contained in the Dialogues and the Republic. Both these books are philosophical.
His Theory of Ideas or Imitation
Plato’s view of art is intimately bound up with what is called his Theory of Ideas. Ideas, he MessageNeoEnglish SystemMobile EnglishPublications Assess the contribution and achievement of Plato as a critic.
Plato was the first philosopher-scholar who gave a formal and systematic shape to criticism. It is believed that he started his career as a poet but soon after his meeting with Socrates, he destroyed his poems and dramas and began to take active interest in philosophy and politics. But he was not a professed critic of literature and his critical observations are not embodied in any single work. His chief ideas are contained in the Dialogues and the Republic. Both these books are philosophical.
His Theory of Ideas or Imitation
Plato’s view of art is intimately bound up with what is called his Theory of Ideas. Ideas, he says in the Republic, are the ultimate reality. Things are conceived as ideas before they take practical shape as things. A tree, thus, is nothing more than a concrete embodiment of its image in idea. The idea of everything therefore is its original pattern, and the thing itself its copy. As the copy ever falls short of the original, it is once removed from reality. Now art—literature, painting, sculpture—reproduces but things ‘as mere pastime,’ the first in words, the next in colours, and the last in stone. So it merely copies a copy : it is twice
Plato was the first philosopher-scholar who gave a formal and systematic shape to criticism. It is believed that he started his career as a poet but soon after his meeting with Socrates, he destroyed his poems and dramas and began to take active interest in philosophy and politics. But he was not a professed critic of literature and his critical observations are not embodied in any single work. His chief ideas are contained in the Dialogues and the Republic. Both these books are philosophical.
His Theory of Ideas or Imitation
Plato’s view of art is intimately bound up with what is called his Theory of Ideas. Ideas, he MessageNeoEnglish SystemMobile EnglishPublications Assess the contribution and achievement of Plato as a critic.
Plato was the first philosopher-scholar who gave a formal and systematic shape to criticism. It is believed that he started his career as a poet but soon after his meeting with Socrates, he destroyed his poems and dramas and began to take active interest in philosophy and politics. But he was not a professed critic of literature and his critical observations are not embodied in any single work. His chief ideas are contained in the Dialogues and the Republic. Both these books are philosophical.
His Theory of Ideas or Imitation
Plato’s view of art is intimately bound up with what is called his Theory of Ideas. Ideas, he says in the Republic, are the ultimate reality. Things are conceived as ideas before they take practical shape as things. A tree, thus, is nothing more than a concrete embodiment of its image in idea. The idea of everything therefore is its original pattern, and the thing itself its copy. As the copy ever falls short of the original, it is once removed from reality. Now art—literature, painting, sculpture—reproduces but things ‘as mere pastime,’ the first in words, the next in colours, and the last in stone. So it merely copies a copy : it is twice